Here’s a quick reminder for you today
No, believe it or not – your subscription box won’t sell on its own.
You will need to invest in marketing.
You will need to invest time and money.
Even if you don’t want to.
Even if you have no budget.
Even if you’re afraid.
Once you master it, everything you want from your business is on the other side
Get to it
Email marketing is probably the most universal skill you could learn. There are many businesses that don’t do digital advertising. Traditional businesses, restaurants, gyms, freight companies, garden centres, supermarkets.
They don’t rely on driving traffic from ads to their site, so they aren’t traditionally thought of when you think about digital marketing. But all of them can benefit from an email marketing strategy.
It’s universal not only to many different types of businesses, meaning its a great skill to learn if you ever decided you want to sell your knowledge in the form of coaching or training.
But it’s also universally useful to many types of entrepreneurs and founders.
Having a list of people you (or any business) can contact at a moment’s notice, completely for free is pretty amazing. There has never been anything like this before. Newspapers, newsletters, billboard placement companies all had a lot of people that you could reach, but they charged you for it.
In the digital age, it’s the same tactic. Build up a big list of users, and once you hit critical mass, charge advertisers to bombard your users with ads. It’s happened with Google, Facebook, TikTok and now even Netflix are reportedly resorting to ads.
Eventually, they all charge you to reach their users. But email is different.
Once you have a list of people on your email list, that’s yours. That is traffic that you own.
Of course they have a certain set of interests related to the reason they gave you their email. You can’t send them random crap (obviously).
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In our case they are most likely dog owners since our product is exclusively for dogs. But the fact we can click a button and send an email to ~170,000 people and drive traffic to any dog related offer we want is very cool.
Of course, most of the time its our box – but not always. We can send emails about cool add-on products they can add to their next box, affiliate offers, giveaways or anything. Pretty much any action we want a group of people to take, we can get it done by using our email list.
It got me thinking even about my personal email list, of course most of my readers, like you, are current or budding subscription box founders. And it’s tiny compared to the BusterBox list.
But the most valuable thing I can do with my time is to build my email list, nurture my list and (when the time is right) make offers and sell to my list.
If I ever decide to pivot out of subscription boxes, I still have a list of entrepreneurs, business owners or people with a desire to make money online. All I need to do is create an offer that will help a portion of my list, and I should generate an income from it.
So for you, if you are working on driving traffic anywhere such as your website, it’s critical you are capturing as many email leads as possible from that traffic.
The best way we’ve found? Using a signup flow.
Make sure you’re planning for the future with your marketing, the money is all in the email list.