Sales cure everything in business
The first thing you need to figure out in your subscription box business is how to effectively market your box and get subscribers reliably and predictably.
Everything else follows this first step, there’s no point in getting neck deep in your metrics such as profit, LTV or churn rate if it is all based on a subscriber base of 10 people.
So how can we actually get over his hurdle and start getting a trickle of new people joining up, then grow it to a flood?
”Sales cure all ills” – Mark Cuban
In my experience the big problem in these businesses is finding out the 95% of things that DON’T work to sell your box, they all need to be tried, and trying involves time effort and money.
What you will find at the end of it is some of them just don’t send enough traffic, or the traffic doesn’t convert, or the churn is too high (especially on freebies) or any other problem associated with the marketing results
The benefit to actually figuring this out if once this part of the business is moving in the right direction, then we can talk about systems, staff, processes, margins and efficiencies so you can begin to work ON the business rather than IN the business.
You might be saying “But I don’t have any money to advertise” – I would say you don’t have time to waste on some of the strategies I will outline below. Risking some money is definitely scary for some people, but risking time is easy.
The difficulty arises when the time you invest is on ‘free’ growth strategies will never return the investment. If you invest a lot of time and no money on a bad, whereas the founder next to you invest a lot of time and a little money on the right strategy, who do you think will win?
A little money is relative here, you won’t have to remortgage your house to try out a few Facebook ads. You need to comfortable with putting your money on the line to test things.
Because in my experience a big majority of the work in marketing these businesses is finding out the 95% of things that DON’T work to sell your box, they all need to be tried, and trying involves time effort and money.
Since we’ve tried all of these strategies below I’m going to give you a shortcut to find the things you need to focus on in order to get reliable new subscribers joining your box today.
Only when you have successfully completed this, then we can talk about metrics and growth rates and optimising your supply chain, upselling and more.
- Influencers – Big problem – Not enough traffic
Influencers with big followings usually do a poor job at converting their audience into subscribers for your box. The organic reach on social platforms such as Instagram has nosedived over the past few years.
We’ve sent free boxes to I’d say hundreds of influencers at this stage, and it has never turned into a long term relationship with consistent results – as in new subscribers for our box.
Think about it, 3-5% of their audience might see your box, if that’s 100K followers that’s 5000 people max, a small percentage will click let’s say 10% being generous, that’s 500 people. Then if you have a conversion rate of 2% on your website it’s 10 subscribers.
Might be a good result depending on where you are now. The problem is the next time you send them a box, their most engaged users have seen it, and they already decided not to by the first time around.
This is why the level of traffic, interest and sales deplete because they have the same audience size and audience make up, so less and less people will be interested each box you send.
- Marketplaces – Not enough traffic
Marketplaces again can be relatively reliable in terms of sales, fees are a big issue. In our experience the marketplaces we have been listed on did not deliver us sufficient traffic to justify the time spent on getting set up on them.
Again, if you are just starting and you get 5 subscribers per month from a marketplace, that’s good. But businesses are not built on 5 subscribers per month, and when you are getting 5 people a day from the effective channels, there’s not much you can do to increase the sales from the marketplace.
You can improve your listing of course, but the flow of traffic to your listing is controlled by the marketplace, and who is to say the marketplace itself is not struggling to generate traffic to the site?
Another quick calculation based on a marketplace with 1 million visitors per month, what % see your listing? 0.5%? 5000 people? Using the same calculation as above you would end up with another 10 subscribers. IF you are lucky and your marketplace listing performs brilliantly.
- Posting on social media with exception of TikTok – not enough traffic
We mentioned previously about organic reach on platforms being totally destroyed. If your influencer can’t get you more than 10 subscribers with 100,000 followers…
Of course you have more targeted people who have followed you for the good content you out out, which again takes time and effort to produce by you, or costs money to be produced by someone else. The numbers then must be applied again.
We have 20,000 followers on Instagram, so let’s say 25% of those regularly see our posts in one month. 5000 viewers. 10% click rate = 500 visitors. Because they are engaged
Now some of the results for the organic methods may sound like good enough to you. But you’re forgetting a few things. Time investment. You will need to either become a robot or start sleeping 2 hours a night.
Getting social content brainstormed, produced/designed & scheduled for the month is a part time job
Optimising your marketplace listing, gathering imagery and continually refining is a time consuming task
Dealing with influencers, managing deliveries, replacing lost free gifts and following up in order to actually get them to post is a part time job.
Another thing you’re forgetting is getting all of these set up to actually work to this degree – at what I would call a good level but maybe not the max level will take months if not years. You can expect to be doing all this work for 0 subscribers for 4-6 months.
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So let’s talk about some other marketing channels..
Affiliates – May work – Unreliable and unpredictable
Similar to influencers we have affiliates, who basically get a cut out of each sales they successfully refer to you. If they don’t make a sale then you don’t pay them. This is great and I’d love to have an effective affiliate channel to tell you all about.
There are a few ones we’ve tried such as Jumbleberry and Squaredance. It could be because we’re in the UK & Ireland (as opposed to the US) that we haven’t seen much success. But as of yet the verdict is – worth trying but unreliable and hard to predict whether it will work for you.
TikTok ads – Unreliable and unpredictable
TikTok ads have shown some promise, but the platform is not as mature as Facebook in terms of its targeting of users, tracking of conversions and quality of traffic it sends to your site.
The tracking is a big issue because it makes it hard to discern whether the ads are actually driving sales for your box. When we ran TikTok ads, we sometimes had very good days and other times we didn’t even with the same ad spend.
If all the days were good, or if they had good tracking of results then you would say leave it on and its working. The fact some days were not good and our CAC ended up quite high means it’s up in the air. For this reason TikTok ads are worth exploring, but if you’re going to be learning TikTok you might as well learn how to do the next channel I’m going to mention as they are very similar.
Facebook & Instagram ads – Definitely Works
This is where people get scared. Facebook ads. The thing that gives most people the scaries because you’ve probably risked and lost some money here before. You’ve heard them say “Facebook ads don’t work”
‘They don’t work for my business’ etc etc
Listen, the reason Facebook ads don’t work for most newbies who dip their toes is because of a few reasons.
Reason 1 – Expecting Facebook to be magic
Facebook is just a source of traffic. It’s predictable and reliable in sending traffic to your website. If you put money on a Facebook ad, it will usually get at least a few clicks.
What people actually do when they land on your website is nothing to do with Facebook ads. That part is up to you, with your website imagery, layout, copy, communication and offer. Most people don’t have this part sorted before trying to run ads.
In fact this is the number 1 mistake I see in this industry; focusing on driving traffic before effectively:
- Optimising your website to convert
- Setting up an email marketing strategy to follow-up
If you nail all of these things correctly, usually your ads suddenly start to convert, and then Facebook ads do work.
If we do our quick calculation again, your CPM (cost for your ads to be shown to 1,000 people) on Facebook is $10 for example.
You can spend $1000 and have 100,000 people view your ads. You can spend $1000 in a year, $1000 in a month, or $1000 in a day.
The limit of reach is a LOT bigger than with any of the other channels we discussed previously. If you have 100,000 people on your site per day, with a 2% conversion rate you get 2000 new subscribers per day.
For this reason, this is the channel you should be focusing on learning, because once you crack it correctly you have the opportunity to grow your business much more predictably than with any others.
You can also begin to experiment with other forms of online PPC ads such as Google or TikTok, and for the cherry on top to ensure you get the best possible return from your ads, let’s talk about the absolute best channel there is… Email
Email marketing – Definitely Works
The thing about email marketing is most people don’t utilise it or execute it effectively. This leads to email becoming a chore that seems to take up time and give little reward.
You may find yourself writing newsletters that take hours of research and writing and bring very few if any sales. You are writing to ‘keep people engaged’ but never actually asking them to buy. So, guess what? They don’t buy!
You also may be running ad hoc lead collections strategies like social media giveaways which can bring you some free leads in a rush of competition entries but rarely turn into sales, and your list gets stale if you don’t keep adding fresh leads to it.
So here’s the 3 most important things you need in order to succeed with email marketing for your sub box.
- A fresh supply of leads
The best way of actually capturing the leads is to use a signup flow. When people come to your website and click the get started button, instead of taking them straight to a checkout or product listing, ask them a series of questions about their interest in the box you are offering.
You can ask their name, age and any other questions relevant to the subscription you are going to offer them, the key here is relevancy – don’t ask their favourite band from the 70’s if it has nothing to do with your box.
Then after 2-3 questions you can ask for their email address before showing them the subscription options. This worls incredibly well to collect consistent fresh leads with buying intent.
If people fail to complete the checkout process from that point on then we can follow up with them via email for FREE as many times as it takes to get them to sign up.
Also by removing annoying popups, it makes your site cleaner and convert better. Our signup flow captures up to 30% of all traffic as an email lead. A good popup is 6%. We’re talking 500% better with the signup flow. Use one
- Automated Follow Up Sequence
The next thing we need to do is to automatically remind people to go back and buy. Most people don’t buy on the first viewing of anything, especially something they have just seen a few minutes ago on Facebook and have no idea if its legit or not.
People look around, read reviews, check out your profile. In that time they can get distracted, their kid cries or their boss yells at them to get off their phone. There are a million distractions that can stop an otherwise perfect customer from completing the purchase straight away.
Our job is to use the email they gave us to send 4 emails over the next 4 days:
- Email 1 – Reminder and re-state the special offer
- Email 2 – What do you actually get in the box?
- Email 3 – What other customers say
- Email 4 – This is going away now
This hits the main marketing notes to convince the people on the fence to join up to your box. Use imagery and positive reviews liberally here.
But not everyone is ready to buy within 4 days, so let’s talk about the final piece of the puzzle…
- A consistent strategy of sending sales emails
What is a sales email or sales broadcast?
This is an email with one purpose, to get someone to click to your site and sign up to your box. These are the emails you may be afraid to send, for fear of being too pushy or sales-y.
These are the emails you need to be sending. AT LEAST 1x per week if you have a list between 0 – 5000 or so. If you have 5000+ then you can go to 2x per week, above that you can judge yourself but we email 3x per week.
The reason we email 3x per week is because we get more sales than if we do 2x or 1x per week. The more customers we can generate via email the better, because free sales reduce your cost to acquire a customer and make your business more profitable. Would you rather be sales-y with money in your pocket or the alternative?
In order to keep things fresh here are some ideas:
- Change up your designs as frequently as possible
- Try image heavy emails and text based emails to see what resonates best
- Change your offers frequently to give you an excuse to keep emailing
- Keep on trend with current events if possible, seasons, holidays, celeb scandals etc
Final word on this piece, this is just my personal experience and some people will relate and others will have gotten success with one or more of the channels I mentioned, however if you focus on marketing channels with the best chance of success then you’ll get to where you want to be much faster.
Some are harder and scarier to get started with but will reward you 100x over if you get them right. Your path you choose is up to you.
I hope this was helpful, if you would like to talk to me about it feel free to reach out!
I love the fact I work for myself. I never have to worry about my boss pissing me off, showing up to work a little late, or taking a 2 hour lunch to go for a walk in the park. Never have to worry about vacation time or working from another country for a couple of months.
Almost every time I can utilise this freedom in my life I remind myself how grateful I am. I’ll probably write a longer piece on this soon. The feeling of working on your own schedule and your own business is WORTH IT.
All the difficult times, stress and fear are worth it when you can enjoy being free. It’s the best feeling about being an entrepreneur in my opinion. This is not bragging, just some motivation if you’re working on breaking free from your job soon. It’s worth it.