by The biggest challenge for most people is getting more subscribers.
That’s why I’m going to share some valuable tips and explain how we’ve managed to sign up over 60,000 subscribers to BusterBox over the past few years using Facebook ads.
When it comes to growing a subscription box business, there are a million different things you could be doing, and it’s very easy to get distracted by shiny new objects.
(I know this for a fact, as we’ve put a lot of time and money into probably every marketing channel you can think of.)
Some of them can work well, depending on your niche.
But for the majority of subscription box owners, Meta ads are still where you should invest the majority of your time and money.
That’s because the effort-to-reward ratio is very high when you get them right, and you can drive a lot of volume for a consistent CAC.
A lot of the other marketing channels do not have a good effort-to-reward ratio!
You can work yourself into the ground and end up with a very bad return on subscribers…
I’m not saying there’s no time or place for other channels (we do plenty of other marketing).
What I am saying, though, is that even in 2025, if I had to recommend one channel most likely to be worth your time for the majority of subscription box owners, it would still be Meta ads.
Now let me explain what we do to get thousands of new subscribers signed up using Meta ads.
- Offer
If you’ve followed any of my content for any amount of time, you’ll notice I always bang on about the offer.
The reason I do this is because it’s really that important.
If you don’t have an offer that converts, you’re completely wasting your time when it comes to any form of paid traffic.
We are testing new offers all the time at BusterBox.
Different offers attract different customers, and they’re critical to our business.
They are so important that if we don’t have an offer that converts, our entire business doesn’t work.
A good offer will allow you to reduce your CAC and drive enough consistent volume to keep growing your business.
If your offer is poor, then you will have a very high CAC, and it will be like pulling teeth to get subscribers.
This is true for 99% of subscription box businesses.
These are the types of offers that usually work well for subscription boxes:
Deep discount
Free gift
Double your first box
All of these have the potential to work, but each one attracts different types of customers.
Also, not every free gift will work…
You may need to test a few different ones until you find the right one.
We’ve tested about 100 offers, and the results are wildly different, especially when it comes to gifts.
A very common question I get is: “When will I know if I have a winning offer?”
The answer is: You will know because your CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) will drop, and you’ll be able to drive a lot of volume.
2. Targeting
The good news is that targeting has become a million times easier for most niches over the past few years.
In the past, you would have needed to layer loads of different interests on top of each other until you found your ideal customer.
Nowadays, it’s very different because the algorithm is much more powerful and does most of the heavy lifting for you.
No matter what your subscription box business is, these are the audiences I would try first:
Open targeting
Lookalike audiences – (You may need 500 purchases to get this firing, but it can and should be tested at a smaller amount.)
Simple interest-based targeting – (Just pick one or two obvious interests and test them.)
Like I mentioned above, in most cases, Facebook should be able to do the majority of the heavy lifting for you.
If you go very tight with your targeting, you’re more than likely going to drive your CPMs up.
It usually works better these days to give the algorithm room to work its magic.
There are many other audiences you can test, but for the vast majority of cases, you should start with the ones I mentioned above, as they’re most likely to work.
3. Structuring Your Campaign
People seem to get obsessed about how to structure their campaigns.
The technical side of Facebook ads only accounts for a small amount of your success.
What’s way more important is the creative side of things.
That means having a website, an offer, and ads that convert. If you have those things in place, there’s a very good chance you’ll succeed.
Once you pick the sales objective, any kind of campaign has a chance of working:
CBO (Campaign Budget Optimization) works.
ABO (Ad Set Budget Optimization) works.
Advantage Plus Shopping works.
You’ll need to test to see what works best for your account.
To make things simple, I would start with old-school CBO or Advantage Plus Shopping.
If you go with Advantage Plus Shopping, make sure your engaged audience and existing customers are defined, and ensure you set your existing budget cap to 0.
This is very important if the only product you sell is your subscription box.
(It will stop you from wasting money showing your ads to existing customers.)
As far as the number of ads per ad set goes, I would always recommend 4–6.
The algorithm works much better when you give it some variation to test.
We usually keep all the copy and headlines the same, and then change the image or video on each ad.
This helps us see what’s working and what isn’t.
4. Creating Ads That Convert.
This requires testing different copy, images, videos, and headlines.
I highly recommend using the Facebook Ad Library to see what the big subscription boxes are doing.
If you see they’re running a particular ad for a long time, it’s highly likely it’s working for them.
Here’s an easy formula for ad copy that works for most subscription boxes:
Pattern interrupt – Grab attention on the newsfeed.
Offer – Hit the customer with your amazing offer.
What you do – Explain how your box benefits them and why they need it.
Social proof – Include customer reviews or press mentions.
Call to action – Tell the customer to sign up and create urgency (e.g., Offer ends in 48 hours!).
5. Images and Videos.
At BusterBox, we get thousands of images and videos of dogs with our box, so we use the best ones in our ads.
I highly recommend running a competition each month for the best video and image.
This will entice your customers to consistently send in fresh content, which you can use.
Some of our best-performing ads were created years ago.
Every now and again performance will drop as we are running them for so long.
(We will then give them a break for a few months, but once we bring them back they usually start working well again)
I also recommend adding your offer directly to your static images in bold text, as this makes the ad’s message much clearer on certain placements.
6. Metrics
If you don’t understand your metrics, you shouldn’t be using paid advertising, as there’s a high probability you’ll lose money.
You need to know your lifetime value (LTV), CAC, and how long it takes until a customer becomes profitable.
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.
We use a program called ChartMogul, which works well with Subbly.
This is a basic overview of how to grow your subscription box with Meta ads.
There are a million other things you can do to lower your CAC and increase volume and make more money from your subscribers.
That’s very another time though.
For the vast majority of box owners you want to keep things simple, and this is the easiest way you can have success with your ads.
I hope this post helps some people.
Any questions, let me know. Have a great day.
