Dispensaries have spent years building loyalty programs to reward repeat customers, encourage return visits, and give regulars a reason to choose their store again. Along the way, many also built something far more valuable: a direct email audience made up of the customers most likely to spend, return, and pay attention.
- Loyalty members are not simply frequent shoppers; they may be a dispensary’s most reachable email audience.
- A 28.2% email open rate is evidence of attention, but retailers should measure conversion, repeat visits, revenue per recipient, and margin impact.
- Treating loyalty members as one undifferentiated promotional list leaves value on the table.
- Enrollment totals can overstate an audience when customers are automatically added or have not actively opted in.
- The best email programs give customers reasons to pay attention beyond discounts: relevance, timing, access, recognition, and convenience.
Loyalty members at cannabis dispensaries open marketing emails at 28 times the rate of non-members — 28.2 percent versus 1.0 percent. In an industry locked out of most traditional advertising channels, that number alone should stop every operator in their tracks.
It’s the buried headline in new first-quarter 2026 benchmark data from Sweed, a point-of-sale and loyalty platform, drawn from 2.1 million active cannabis shoppers and $452.5 million in retail revenue. The report was released to establish loyalty performance benchmarks across Sweed’s dispensary client base. But what the data actually reveals is something more fundamental and more actionable: Cannabis loyalty programs have quietly become the most powerful direct-marketing infrastructure most operators own. Whether those operators know it — or are using it — is a different question.
Why the inbox may be the most valuable shelf in the store
Before getting to what loyalty programs can do for operators, it helps to understand who loyalty members are commercially. They are not simply a majority of active customers. They are a disproportionately valuable demographic.
In Q1 2026, loyalty members represented 81.7 percent of active customers but generated 89.4 percent of total revenue. They spent $235.59 per customer in the quarter, compared with $124.36 for non-members. They visited dispensaries an average of 3.93 times, against 2.32 for non-members. Their repeat-purchase rate was 59.7 percent, more than double the 24.1 percent recorded among non-members.
According to Sweed co-founder and President Rocco Del Priore, “From the marketing side, this is absolutely a weapon against the race-to-the-bottom price wars going on in some areas.
“You can see this in Florida,” he added. “You can see this in Arizona where they have more discounts in an average [dispensary] than most regular stores outside of cannabis have SKUs. It’s nuts. And a lot of these companies, almost all of them, are looking for a way to combat this. Everybody wants to be able to differentiate themselves and hold onto their customers. A loyalty program or membership program or referral program — any of these programs — are great ways to invest in somebody and have them invest in you in return.”
The loyalty member isn’t simply a frequent shopper. They are a structurally different customer: more engaged, more consistent, and more commercially important than any other segment in the store.
The best customers are also the easiest to reach
The revenue gap is significant. But the communication gap is where the data gets genuinely interesting for operators thinking beyond the next transaction.
Loyalty members have an email reach of 81.3 percent, compared with 26.2 percent for non-members. Put plainly: Dispensaries already have a direct line to four out of five of their most valuable customers. And when those emails arrive, loyalty members open them. The 28.2-percent open rate among members, set against 1.0 percent among non-members, produces a combined end-to-end message consumption rate — reach multiplied by open rate — of 22.9 percent for members versus 0.26 percent for non-members. That’s an 88-fold gap in actual message delivery.
In most industries, an owned email audience with a 28-percent open rate is a significant competitive asset. In cannabis, where paid access to major advertising platforms remains heavily restricted and uneven, it is something closer to irreplaceable.
“Our emails are by far the most valuable marketing channel we have,” said Brendan McKee, co-founder, chief financial officer, and chief operating officer at Silver Therapeutics. “Due to compliance limitations, we can’t market in the typical ways you see other retailers and brands utilize. A large percentage of our monthly marketing budget is allocated to our email and loyalty flows because they generate the highest [return on investment], with tangible revenue attribution metrics.”
Del Priore added another example. “In Florida, [loyalty email communication is] incredibly important,” he said. “Florida is vertical. That means each store can only sell what they [or the parent company] produce. And that means that when there are drops of flower as soon as it’s harvested and it’s the freshest, it sells out really quickly. So Florida dispensaries offer those products for a short period of time exclusively to loyalty members who have reached a certain tier. Maybe they’ll have a day or two to buy that fresh flower before everybody else. That makes a huge difference to customers. They like their flower enough that they make sure they’re in the group that’s going to get early access to that new drop.”
Enrollment is not the same as attention
One caveat worth understanding before benchmarking against those numbers: A loyalty database is not automatically a useful email audience. Sweed confirmed to mg Magazine that Q1 enrollment figures included bulk additions of existing customers to loyalty tiers — passive assignments rather than customers who signed up intentionally.
“I would say that maybe 10 percent of our [client dispensaries] have automatic enrollment such that everybody joins the program,” Priore said.
That context matters for communication strategy. Customers who were bulk-added to a program may not know they are members, may not have actively opted in to marketing, and may have no reason to engage with a rewards message. Retailers should distinguish headline enrollment from active, permissioned, recently engaged customers.
They also should pair open-rate data with clicks, offer redemptions, online orders, in-store conversions, repeat visits, revenue per recipient, and margin. An email that gets opened but trains customers to wait for a discount is not necessarily a successful campaign.
Stop treating your best list like a coupon list
The strategic implication of the data is straightforward, even if executing it is not. If loyalty data lives in a separate system from customer-relationship-management and campaign tools, the asset is stranded. If operators are measuring loyalty performance by enrollment counts alone, they are optimizing for the wrong metric. And if the communication cadence amounts to a single promotional email per month because the team isn’t sure what else to send, the 28x open-rate advantage is sitting idle.
But the goal is not to fill inboxes with more price-off offers. A useful dispensary email program can alert regular customers to limited releases, prompt replenishment based on prior purchases, welcome back lapsed shoppers, recognize milestones, explain new products, or provide early access that feels genuinely valuable. Discounts may still have a role, but they should not be the only reason customers hear from the store.
“We have multiple email flows for our loyalty members,” McKee said. “They range from birthday campaigns to visit count incentives, discounts on brands they’ve purchased on more than one occasion, and multiple winback offerings if we haven’t seen them in a few weeks. Our loyalty members drive the majority of our revenue, so we do everything we can to keep them happy.
“When done right, your email campaigns are your best marketing weapon,” he added.
Matt Janz, director of marketing at Deep Roots Harvest, said his dispensary chain also markets heavily by email. “More than 96 percent of purchases at our stores come from loyalty members,” he said. “Our loyalty program is designed to give customers more ways to engage, through exclusive missions and achievements in our app, email offers and engagement campaigns, and early access to promotions. Those added touchpoints help build a stronger relationship, because customers aren’t just earning rewards; they’re part of something they actually look forward to coming back to.”
The owned audience cannabis operators have built through loyalty enrollment is the kind of direct-marketing infrastructure most consumer brands spend years and significant budget trying to construct. Dispensaries mostly built it as a byproduct of retention programs, without necessarily thinking of it in those terms. But as AI-assisted shopping changes how consumers find retailers, useful owned channels may be one of a dispensary’s strongest defenses against becoming invisible.
Retailers cannot control where AI sends the next customer. They can control whether the customers they already have remember to come back.
By the numbers
Loyalty members are a dispensary’s most reachable email audience
Share of active customers who were loyalty members.
Share of total revenue generated by loyalty members.
Average quarterly spend per loyalty member, versus $124.36 for nonmembers.
Average quarterly visits by loyalty members, versus 2.32 for nonmembers.
Repeat-buyer rate among loyalty members, versus 24.1% for nonmembers.
Email reach among loyalty members, versus 26.2% for nonmembers.
Email open rate among loyalty members, versus 1.0% for nonmembers.
Estimated advantage in customers both reachable by email and likely to open it.
Source: Sweed Q1 2026 Loyalty Benchmark Report, based on 2.1 million active customers and $452.5 million in retail revenue.
