by If you follow the steps in this article you will be able to sign up a lot of new subscribers for your box.
This is one of the main reasons why we have been able to sell millions of dollars of subscription boxes in BusterBox.
If you implement this into your marketing you can change your entire business overnight.
I have touched on this plenty of times before, but I have decided to go deeper and dedicate an entire blog post to it as I believe it is so important and it is something that will help a lot of people in this group.
Once you get this right, you will be able to grow your subscription box business so much easier.
I would go as far as saying this is the most important component of your marketing. It does not make a difference if you are advertising on Facebook, TikTok, Youtube, Direct Mail Radio, TV or any channel at all. If this isn’t correct you will struggle to get volume and your customer acquisition cost will not be sustainable.
This is one of the main reasons why some Subscription Box owners are able to blow their business up to millions in sales and why others struggle to get a few hundred subscribers. It is literally that important
The topic I am about to cover is Subscription Box Offer Creation
What’s a Subscription Box Offer?
To break it down in its simplest form a Subscription Box offer is what you give a consumer in exchange for signing up to your box. An offer doesn’t only have to involve discounting prices you can also bundle things together to entice the consumer to take action and purchase your box.
Your success with customer acquisition will come down to how good you are at understanding your customers so you have the ability to come up with irresistible offers which will make them pull out their credit card and sign up for your box on the spot.
The current offer you are running is going to be the focal point of the majority of your marketing material. That means it is going to take centre stage in your ads and any direct communication you have with your prospects E.G Email marketing and SMS.
The mistake a lot of Subscription Box Owners make is they don’t take the time to learn how to put together a really good offer or they don’t learn how to present it in a way that makes people want to sign up to their box.
The default offer everybody seems to jump to is a minor discount like 5-10% and unfortunately this doesn’t achieve anything.
Put yourself in your customer’s shoes if you saw a 5% discount appearing on your newsfeed would it make you want to take out your credit card and commit for 6 months? No, I didn’t think so.
Ideal offer from the Subscription Box Owners Side.
Now before we start going through some example offers I want to explain what an ideal offer will look like from the Subscription Box owner’s side.
I think one of the reasons people are afraid to get creative with their offers is because they don’t know for certain how much they can give without losing money.
The main piece of advice I can give you in regards to this is you have to know your numbers. That means you need to understand exactly what your customer lifetime value is for each subscription plan you offer.
Once you understand this piece of information you will understand how much you can pay to actually acquire a customer.
As a general rule of running a subscription business your LTV to CAC ratio should be 3:1. That means you want to earn back 3 times the amount you spent to sign up the customer in gross profit during the lifetime of the subscription.
This offer you do at the start of the subscription should also be included in this calculation. So if you are losing money on the first box you need to ensure the ratio is still working out as 3:1 on average.
(The reason why you want this ratio on average is because you will probably run into cash flow problems otherwise as you scale up)
Now that I have made that clear, I am going to highlight 4 key points that you should aim to hit with any offer you create.
If you manage to hit all 4 points you will be able to blow your Subscription Box up rapidly.
1. Volume
The offer has the potential to bring a lot of sales. Once your ideal customer sees it they won’t be able to resist it. If you have done everything right and your ads are going out to your ideal customer and the sales are slow the offer is probably wrong.
2. 3 – 4 Month PayBack Period maximum.
The maximum number of months it will take on average to get a customer into profit will be 3-4 months. This is after the marketing spend and whatever you had to fulfil for the offer. If the offer pushes the payback period out any further it will be very difficult to scale up without a considerable amount of investment in the business.
3. Fulfilment
You have the capability to fulfil whatever the offer is without it becoming a serious struggle for your business. If it is a discount obviously this is easy to fulfil as it will be applied to the account, but things like free gifts, themes, double boxes take planning and if you don’t do it right it can eat up a lot of cash flow.
4. Profitability
This is pretty important. There is no point running an offer and signing up thousands of customers, which will never go profitable. That’s why you need to pay close attention to your numbers and follow the 3:1 LTV to CAC ratio I discussed above.
Offer Examples
I am now going to go through some basic offer examples so you get some ideas of what you can test in your subscription box business.
1. Deep Discount.
A deep discount can work well, but if you are going with this approach make sure you only offer it on the longer plans (6, 12 month) If you go with the deep discount on a rolling monthly plan it will probably be a blood bath of churn. The more aggressive you get with the discount the higher the churn. You must also accept when you are doing a deep discount you will attract a percentage of poor quality customers.
This doesn’t mean this offer can’t be profitable. If you do it on the 6 or 12 month plans it can be highly profitable you just have to have the correct expectations and make sure you are monitoring your metrics and cash.
The only time you should consider doing a deep discount on a monthly plan is when you have your funnel set up in such a way that you can have high churn but recoup a lot of the ad spend through upsells.
The good thing about a deep discount is it is pretty straight forward to set up. You don’t need to manage any extra stock or anything. You simply apply an automatic coupon code to your checkout process and that is it.
When done correctly a deep discount can grow your business pretty quickly. This is because the sales volume can go through the roof and the marketing spend to acquire customers moves from ad spend to product costs.
2. Free Gift.
The free gift can work very well once it is actually a gift that your prospect is interested in. If it is some old stock down in your warehouse that you want to get rid of performance will be terrible.
That’s why you need to offer something really, really cool which will grab attention and make people want to sign up to your subscription box on the spot.
A tip would be to try and source stuff that have a high perceived retail value, but can be picked up for relatively cheap. Then lean on the value of the free gift in your marketing. This can make a big difference to the customers perception and massively improve the conversion rate.
A tip would be to try and source stuff that have a high perceived retail value, but can be picked up for relatively cheap. Then lean on the value of the free gift in your marketing. This can make a big difference to the customers perception and massively improve the conversion rate.
3. Double Your First Box For FREE
This offer can work very well once it is set up correctly. You just double the amount of stuff the customer gets in the first box. This is very enticing for most consumers and also leaves a very good impression after the first box. This can make a big difference to the churn rate.
The only bad thing about this offer is it can cost a lot of money up front to get all the stock in for this especially if you are scaling. So if you do decide to do this offer make sure you keep on top of your cash flow so you don’t end up running into any issues.
4. Theme based offers.
If you do monthly themes for your box. Theme based offers can work very well. You can reveal your theme ahead of time and base all your marketing material around that months theme.
You can also add one of the offers I mentioned above to it. So imagine you are sending out a safari box next month.
All your marketing material would be around this safari box, but then to make things even better the first box has a deep discount, is double the amount of stuff or has a really cool safari based gift.
Theme based offers are the most effort to pull off as you need to change your marketing material frequently, but they can also be the most enticing for your customers.
Example:
Imagine at Christmas you have a Christmas based theme, with Christmas based marketing and on top of that, new customers can also double their first box as well. This is a very powerful offer that would sell very quickly.
These are just a few different examples of some basic offers. You can make things a lot more interesting by adding different things and positioning them in different ways. If you can find a way to add digital products and other benefits that don’t cost you a lot this can also make a massive difference. This is because it raises up the perceived value for the customer.
I hope this has given you some ideas though about things you can test in your businesses.
Presentation
It doesn’t make a difference if you have the best offer in the world. If you don’t know how to present it correctly, your sales will be slow. The biggest piece of advice I can give you is hire a graphic designer to help you with this.
You are going to need professional stuff done for your header, ads and emails. Here are some tips to help you.
• Header
The offer should be in the header of your website. It should designed in a way that it is very clear, but doesn’t take away from your box. It needs to look extremely enticing, professional pictures here are a must.
• Emails
Email marketing should be a big part of your marketing strategy. Your offer needs to be centre stage in all sales emails you send out. You should have many different versions of these emails so you can email your list regularly. Professional design work here makes a big difference.
• Ads
All ads that you send out should include the offer. The ads should be colourful. The boxes should be packed and the offer should be clear. Make the most of Facebook relaxing the 20% text rule and put your offer in bold text for each image. This will make a big difference for the placements where the caption isn’t so easy to read e.g Instagram
For unboxing video ads the offer needs to be discussed by whoever is opening the box on camera.
I can’t stress this enough presentation is critical so make sure have the skills to get it right and if not hire a freelancer or full time graphic designer to help.
I hope you found this article around Subscription Box offers helpful. You will be surprised to see what happens when you test different offers. Once you start getting them to work it makes the whole customer acquisition process so much easier and you can completely change your business overnight.
If you have any questions around marketing, offers or subscription boxes in general please let me know. Have a great day.
