Dispensary customer segment · Spending and value
Top 20% of dispensary customers by lifetime spend: VIP retention
Protect the customers carrying your revenue
The Top 20% Spenders segment in Sticky Cards includes every dispensary customer whose lifetime spend falls in the top 20 per cent.
A short list doing a large share of the work. The goal here is keeping them, not selling them more.
What is the Top 20% Spenders segment?
Everyone here falls in the top 20 per cent of your customers by lifetime spend. Note that word: lifetime, not per visit. This is the only spending segment measured across everything someone has ever spent with you.
What matters is that this is a small group carrying a disproportionate share of your revenue, which makes losing one expensive in a way that losing a low spender is not. That should change your instinct. The reflex with a good customer is to sell them more; the better move is usually to make sure nothing happens that would cost you them.
They also need the least persuading of anyone on your list. They already spend heavily with you, so a discount here is mostly margin handed back on purchases that were happening anyway. Access, early notice and being treated as a known customer are cheaper and work better.
How Sticky Cards builds this segment
- Category
- Spending and value
- Membership
- Dynamic, recalculated from your POS
- Find it in the app
- Customers > Segments > Spending & Value
Every row on this segment is small and each contact is worth more than it is anywhere else in your account. That argues for fewer, better messages. Push is useful for frequent low-stakes news; save SMS for the things that deserve to interrupt someone.
What should a dispensary send to your top spenders?
Early access and first lookSMS
Costs you no margin and says exactly what a discount cannot: that you know who they are. It is the single best message to this band.
The drift alarmSMS
Not a scheduled campaign. Cross with the absent lists and send the moment a top spender slips, because this is the most expensive kind of customer to lose and the easiest to catch early.
The heads-up before anyone elseEmail
Supply changes, hours, a new location, a range you are dropping. Telling your best customers first is free and it is what keeps them feeling like customers rather than an audience.
The thank-you with nothing attachedEmail
Once or twice a year, no offer in it. It is the cheapest retention spend available and it makes the occasional ask land properly.
Ideas to try
The drift play
Build it in Play Designer to fire the moment someone in this band lands on No purchase in 30+ days. Do not wait for a scheduled send. This is the one automation on the whole library that most deserves to exist.
Sample subject line
We have not seen you in a while
The first-look list
When something limited arrives, this segment hears first as a matter of routine. Build it as a play rather than remembering it, because the value is in it happening every time.
Sample text
Small batch in today and you are hearing first. Held back until noon. Reply STOP to end.
The no-offer thank-you
One Campaign Blast, twice a year, with nothing to buy in it. Say what they have meant to the store this year and stop. It is the message operators skip and the one customers remember.
Sample subject line
A proper thank you, no strings
The names-on-a-page exercise
Not a campaign at all. This list is short enough to read. Print it, hand it to your counter staff, and let them recognise people. That does more for retention here than any send on this page.
Sample subject line
No subject line: this one is a list for the counter
Related segments to pair it with
- No purchase in 30+ daysThe crossing that matters most in the whole library. A top spender at 30 days absent is the most valuable alert your account can generate.
- Repeat customer (2+ purchases)Cross the two for customers who are both frequent and high value. That overlap is the core of your business and it is a short enough list to treat individually.
- High Average Basket SizeRelated but not the same. This band is about total spend over time; that one is about a single visit. Compare them to see whether your top spenders got there by volume or by frequency.
- Low SpendersDon’t send toSet this as your exclusion on anything about early access or reserved stock. Offering a privilege to a band that cannot act on it wastes the message on both groups.
What to measure
Retention, not revenue. Count how many people in this band are still in it a year later, and count how many left your active lists entirely. Those two numbers are the whole story. On individual sends, ignore response rate; a band this small will produce noisy percentages and the thing you are buying is that they stay.
Questions we get
How is the top 20% worked out?
By lifetime spend, which is everything a customer has spent with you rather than what they spend on an average visit. That is what separates it from the three average-order-value segments.
Should I send this segment discounts?
Generally no. They already spend heavily with you, so a discount reduces margin on purchases that were happening anyway. Early access and first notice cost nothing and mean more.
What is the single most useful thing to do with this list?
Cross it with No purchase in 30+ days and set up a play that fires when someone appears in both. Catching one drifting top spender a month pays for a great deal of other marketing.
Is the list the same as my most frequent customers?
Not necessarily. Someone can reach this band on a few large purchases a year. Cross it with Repeat when you specifically want the customers who do both.
See this segment running on your own customers
We connect your POS, build the list from your own orders, and walk you through the first campaign on it.
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