As a digital marketer in the cannabis space, this question comes across my desk frequently from several colleagues, clients, and leads—which CRM or ESP is the best? Klaviyo is an ESP that has become an industry standard for a wide number of brands. They dominate CPG, retail, and other industries because of their robust data curation, analytics, and automation capabilities. But, within the cannabis space, Customer Relationship Software (CRM) providers like Springbig and Alpine IQ continue to reign supreme.
Now that Klaviyo has opened the doors to supporting legal cannabis business in the past few years it has had a lot of people wondering…why not make the switch? With over 143,000+ companies already using Klaviyo, you’re hard-pressed to find an ESP with as potent forecasting and performance reporting. Despite this, there are still several major factors that would make a cannabis CRM make more sense if you’re a dispensary or brand in the space.
In this blog, I’ll outline what Klaviyo currently doesn’t offer for the cannabis industry, as well as the limitations you deal with when using Springbig or Klaviyo. I’ll also go over how Klaviyo can be a godsend to cannabis brands, and how Springbig and Alpine IQ both have their respective strengths. Finally, I’ll go over the Klaviyo integration capabilities for both Springbig and Alpine IQ and when it makes sense to employ it.
CRM vs. ESP
Just to quickly clarify, an ESP commonly refers to an Email Service Provider, a company that offers email marketing or bulk email services. ESPs allow businesses to send email campaigns to a list of users, manage subscribers, and track the performance of their email messages. This service is used for various purposes such as promotional campaigns, newsletters, and transactional emails.
A CRM system is a tool used by businesses to manage interactions and data related to customers. It aims to improve relationships, increase customer retention, and boost sales. It does this by gathering customer data from various sources such as websites, social media, and emails. CRMs also usually provide messaging to multiple channels beyond email. Klaviyo is somewhere in between, especially now since they offer SMS, but by its primary functionalities and design, Klaviyo is an ESP.
Klaviyo Won’t Do SMS For Cannabis
As a certified Klaviyo Partner, I’ve gone ahead and asked all of the important questions…like if I can text people about weed on their platform. Currently, Klaviyo does not support SMS for cannabis. The good news is that a benchmark report they published for 2024 revealed that the difference between Email and SMS revenue is meager. Only around the end of the year, during the holiday season, does it seem like SMS can be helpful to break through the barrage of emails one is receiving.
My Opinion About SMS For Cannabis
In my humble opinion, SMS for cannabis isn’t worth it unless you know exactly what you’re doing. It’s the most expensive method of messaging available and has restrictions that vary from carrier to carrier. You have to sign a waiver with Alpine IQ to even send SMS messages to T-Mobile. Springbig has always confidently offered an SMS service, but their deliverability has, at times, been all over the place. At present, the most consistent and low-cost methods of messaging cannabis consumers are email and native push notifications, straight up, they both have like 99% deliverability. I think it’s important to have SMS capabilities available, but only for highly segmented campaigns to top-spenders, or to diversify the messaging of a sale during the holiday season.
The best rule of thumb, if you want to send cannabis SMS, is to regularly check with your CRM provider about the current status of deliverability. Then, be willing to adapt and change. You might have better luck with deliverability if you change your DBA or include an MMS with the CTA text, among other minute things you can change. Then it’s on you to send out test campaigns to see what’s working best. I’ve spent tons of time (literal years) playing around with these to increase SMS deliverability and the answer is that it’s constantly changing.
Klaviyo Doesn’t Have Built-In Loyalty
One of the biggest convenience factors that Springbig and Alpine IQ present with their platforms is built-in loyalty programs. It’s extremely easy to set your parameters for accruing points based on how much customers spend and build reward tiers. Thankfully, there are tons of Loyalty Program plug-ins that work with your website and can communicate freely with Klaviyo’s API. For example, if you use WordPress for your website (I’m a WP snob, so this will always be my recommendation,) you can totally use YITH Points and Rewards for loyalty.
Single Drip Campaigns vs. Flows
This is the big one for me. Drip campaigns traditionally involve sending a series of pre-planned messages to a targeted audience over time. These messages are automated and designed to gradually nurture leads, engage customers, or provide valuable content. Some examples are Abandoned Cart, Winback, Browse Abandonment, and Welcome Series. Within Springbig and Alpine IQ, you’re limited to one single drip campaign per custom audience you feed into it. So, you’re able to message customers based on very specific behaviors, but only once. This can feel limiting when your typical Abandoned Cart drip campaign spans 3-4 or more messages. When it comes to automation, Klaviyo’s “Flows” are a cut above the rest, and offer some of the most granular automation capabilities currently available.
Klaviyo Has The Most Robust Data & Automation
What Klaviyo offers its clients above anything else is its extremely robust data curation, analytics, and abilities to automate with their “Flows.” The only comparable ESP in this regard is Omnisend, which does basically all the same things, but with less intuitive and valuable data presented. If you’re a retailer or brand working on an extremely tight budget, hands-down, Omnisend is the best affordable ESP that’s cannabis-friendly.
I digress, the Flows in Klaviyo can become EXTREMELY granular, even allowing you to A/B test campaigns within specific parts of your Flows to later analyze. Klaviyo can take a custom audience and trigger drip campaigns based on behaviors as well as time. For example, your Welcome Series could trigger by a customer opting-in to loyalty, sending out the initial message. Then you could continue to email this same group of new loyalists each week for as long as you want. Your Abandoned Cart flow could message someone not only within a small window of their cart being abandoned, but also the next day, and the day after that. This is important when you consider that Abandoned Cart campaigns are the biggest moneymakers compared to any other automation.
What Springbig Is Doing Well
Customer service, customer service, customer service. When I serviced a client using Springbig for almost 3 years, I experienced outstanding customer service from Springbig. They will respond almost immediately to any email query and resolve it just as quickly, in my experience. I also learned a tremendous amount from my reps over the years. All of them would take weekly meetings with me to discuss what was and what wasn’t working. As of this month, Springbig has also just launched a 24/7 virtual assistant on their site called Biggi. It’s capable of answering questions about the platform or providing troubleshooting assistance. Biggi will even provide you with links to the most relevant and helpful resources in Springbig University (SBU.) You can even submit a support ticket directly through Biggi at any hour of the day. These are small improvements, but very comforting when you’re suddenly dealing with a problem.
Their user interface is also very easy to use, and I think that’s important for smaller operators that can’t yet afford a marketing department. But that doesn’t mean they don’t swing with the big boys and MSOs. Some of their enterprise clients include Lume, Planet 13, Verano, & more. Their new subscription service is also a smart move, and one that no one else is doing at present. This allows customers to pay a monthly subscription to a particular dispensary in exchange for members-only perks. Overall, I think Springbig is a great all-in-one platform for customer loyalty and retention that cannabis retailers big & small can comfortably grow and scale with.
What Alpine IQ Is Doing Well
Alpine IQ does data very well and will give you some incredible insights through campaign reporting. They also prioritize a lot of single-drip campaign templates that benefit clients such as Abandoned Cart, After-Join, and Winback. Although their user interface isn’t always the most intuitive (for me at least,) I still find their platform being used the most frequently by dispensaries with multiple locations or MSOs (Multi-State Operators.) Typically, I only see them handling medium-sized retailers up to enterprise accounts like Cookies. I believe this speaks to how they handle data and reporting, as well as functionality when you have several locations in play.
I’ve also had first-hand experience using the Help Chat on their website and the service was helpful and expedient. The rep was able to answer all of my questions and walk me through the audiences that I was trying to build in conjunction with a specific automation. Keep in mind that a real person will only hop on and chat with you during normal business hours.
Overall, once you get used to using Alpine IQ it’s an extremely powerful tool. One that can handle enterprise accounts fluidly while also servicing single-location retailers with the same care.
What Springbig & Alpine Are Both Doing Well
Their apps are great, and I think it’s smart to further drive loyalty with an app. I also fully support the low cost of native push notifications. Refer-A-Friend programs are prominent with both of them, which is another great emphasis that they both make within their platforms. Their tiered methods of messaging are also great. This allows you to send an email, SMS, and Push Notification within the same campaign, choosing your priority of send. Price-wise, I’d say that Springbig and Alpine almost go neck-and-neck. It really depends on what you’re using the CRM software for the most and how big your customer database is.
When To Use The Klaviyo Integration For Cannabis CRM
Klaviyo offers an integration to both Alpine and Springbig to basically send custom audiences over to them. Once these custom audiences are within Klaviyo’s database, they are continually updated based on the POS data and behaviors sent from Alpine IQ/Springbig. This allows you to create super-duper custom and granular drip campaigns that add on to anything you make in Springbig or Alpine IQ. A great example of implementing this integration would be on your Welcome Series. The first message can go out as either an SMS or Native Push notification after the customer downloads your app and opts in. Then, emails can continue to go out to them over the following days or weeks to further educate them about your brand. You can even gamify the experience and reward customers along the way for filling out surveys, taking tests, or doing “digital scavenger hunts.”
Conclusion
Springbig and Alpine IQ are two of the biggest players in the cannabis CRM space for a reason—they were built from the ground up to service this highly regulated market. But, since seasoned ESPs in the space like Klaviyo and Omnisend have opened their minds to cannabis business, things are changing. Klaviyo and Omnisend both present powerful tools for granular automation within their platforms that are still miles ahead of what preeminent cannabis CRM providers offer. In that same breath, they continue to present some limitations to cannabis brands that are trying to operate normally, like Klaviyo still barring cannabis SMS. Klaviyo also won’t build you an app like SB or Alpine will. But that doesn’t mean someone else won’t for a comparative price.
The best solution truly depends on the size of the brand and what its intentions are with customer relationship management. It doesn’t always make sense to go big when you’re still scaling your brand. You can also always switch CRM/ESP providers over time as your needs evolve. Sometimes the best solution is to combine the capabilities of both Alpine or Springbig with Klaviyo to create an even more diverse experience for the customer. For these reasons, I aim to be as agnostic as possible with all of these platforms to give my clients the best possible solutions for increasing their revenue and retaining their customers.