Does Your Cigar Brand Actually Need Email Marketing?

Email marketing is one of those things every business is told they’re supposed to do. Build a list. Send a newsletter. Keep in touch with your customers. Don’t rely on social media alone. That’s generally reasonable advice, but we’re not convinced it’s always good advice for cigar manufacturers.

Before a cigar brand starts building a consumer email program, we’d ask two questions: What are you hoping to accomplish with it, and what reason does a consumer have to sign up? If there isn’t a particularly good answer to either one, there may be better places to put the effort.

Consumer email has to be worth the work

The issue isn’t that email marketing doesn’t work. It obviously does for plenty of businesses. The question is whether building and maintaining a consumer email list is worth the effort for your cigar brand.

Most smaller cigar manufacturers don’t have something important to tell consumers every week, or even every month. A new release is worth talking about. A major event might be. Interesting company news can be, too. If the person behind the brand has developed a following of his or her own, people may genuinely want to hear from that person. But you need enough of those things to justify an ongoing email program.

There are also other ways for cigar manufacturers to reach cigar smokers. Retailers already have relationships with the people buying cigars. Cigar media outlets, podcasters, and other industry personalities have their own audiences. Instead of spending significant time trying to build a large consumer email list from scratch, a smaller manufacturer may get more value from working with the people who already reach the audience they’re after.

There is one good reason to consider building that list anyway: it belongs to you. Cigar brands are already operating with more restrictions on social platforms than most consumer companies. Meta, for example, doesn’t allow tobacco advertising, and its current Instagram guidelines restrict buying and selling tobacco products between private individuals. Tobacco brands haven’t entirely been prohibited from having a presence on the platform, though. Nobody knows whether that will always be the case.

If you’re concerned that Instagram, Facebook, or another important platform could eventually become considerably more restrictive toward tobacco content, a consumer email list gives you a direct connection to people who have chosen to hear from your brand. If a platform changes its rules, changes its algorithm, limits your reach, or eventually decides it doesn’t want tobacco brands there at all, the email list doesn’t disappear with it.

That can make building a list worthwhile even if email isn’t currently your highest-return marketing channel. You’re investing some time now to own a connection with your audience that isn’t dependent on another company’s platform.

We still wouldn’t take that as a reason to start sending emails nobody wants. If future-proofing your audience is the goal, build the list deliberately and send something when you have something worth sending.

Some cigar companies have plenty of reasons to email consumers

The calculation changes for cigar companies that regularly have something interesting happening.

If your company has large events, frequent product news, special releases, and enough activity around the brand to give consumers reasons to stay connected, you have opportunities to make a consumer email list useful.

The same can be true when the people behind the brand are part of its appeal. As examples, people like Robert Caldwell and Matt Booth have personalities and followings that extend beyond any individual cigar they produce. When consumers are interested in what the person behind a company is doing, the company naturally has more to talk about.

That doesn’t mean you need to be Robert Caldwell or Matt Booth to have a consumer email list. It means you should understand why somebody would want your emails before asking them to sign up. If your answer is basically “because every company needs an email newsletter,” we’d revisit the approach.

Retailer email is a different story

For cigar manufacturers that primarily sell through retailers, we’re much more enthusiastic about email when the recipients are the retailers themselves. You have real reasons to communicate with them. New releases, product availability, major events, noteworthy company news, sales materials, and other information can all be genuinely useful to the people selling your cigars. Some companies will have more to communicate than others, but the basic relationship is already there.

More importantly, retailer communication supports the way most cigar manufacturers actually get cigars into consumers’ hands.

If you’re launching a new cigar, you want consumers to hear about it, but you also need retailers to know what it is, when it’s coming, why it’s interesting, and how they can get it. The retailer doesn’t need another generic newsletter filling up an inbox – they need information that helps them understand and sell your product. That’s a clear job for email.

And if you are a cigar retailer? You definitely want to have an email list. This article is for the brands, not the retailers.

Start with the reason, not the platform

We offer email marketing at Dairy Air. It would be convenient for us to tell every cigar company that they need more of it. We think many don’t need it.

For a smaller cigar manufacturer, the time required to build and maintain a consumer list may produce a better return somewhere else. Working with retailers, engaging with the cigar community, getting information to media and podcasters, and building a stronger social presence can all put the brand in front of people who already care about cigars.

Consumer email starts making more sense when you have enough happening that people genuinely want to hear from you, when you sell directly to consumers, or when owning a direct connection to your audience is strategically important enough to justify the investment.

Retailer email is different. If retailers sell your cigars, maintaining a useful way to communicate directly with them is worth doing.

So before you choose an email platform, build a template, or start worrying about subject lines, answer the more important questions first.

What are you trying to accomplish?

And why would somebody want to get this email?

If you have good answers, build the list. We can help you make it great. If you don’t, spend your time on something else.