Smart Printed Menu(SPM)
Is it time to take a page — literally — out of the restaurant industry’s handbook for cannabis retail? A daily printed ‘fresh’ sheet, special weekly menu, or other paper promotion is a tactic that works in similar customer service sectors, so why not adopt it for cannabis dispensaries and retail stores?
Is it time to take a page — literally — out of the restaurant industry’s handbook for cannabis retail? A daily printed ‘fresh’ sheet, special weekly menu, or other paper promotion is a tactic that works in similar customer service sectors, so why not adopt it for cannabis dispensaries and retail stores?
A printed cannabis menu is an invaluable resource. It can help move stagnant products, highlight new offerings, and improve the in-store customer experience. Plus, it requires little additional hardware — just an office printer.
It’s why we have just launched our new printed menu feature and rolled it into the all-in-one TechPOS solution. Now with just the click of a button, you can boost sales by playing into what the restaurant industry calls “menu psychology.”
Paper Menus Dive into Menu Psychology
In the restaurant industry, there is a lot of attention paid to menu psychology, which is the “study of how a restaurant’s menu can influence people to spend more money. There are many tactics that restaurants use, some even have a ‘menu engineer’ who helps them make sure they optimize their menus.”
One of the main ways restaurants engineer the menu is by adding price anchors. Naturally, customers scan menus based on price, so by carefully including a few higher-priced items, customers inherently consider lower- to mid-range items to be more affordable. This tactic is proven to increase average spend.
You may have also noticed that restaurants sometimes remove the dollar sign from each item (12 vs. $12.00) or write the price as a word (twelve vs. $12.00). According to Wisk, removing the dollar sign can lead to “people spending up to 30% more,” while resorting to words “has been shown to increase spending by up to 15%.”
Will these tactics work at a cannabis retail store? The beauty of a paper menu is that it’s an easy experiment in menu psychology — the experiment’s only price is a pack of office paper.
A Digital Menu and a Paper Menu: A Winning Combination
We all love digital menus because they attract a shopper’s attention. They flip from one category to the next and quickly show off what’s in the store. But there is something to be said for physically holding a paper menu and scanning the options.
Whether it’s displayed on a handy clipboard, offered up in a binder, slid into an acrylic stand, or set into a frame, a printed menu encourages more customer interaction.
Imagine a budtender handing over a fresh sheet to highlight the latest strains that just arrived. Or a menu set into an acrylic stand over the edible section, listing all the options by brand, flavor, and potency. These offer new ways for customers to absorb the information before making a purchasing decision.
A printed menu is inherently much more flexible and can provide more product information than digital signage. A digital menu captures attention, especially while waiting in line, but we’d argue that using both strategies in parallel makes the most sense. Each disseminates product information and promotes sales but in very different ways.
How To Incorporate a Printed Cannabis Menu into Your Store
There are a variety of ways that cannabis retailers bring paper menus into their retail environment. Choose the tactics that make sense for your brand and how your budtenders interact with customers.
Below are just a few ways that you can incorporate paper menus into your own cannabis retail store:
Daily Menu a.k.a the Fresh Sheet
This approach takes a page straight out of the restaurant industry. A fresh sheet features specific dishes the establishment wants to promote. Restaurants often use daily menus to upsell seasonal ingredients — or it’s Monday and the chef wants to use the remaining weekend fish order. Either way, it’s all highlighted on the daily menu as a featured dish and naturally draws more attention.
You can use the same tactic in a cannabis retail store. Show off new products or highlight products that have been slow to move. Handing customers the daily specials as they walk through the door creates a unique shopping experience and refocuses their attention on the products you want to move.
Special Event Menus and Holiday Sales
Whether it’s Valentine’s Day or 420, a printed menu offers another way to promote a sale. With printed menus placed around the store, you can highlight special events or holiday sales in a very targeted way.
Why not print off a menu for the vape pen case that details all the sales in the category? Or show off special 420-themed goodies at the till during the week leading up to cannabis’ biggest holiday of the year?
Personalized Shopping Experience
A paper menu is uniquely customizable. For example, print off a menu of CBD-only products, one with only fruity-flavored strains or one designed with all Staff Picks.
Budtenders can use these different menus for any customer they are working with, whether it’s presented as is, in a binder, or on a clipboard. It personalizes the experience, like being handed a wine list at a five-star restaurant.
However, if you choose to incorporate a paper menu, consider your brand ethos. If your shop is focused on customer service, using menus as a personalized shopping experience makes sense. On the other hand, if your mandate is selling budget-friendly products, what better way to highlight your daily sales than with a fresh sheet?
The beauty of the paper cannabis menu is it’s a low-cost way to experiment with different tactics.
Introducing: A Customized Paper Menu with TechPOS
Cannabis retailers across Canada are already bringing printed menus into their own sales strategies — and it’s working. But, as a business owner, the last thing you need is yet another daily administrative task to tackle before the store opens.
So, when we started developing a paper menu feature for TechPOS, we knew we had to make it easy. As a result, our new integrated printed menu option requires no data entry, no Excel sheet, and no inventory checks. We made it straightforward enough for even the front-of-house staff to do as part of their opening duties.
At the click of a button, you can print off fresh sheets for any category in your store, with the full extent of your inventory — or just a few choice items. Every menu item comes with all the critical details, from strain name to cannabinoid ratio to strain type.
In a world where everything is going digital, it may seem counterintuitive to go back to paper. But, we only need to look to the restaurant industry to see the value.
