by If you are looking to blow your Subscription Box up and get a lot more subscribers and sales, this is the PERFECT time to do it.
Normally the busiest period for Subscription Boxes (and e-commerce in General) is October until December and If you play your cards right you can get some serious growth in your business over these months.
We have been running BusterBox for 5 years now and this is historically where we get a lot of our growth.
Everybody should be looking to make the most of this and try their very best to get as many new subscribers as possible
Now the only bad thing about these months are they can be challenging and you can end up not moving the needle at all if you don’t know what to do. Competition normally heats up for advertisers on the run up to Christmas so you have to stay ahead of the game.
After running my own business for years and working with countless other subscription box owners I am very familiar what the biggest mistakes are. So in the hope of helping as many people reach their goals as possible this Q4 I have decided to write this article and highlight the biggest mistakes subscription box owners make.
5 Common Mistakes Subscription Box Owners Make During Q4
1. There is nothing you can do about ad prices!
In case you didn’t know Facebook ads are run on an auction. On the run up to Christmas more companies will decide to advertise and spend more money on the platform. This means ad prices will go up and there isn’t much you can do about it. There are a lot of subscription box owners and business owners in general who get frustrated by this and decide to completely stop advertising.
I don’t personally believe this is a good idea. You should be looking to make the most of this period and if anything you should be looking to ramp up advertising. Ad prices may be increasing, but so is consumer spending so you should be looking to make the most of this on the run up to Christmas. Now, unfortunately if you have poor metrics in your Subscription Box business it may not be possible to do much advertising during these months as it won’t be financially viable.
So make sure you are tracking these 3 things.
· CAC – Customer Acquisition Cost
· Monthly Churn
· CLTV – Customer lifetime value.
As a general rule of thumb, you should be looking at a 3:1 Ratio (The value of a customer should be three times more than the cost of acquiring them) If you are making more than 3 times the profit fair play but you are leaving customers on the table so should try and market harder. If your ratio is less the 3:1 you should stop what you’re doing and try and fix it because you will run into cash problems as you advertise and try to scale up.
Also, remember if you have a poor ratio it’s more than likely you don’t have a marketing problem but a product problem
If you have good metrics and people stay signed up to your box for a reasonable period of time (over 8 months at least) then you should be looking to crank up your advertising spend and get as many people in as possible.
2. Not selling other products
This is a very common mistake and I completely understand why. There are a lot of subscription box owners who don’t sell any other products around this time of year and choose to focus exclusively on growing their subscriber base.
This makes complete sense as you should be focusing on growing your subscriber base, but why not do both?
These are potential sales that you won’t have to pay for as you already have these customers details on file. Now the biggest mistake most subscription box owners make is they think existing subscribers won’t buy anything else from them. This means they leave them out of their Q4 Marketing efforts.If this is your thought process you are leaving a lot of money on the table.
I promise you happy existing subscribers are extremely likely to buy more products from you.
You should put together some expensive gift baskets and gift bundles your existing subscribers can buy in the run up to Christmas. You will be very surprised by the amount of extra sales you can get by doing this.
If an existing subscriber buys one of these products, it will not affect their current subscription in any way. They will still receive their normal box, but they will also receive the extra gift bundle as well. This allows you to boost CLTV significantly by making more money from your current subscribers.
Now the common mistake everybody makes with this is they don’t apply any thought or strategy into the process. They wait until the last minute and then start blasting out emails and SMS messages to their contacts hoping to see an influx in sales.
Now you probably will see an increase in sales, but you have the opportunity to make this strategy much more effective with a little more effort.
You should look to warm your contacts up and engage them before you start trying to sell them anything. You can do this by providing value, building hype or pre-qualifying them before trying to sell them anything else.
What works very well is sending out an email saying you are thinking of doing additional gift bundles this year and would love some feedback. You can then ask them to fill out a quick survey asking them what kind of products they would like to see in one of these bundles.
Then when it comes time to release the gift bundles you can tell everybody you took their feedback on board, and they can now go ahead and purchase. Doing this will make a big difference compared to just randomly blasting somebody’s inbox or phone with a message asking them to purchase an expensive gift bundle.
3. If you don’t do anything, then don’t expect anything.
If your marketing plans for the next few months involve doing nothing but posting organically on social media then don’t expect miracles. To really make the most of this period you need to have a proper marketing strategy that involves paid traffic. You can do other advertising like influencer marketing and affiliates, but paid traffic is more than likely going to bring you the most results.
So if you haven’t done this already you should spend some time figuring out your strategy and what your Q4 offer will be. If you have some historical data from last year you can look at that to get a rough idea of what the next few months could look like from a CPA Perspective. You should then start advertising as aggressively as you possibly can.
4. Make the most of the assets you have.
A lot of subscription box owners completely overlook any assets they have in the run-up to Christmas. Instead of trying to make money from contact details you already have, they spend all of their time focusing on new customers.
These are the assets I am talking about.
· Email List
· SMS list
· Facebook messenger list.
As I stated above getting new subscribers signed up to your box from paid traffic is very important, but you shouldn’t overlook the assets you have already collected. You should take things back to basics and try and sell to these people. Spend some time setting up some sales emails, SMS messages and Messengers blasts to run beside your ads.
If you engage these people correctly and have a good offer you are likely to get some decent movement from this. If it’s a case where you haven’t been collecting any assets for the last year you should look at this as a learning exercise and you should start straight away. So this time next year you will be able to make the most of this strategy.
The best way to increase sales and subscriber numbers massively over Black Friday is to have a gigantic email list, SMS list and Facebook Messenger list.
You won’t build this overnight, it takes a sustained effort over a period of time to achieve this.
5. Have Christmas Ad Creative Ready.
It’s pretty obvious why sales increase from September – December. The majority of this is down to Christmas. People tend to spend a lot more money on themselves and on gifts for others. As soon as Halloween is finished, you should be focusing your marketing message towards Christmas.
This means you will need to have Christmas videos and images ready for your ads. You should plan these out in advance and have them ready to go. You can contact your suppliers now and ask them for some samples which will be used for marketing materials.
A big mistake a lot of Subscription box owners make is they don’t bother doing this ahead of time. They wait until they are deep into November before getting any of this ready to go. This isn’t a good idea as you will end up on missing out on a lot of sales. Get prepared now and you will be glad once the Christmas rush hits.
I hope this article helps everybody in this group increase their sales and subscriber numbers over the next few months. These months can be challenging if you don’t know what you’re doing, but the pay off can be massive if you get it right. I could have probably written a book about increasing sales from September – December but It would have been too long haha. I may write some more articles around increasing sales on Black Friday if people think it will help.
If you have any questions about this or Subscription Boxes in general just comment below and I will be happy to answer them. Have a good.
