Joint the dots

or How our team increased Treehouse's email ROI by 500,000%. In one year. For real.

COMPANY PROFILE

Treehouse Culture is the largest legal cannabis dispensary in Canada. Based in Alberta, our customers deliver high-quality products to a loyal customer base of 10,000 people — and pets, too.

Summary

Treehouse Culture has a strong, loyal customer base, choosing their service and products on the basis of quality, support and good vibes. The challenge was simple. We needed to find a way to convey their strong offline brand presence and identity into their digital marketing communications.

Approach

Voice & Tone

Fun, humor, self-awareness, empathy, and a playful spirit. We began drafting campaigns that were less salesy, and more around something the customers would enjoy reading. Campaigns were sent on Thursday and Friday nights — a pretty unorthodox time and day to send — and noticed how all opens, clicks, and open to click ratio started to ramp up.

Banners and subject lines were conceived to amuse, communicate and sell at the same time. The tone was invitational, inclusive and friendly.

Calendar & Consistency

We established a year-long marketing calendar with all the big local, national and global events we wanted to promote around, as well as other playful dates with extra flavor — 420, Star Wars Day, etc.

Having a consistent publishing schedule was positive across the board: More sales per campaign, engagement on all coupon codes, and cross-channel content enriching their social media.

Strategy, analytics & personalization

By integrating Mailchimp with Woocommerce and Google Analytics we gained additional insights on what worked and didn't. We also created custom event triggers on-site to enrich our customer profiles in Mailchimp with behavioral tags. As we gained more information on our audiences, we started refining the message and offer via personalization, advanced segments and product recommendations.

Advertising, the hard way

Even though the cannabis industry is legal and socially accepted in Canada, it still is a tricky niche business facing all sorts of challenges. In terms of regulations, numerous Acts and company policies prevented companies like THC from publishing advertising that could, in any way, glamorize or promote certain lifestyles associated with substance abuse.

From a marketing perspective, it was a massive challenge to create ads that performed well without saying anything at all about the product. The resulting campaign was a set of ads with "Happiness, Delivered" as tagline, which provided a striking visual presence that was a great fit for online and print ads, as well as for events and parties sponsored by our client's brand.

Artwork for multi-channel advertising campaign

Came, Saw,
Conquered

We completely reshaped the digital strategy for Treehouse in just a year, setting all the technical foundations they needed, a clear and repeatable marketing calendar, a tone of voice and content variants that worked, a brilliant ad campaign, and an established workflow.

Before we enaged with Treehouse, their total sales via Mailchimp were a little under 200 CAD, an extremely underachieving figure for an audience of their size.

In one year our team generated sales directly attributable to email marketing for a total of one million.

Yes, that's 500,000% growth year on year, and with a small 80-hour monthly investment too.