Email, Text, and Push: What Each Dispensary Communication Channel Actually Does, And What It Costs

June 11, 2026
By Steve Riparip

By the end of this article, you will understand four things: the advantages of each messaging channel available to cannabis retailers, what each one costs, how customers engage with each, and how to combine them into a strategy that works.

Most dispensaries use at least one of these channels. Very few use all three intentionally. Almost none use them in a way that reflects how customers actually behave with each one. That gap is costing real money.

Email, Text, and Push: What Each Dispensary Communication Channel Actually Does

Email: The Workhorse

Email is the highest-reach, lowest-cost channel available. In most store databases, more customers are opted in for email than any other channel, often representing 20% to 45% of the total base. Cost-wise, email is roughly ten times cheaper than SMS per message sent.

Customers typically open emails 12 to 24 hours after it’s sent. That makes it the right tool for planned communication: announcing a sale in advance, running lifecycle sequences, and sending win-back messages. It is not the right tool for same-day urgency.

Healthy email open rates fall in the 25% to 35% range. Below 20% signals list health problems. Above 35% reflects strong relevance and list hygiene.

Email costs 10x less than text and reaches more of your customers. It is the foundation of any serious messaging program, not a secondary channel.

SMS: The Fast Lane

Customers typically open texts within 4 to 8 hours, making SMS the highest-urgency channel available. When you need same-day action, nothing else performs like a well-timed text.

The tradeoff is cost and reach. SMS is significantly more expensive per message, and opt-in rates are lower, often only 3% to 25% of the customer base. Keeping SMS for high-value, time-sensitive messages, like a same-day flash deal or limited inventory alert, protects its effectiveness. Texts that feel spammy drive unsubscribes faster than any other channel.

Average SMS open rates fall between 5% and 10%. Below 5% means you have a non-engager problem: messages going to people who have stopped listening.

App Push: Free, Fast, and Underused

Push notifications are the most underappreciated channel in cannabis retail. If your store has a branded app, push is free to send, opens quickly, and delivers directly to the customer’s home screen.

The catch is reach. App push notification opt-in rates are typically 1% to 5% of the total customer base. But for those customers, the engagement opportunity is strong. Apps provide in-app engagement that no other channel can match: loyalty point tracking, menu browsing, and order history. Customers who use the app tend to be among your most active buyers.

Push works best for simple, high-frequency messages: daily specials, point balance reminders, new arrivals. The goal is to give customers a reason to open the app, and in-app engagement takes over from there.

Push is free to send. Ignoring it is a missed opportunity for your most engaged customers.

The Non-Engager Problem

Every channel eventually accumulates non-engagers: customers who have received 20 or more messages and opened zero. Continuing to send to them costs money and degrades your deliverability over time.

The fix is progressive filtering. Move customers with 20-plus messages and zero opens to a suppression list for that channel, which is typically done dynamically through platform segmentation. This is not abandoning them for retention purposes; win-back campaigns can still reach them, but the messaging channel has stopped working for this group.

How to Combine the Communication Channels

The stores that execute this well treat the three channels as a coordinated system, each doing a job the others cannot.

Email for planned communication: lifecycle sequences, win-back campaigns, event announcements. Send 1 to 3 days in advance.
SMS for urgency: same-day flash deals, limited-time offers, time-sensitive alerts. Short message, clear offer.
Push for daily habit-building: today’s special, points balance, new arrivals. Brief and frequent.

What to Check in Your Own Dispensary Communication Program

Pull your opt-in numbers for each channel as a percentage of total customers. Pull your open rates for the last 90 days and compare to the benchmarks above. Check what percentage of subscribers have received 20+ messages with zero opens.

Most stores that run this audit find at least one channel significantly underperforming. That is not a failure. It is a starting point.