by I recently shared the following post on a couple of subscription box groups and got really good feedback from people. Lots of subscription box owners contacted me and said this post was really helpful and they would be using it to guide them with their marketing efforts. So I have decided to republish it on this blog in the hope that it will help more people.
Lots of people are asking me how do you get more subscribers for your box. So I am going to share some valuable tips and explain what we do with Facebook to get 40 new subscribers signed up every day for BusterBox.com
1. Offer
You need to have a solid offer that makes sense financially for you and will entice the customer to sign up. If you can’t come up with a good offer you can expect your CPA to be really high and a really long payback period for the customer. Giving 10% off your first box is not something which will have people kicking down your door to sign up at scale. I can’t stress this enough. We have tested so many different offers over the years and even a slight change in price can make a massive difference. You can be creative with your offers as well but you need something that is going to get the customer excited. BarkBox gave away a blow-up dog lounger one month. This would be cheap for them but high perceived value and very cool.
2. Targeting
If you are not targeting the right people it doesn’t matter how good your ads are they simply won’t convert. How do you target the right people? Well, we use lookalike audiences. This means we give Facebook a list of all of our buyers, website visitors and email subscribers and Facebook will find similar people to market to. Then we hone in on the exact customer we want even further by adding interests, gender and ages. If you are just starting out, you won’t have any data for lookalike audiences so you will need to do the “dirty work” as I like to call it to find these people who are interested in your box. Here’s a good tip. Make a quiz around the niche your box is in. Then boost this quiz out for a week. Then make a lookalike audience from the ideal people who did the quiz. You can also put out content around your box boost that out and pixel the people who read it and make a lookalike of them people. You can then test different interests with them lookalikes and hone in further. Once you start getting sales you can feed Facebook that data and make stronger lookalikes. Once you get around 500 customers Facebook will really start to pinpoint your ideal customer.
3. Structuring your campaign.
99% of the time you are going to select the conversion objective. Unless you have a big budget to run an awareness campaign everything else will waste your money. What I like to do is have one cold traffic campaign set up with anything from 5 – 10 different ad sets running at once. These ad sets will all be targeting individual sections of our lookalike audiences. We will break our lookalikes down all the way to 10%. Each ad set will contain at least 4 different ads. The copy and headlines on the ads will be the same but they will all have different images and videos. In my experience when you are selecting placements you are only going to select the Facebook Newsfeed. Everything else will drive up the CPA. If you are advertising on Instagram you set up a different campaign for that you don’t just bunch them together as you need to make ads that suit each platform.
4. Creating ads that convert.
This will require testing different copy, images and headlines. I would advise looking at what the other big sub box companies are doing to get an idea. I follow a simple layout when laying out the copy for our ads.
1. Pattern interrupt – This is something to grab attention on the newsfeed.
2. Offer. Hit the customer with your unbelievable offer.
3. What you do. Explain how your box will benefit them and why they need it.
4. Social proof. Include some social proof. E.G customer reviews or if you have featured in something say it on the ad.
5. Call to action. Tell the customer to sign up and create urgency if possible E.G Offer ends in 3 days.
5. Images and Videos.
We are lucky as we get thousands of images of our customers using the box. We then pick out the best ones each month and save them. At this stage, we have a massive folder of images that we know converts. We might make a collage of the best ones or we might run a few of them on their own. The main thing is they have to grab attention and show the product in the best possible way. We also get lots of videos each month and we use a program called Animoto to edit them and add text and music for our ads. I would highly recommend adding text to your videos. We see a much higher conversion rate when we do it.
6. Retargeting.
Not everybody is going to convert straight away so you are going to need a way to collect emails on your website. This can’t be a bar buried down the bottom of your website because that is useless and you won’t get enough emails to make any difference to your sales. I would advise creating a lead magnet and capturing as many as possible so you can follow up with these people every single day. You also need a strong retargeting campaign on Facebook. You should make a list of objections on why customers won’t sign up to your box. Then make ads fighting these objections. If a customer visits your website and doesn’t convert for the next 14 days after they see these ads, you should remove them from your campaign as you are wasting money reaching them they probably will never buy.
Metrics
If you don’t understand your metrics or you aren’t tracking them then you shouldn’t be using any form of paid advertising as you will just lose money. You need to know your CLTV. CAC and how long it takes until a customer is in profit. If you don’t know this, you won’t know how much you can even spend to sign up a customer and what the cash flow requirements are. My advice for you is to take a step back if that is the case and learn what all this means. There is plenty of software out there which will help you track all your metrics.
That is a very basic overview of what people should be doing on Facebook to grow their subscription box. There are lots of other cool and complicated things you can do to get the CPA down, increase volume and get the customers into profit sooner but that’s for another time. I hope this post helps some people. If anybody has any questions just let me know and I would be happy to help. You can reach out to me at liammichaelbrennan@live.ie
