Welcome to Subscription Box Answers with your host, liam Brennan. You're no rubbish, no crap. Straight to the point podcast with real, actionable tips, real strategies and insights from the industry which will help you start and grow your own successful subscription box business. You ask the question, you ask the questions, liam gives the answers. It's as simple as that.
Speaker 3:Hi everybody, welcome to another episode of Subscription Box Answers. On today's episode, we have a very special guest, somebody who I followed for a long time in the subscription box industry. He always comes out with great content around marketing and subscription boxes in general. This person is Steve Krakowar, who is the owner of Harbor Marketing. How are you, steve? Hey, liam, I'm great. Thanks for having me. No problem, really really excited to have you on today. It's always great chatting with you. Before we jump into it, do you want to explain a bit about your background and how you got started in the subscription box industry?
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. My background started really in the subscription box space at a company called Hunter Killer, which many people listening to this may not be familiar with. Hunter Killer we were a murder mystery subscription box company where, basically, we would send out an episodic murder mystery story where you would get letters and clues and objects from this fictional serial killer. This story would unfold over the course of six or eight or 12 months. I started working there back in 2017. To be honest, I was just very, very fortunate to work under really strong leadership there. Ryan Hogan, who's the CEO there, is just a beast of an entrepreneur. I got to learn directly under him and work with some really great marketers like Eric Carlson. In the year and a half that I was there, we basically scaled up to about $15 million in revenue to over 35,000 active subscribers.
Speaker 2:I was the one behind the scenes doing a lot of email marketing and strategizing on a lot of the podcast buys we would do and the radio buys and TV buys Really just figuring out ways to build our community message, the product effectively find angles that convert and just acquire more customers. I also had a pretty heavy focus on the retention side of things. I was there, got moved up to retention marketing specialists where I really focused on keeping our churn low and maximizing lifetime value. That experience really allowed me to build a really strong base in the subscription box industry. From there I just got the entrepreneurial bug and just decided to launch Harbor Marketing Agency.
Speaker 2:The natural progression there was to build an agency that specializes in subscription box marketing. We've been in business now for about five years and in that time we've helped dozens of companies scale to over seven figures in revenue, some to over eight figures in revenue. It's just something that I'm really passionate about. I love working with subscription brands, specifically subscription box brands. I think a lot of people don't realize the potential they have to scale if they can just find a way to crack-paid advertising, get their email marketing operating efficiently, make sure their website is set up to convert and really just build a well-oiled marketing ecosystem. That's what we help brands to do Fantastic.
Speaker 3:That's really fascinating about the fact that you're working for the Hunter Killer. I'd say that was a serious education into direct-to-consumer. We say the amount of information that you learned from actually participating and helping them scale to that height in such a short period of time was completely game-changing. That's pretty much priceless. You wouldn't be able to get any of that information anywhere.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it absolutely was a game-changer. The interesting thing about it is being on the agency side now, where I do see the insides of all these different companies, you start to realize that there are a couple commonalities or key ingredients to scaling up a successful subscription box company. I think I was really fortunate that I got to learn those firsthand at Hunter Killer and then be able to apply those to other companies. There are certain things with the customer experience that are universally beneficial across any subscription box that will lower your turn rate and maximize lifetime value. There are certain things on the customer acquisition side of things that every single subscription box needs to be doing. That makes our job easy. As long as we have a good product to work with where we can just come in and put this system in place. Usually it's very effective and these companies can scale up, provided that they have a really good product, product market fit and healthy profit margins. Then if we can check off those things, we can make some magic happen.
Speaker 3:That's really decay. I remember I was actually on for anybody listening on Steve's podcast, probably a few years ago. That was a great podcast, by the way. I listened to that at the start because not many people are putting out content. I think it was called the box base. If anybody wants to check that out I don't know when you stop doing that or whatever you should definitely consider bringing it back. You have to bring that back. I remember we were speaking on that podcast and it just kind of jogged my memory there.
Speaker 3:People tend to think marketing can save your business if you're struggling In cases. Obviously it can help. But if you have something that doesn't have product market fit, it doesn't matter who's doing your marketing. It doesn't matter what agency you hire, who the copywriters are, whatever. If there's no market to buy the product, marketing won't solve anything. You'll just basically set money on fire. Again, if you've bad gross margins, marketing can save you either. You're not going to have a successful business. That pretty much jogged my memory because I remember us having a similar conversation about all them years ago.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I do remember that conversation and it's totally spot on.
Speaker 2:I mean, you can throw the best marketers in the world at a terrible product and it probably won't sell, or you can throw average marketers at a great product and it will probably scale. So, granted, the formula that you want is really good marketers with a really good product, and that's when you can make something special happen. But we have a lot of people that come through the door that just don't have the fundamentals in place to really scale. They'll be operating off really tiny margins or they don't have a validated product market fit yet and they want to scale to millions in revenue in the next several months, and so there's a lot of expectation setting that needs to happen, or just education really on. Hey, here's kind of the base that you need to have if you want to have a shot at scaling this successfully. And I think you're totally right that there's this misconception that you can just find the right angle or design your website the right way or have the right video and everything's going to take off.
Speaker 3:And unfortunately, there's more layers to it, there's more variables at play and all of them kind of have to be lined up in order for this entire thing to scale, yeah definitely and that brings me on to the next point, because you actually put out a video recently that I definitely enjoyed and got a lot of value from, and I agree with everything you said. The name of the video was the state of the subscription box industry. Well, you go ahead, talk us through the video.
Speaker 2:Yeah, sure.
Speaker 2:So the premise of the video is basically I think there's a lot of doom and gloom around the state of the subscription box industry right now because you see these larger subscription box companies that have been around for years, that some of them are public and their earnings are down and they're not doing so well and it's kind of creating a state of panic in the industry.
Speaker 2:And I think it's important to distinguish between where those companies are in their growth lifecycle versus where the average subscription box is in their growth lifecycle. And the way I kind of broke it down was are you a funded subscription box that kind of has that mentality of growth at all costs and like let's just pour money into this and figure out profitability later? Or are you bootstrapped, self-funded, or maybe you just haven't taken on too much funding and you're more of a lifestyle subscription box. You're looking to just kind of generate some cash out of your business and provide a nice lifestyle for you and your family. And I think what we're starting to see is a lot of these companies that were those funded subscription boxes, like winkcom comes to mind. I know their earnings were down and there was like all true and a couple of others.
Speaker 3:I think Wink went bankrupt, or don't quote me on that now. I don't want to be saying companies go bankrupt if they're not.
Speaker 2:I did some research on what those companies were and I mentioned them in the video. I can't remember the exact companies now so I don't want to misquote myself, but there are a handful of those large subscription box companies that weren't doing so well, and the reason for that is basically a couple of years ago they took on all of this funding to basically grow at all costs and they were paying more to acquire a customer than they were making in lifetime value at the time and they were basically just taking this cash that wasn't there as it came from investors, pouring it into the business to grow, to hopefully increase the valuation of the company, go public at a sale, whatever it might be, and they basically just haven't been able to figure out the lifetime value side of the equation. So now they're in the red and investors are pulling back funding and they're declaring bankruptcy and running into all of these problems. And so those are the stories that make headlines that kind of cause a panic in the subscription box industry. You couple that with the broader headlines of recession talk and inflation and all the privacy concerns on the ad platforms where advertising is getting more difficult, and the end result is that people are freaking out and people are thinking that subscription boxes are no longer a viable business model.
Speaker 2:And the point of making that video is I see a lot of the other side of the equation, where some of these brands are not funded, they're bootstrapped. And as long as you're not overspending, as long as you're paying a reasonable amount to acquire a customer and keeping in mind your lifetime value. So generally speaking, the bare minimum that we try to shoot for is a three to one customer acquisition cost to profit lifetime value ratio. So basically, you should pay about a third to acquire a customer of what you make in profit over the lifetime value of your relationship with that customer, and that's kind of like the minimum that we like to shoot for. If you can keep that ratio as you're scaling up your ad spend, you're fine.
Speaker 2:And the reality is that, from what we see, at least in a lot of our client ad accounts, a lot of them are hitting those numbers. They're not in any trouble. Their customer acquisition costs are at healthy levels to lifetime values at healthy levels. Yeah, they probably won't be able to scale as quickly as a wink or some of these larger subscription boxes. But also, their goal isn't to go public. Their goal isn't to get this massive billion dollar exit. If you're just looking to build a nice lifestyle business for yourself through a subscription box model, it is still possible. You just have to be mindful of your unit economics and you probably won't be able to grow as quickly. So that was the whole point of that video that don't pay attention to those crazy headlines of every single subscription box out there going under and declaring bankruptcy. Focus on you, focus on your business and be mindful of your metrics and just make smart decisions as you're trying to grow.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's, you put it perfectly. It's still a very viable business model which can provide you with a fantastic lifestyle once you actually have a grasp on your metrics and you understand your limitations in the marketplace. Pretty much with wink I think it was wink anyway and a few of the others that went it was kind of like musical chairs. How you could cut this sounds mad, but feces were absolutely trowing money at direct to consumer businesses, especially during COVID because the whole industry got such a massive jump and, yeah, trowing mental amounts of money at companies and you had to hit these crazy growth targets. And then eventually, you keep going, you keep going, you keep going, you keep going.
Speaker 3:The market changes. Feces are pulling back. Now they're looking for profitability and not growth. You go back looking to raise more money, not more money. You haven't figured out how to get profitable and you're in trouble. But yeah, that's like a completely different ballgame with direct to consumers. If you're a smaller direct to consumer subscription box company, it can still be highly profitable and it can still be a great business. But yeah, you hit that spot on, because I do see a lot of fear nowadays with people like looking to sell their businesses or they've had enough to think everything's come to the end. But no, it's not the case at all.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and don't get me wrong, I do think it's a little harder Nowadays. It's not 2020 anymore. It's not like people are stuck inside and the only thing they have to do is play with their subscription box. Customer acquisition costs are up a little bit, but, generally speaking, you can find a way to make it work nowadays If this is still your passion and this is still what you want to do and you're committed to this. Don't give up. Just talk to professionals, talk to people like Liam, find a way to make it work and, yeah, it's totally doable.
Speaker 3:Back in the day it was only a few years ago, I think you could get away with a lot of things in your marketing that you probably can't get away with now. Like you could literally take a picture of a box and throw it up on Facebook and put some budget behind it, turn it into a conversion campaign and if you had your audience you would get movement. But now you actually have to be good at marketing to get movement. It's changed completely. You have to have strong marketing fundamentals behind you and you have to understand actually how to acquire people. If you have that information, you can still do really well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, totally agree there. I think a big shift in the last couple of years that has thrown everybody for a loop is that now more than ever, creative is king. Yeah, yeah, it's just a matter of testing more creative in your ad account, more videos, more static image variations, more customer testimonials and unboxing videos and basically just throwing a whole bunch of stuff at the wall, seeing what sticks and then trying to scale aggressively when you find something that works and I think that's a big bottleneck for people nowadays is just being able to source all of the creative that you need to be able to scale on top of making sure their website looks good, making sure they have a well built out email marketing backend and all the other things that go into it.
Speaker 3:I think you're spot on with that, because creatives really the main variable these days. Facebook, they pretty much want to take the heavy lifting off everybody. They're like encouraging you to go open, target in pushing more on AI. I think I heard something recently where they're actually going to get rid of the option to remove placements when you're setting up a campaign. I don't know how true that is it hasn't happened to our account but it seems like they want to control everything, so the companies with the best creative will win, like the days of like 2019, 19, where if you knew all these little hacks around setting up campaigns, you could get kind of like advantage. I think that's really coming to an end and it's really all going the creative direction.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah, I mean our role as an agency really has evolved over the last couple of years because, to your point, it did used to be a lot about the hacks in the ad account and knowing when to run a cost cap campaign and what bidding strategy to use and using manual placements and all these things. And in a way, it's kind of cool how it's changing, because now it's really just about being a good marketer and doing your research, understanding your audience, understanding why they buy your product and what their pain points are, and then coming up with creative ideas to message that to them that's going to resonate and get them to convert. So in a way, it kind of makes our job a little bit more fun because we don't have to worry so much about pushing the right button in the ad account and we can spend more time just strategizing on like, all right, what's the right message to get in front of people and how can we convey that in an ad.
Speaker 3:Yeah, Like I remember before, I used to spend a ridiculous amount of time looking into and testing all these different hacks and methods. The bully method is one I remember off the top of my head. I can't remember exactly how it was. I think it was like manual bidding or something. You'd send your bid through the roof and try to scare your competition out of the app. And there's crazy things going around and a lot of them worked and if you got a grasp on them you will get a advantage.
Speaker 3:But it would always be for a short period of time and then everybody would find out what that hack was and then it wouldn't be as effective and you'd be back to the drawing board. You'd be like obsessed about different like. I remember like you'd be setting up a campaign, a cost cap campaign, and you might have like a million different ad sets in the campaign, all bidding on different cost caps. You might find the perfect amount so you could actually get mail from lower CPA. It was crazy. It was crazy the amount of things that use would be going on.
Speaker 2:And it was a lot of work too. It was, you know, the ad account pushing buttons and yeah, I think it's better. I think it's harder to get results now, but I think it helps people become better marketers when they really apply themselves nowadays.
Speaker 3:Remember another one, like there was always mad names to the hacks and there was one like remember I hasn't like about 50 different ad sets going at once with tiny budgets on them and I'd have to, like at certain times of the day, burn ones off, raise the budget on other ones, like exactly two hours, come back. It was credit. It was a lot of work but, like you said, but yeah, it definitely, it definitely paid off and you found one of the hacks now for us with running ads they don't know if it's the same for you it's making sure you have somebody who can produce these creatives for you, that you have a process and place to make the creatives. Obviously, you still need to know how Facebook works, like there's still things that you can't just turn it on and throw something in. You have to actually understand how to run a proper campaign. But yeah, a lot of time is spent sourcing you just see content, sourcing images, testing different images, all that stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. And I think a key element that's overlooked to that too is, you know, I think a lot of people just say, oh, we need new, new creative, and they go out and find some and they're just kind of like, okay, cool, I got a new video. You know, let's, let's check that box and move on with our life. And creative direction is really really important as well. So look at what's working in your ad account and don't just source any creative.
Speaker 2:You know, look at. You know, okay, is our text overlay images working better? Or our customer testimonials working better? And what are they saying in that customer testimonial? That I think is getting people to convert? Or is, you know, more professional? You know, high level video shoot working better? Do we need to source more of that creative? So you can save yourself a lot of time and back and forth with sourcing creative if you just take a step back and pay attention to what's actually working and put all your energy and effort into sourcing that specific type of creative that's working well for your business at that at that time, yeah, and we do that kind of a process around it.
Speaker 3:When we find something that's working, it will go into a Google Drive as a example video. We write up a campaign brief and you really want to get it down to a science. So when you're sending, like, when you're hiring creators, whatever you can go, this is exactly what we need. This is the intro that we want to the video. Put the product like this, use these videos as a reference and just amplify what's working. Pretty much get as much of that creative as possible. So let's smack it into that account and run it on. That doesn't work anymore.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, exactly, it does seem to be kind of a mix of like, like you said, like amplify was a perfect word. Let's amplify what's working and test a bunch of different kind of variations of that, while also, you know, having some new stuff thrown into the mix and seeing if we can pinpoint something as well, in case that stuff that we're amplifying runs dry.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and as far as other marketing channels, I know we were chatting a bit off air there before we came on and we were saying like it's crazy how Facebook is still so important. It's sad but it's true pretty much like a lot of us really do depend on Facebook being trouble if we never had it. But there are other marketing channels which can supplement Facebook and you can get some movement. So being out there these days and the other channels people should pay attention to.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, our bread and butter is is meta.
Speaker 2:So Facebook and Instagram you know that's where we scale the vast majority of our clients and you know basically what we're talking about off air before this is if you can't crack meta advertising Facebook and Instagram then you're pretty out of business.
Speaker 2:You know you're not going to not going to get supported by by tick tock or Google or Pinterest or anything like that.
Speaker 2:On top of meta we do run Google ads as well and we see some you know some decent success there, less scalable. So meta is always going to be more scalable just because there's, you know, more target audiences on there and you can target based off of interests, people that aren't necessarily solution aware yet you know maybe they're problem aware but they haven't heard of your product and you can get in front of them, whereas with Google, you know there's only so many people searching for a dog subscription box or any trail. Yeah, so we find that Google supplements Facebook very well and you know you can get some, some top of funnel sales from Google as well with the right keywords. To be honest, we haven't dug too deeply into tick tock advertising. Yeah, and I mean actually I was about to say from what I hear but really I hear this from you that it's a good supplement to the rest of your advertising from a top of funnel standpoint.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's it Pretty much. Tick tock is good. You can get good movement on tick tock. But if I only had to depend on tick tock like it was like you've been banned out of Facebook forever and you have to depend on tick tock to run your whole business I think you'd have a very stressful life and I think it may be difficult to get anywhere near the numbers that you get from Facebook.
Speaker 3:But tick tocks very like up and down. If you hire the right creator through the marketplace and the video goes viral or semi viral, you can get a big spike off that of traffic and you can turn that into sales If you've the email collection set up on the website. But it will be hard to replicate it over and over and over again. And then you can get a lot of other stuff like spark ads and stuff on tick tock. They're good. They are good but again, nowhere near as powerful as meta, because meta have been doing this for years. Even with all the privacy restrictions and stuff. They're well ahead of the competition and they know when people are more likely to buy, whereas tick tock they aren't there fully yet. Maybe they will be in the future and maybe and hopefully they will be, because it'd be great for everybody who actually depends on Facebook. But yeah, right now, facebook is still the place where you want to be putting most of your time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, 100%, 100%, and I hope someone comes out and creates a better ad platform. That would be great. That'd be better for everybody. I think competition is a good thing and it's healthy. Yeah, right now it seems like Facebook is still the dominant player in the space, and that's where I'd recommend everybody start.
Speaker 3:Yeah, definitely, and what I'm kind of excited about is because, wait, I think Twitter could have been a great place to acquire customers, but their advertising platform, from a performance marketing standpoint, is absolutely terrible. You're getting nothing off of that. It's complete waste of time. But Facebook have threads and that's going to open up more room on the ad platform. That's exciting, because you'll probably be able to get a lot of people signed up from threads, because it will just integrate exactly into what's already working, similar to Rails.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think it's smart what they're doing by launching threads. It's going to create more ad inventory. Yeah, I think there's a lot of buzz around threads right now just because they're kind of like the new player on the block and you know, people are saying that they're the fastest growing social media app ever recorded in history. I don't think it's necessarily fair to give them that trophy, because they're basically piggybacking on Ram's growth.
Speaker 2:It's not like they're just like two random kids in a garage with hoodies on. That launched the social media app and it went viral Like they, you know, have it off of one of the largest social media apps in existence. So with threads, I think it's still up in the air. You know we'll see how it looks. You know three, four, five, six months from now and you know what engagement looks like. We'll see how brands are handling their marketing strategy on threads. We'll see what the impact on meta ad costs actually is from threads and if performance improves because of it. So I think you know right now, like it just launched a couple of days ago. I think it's too early to have you know a really strong opinion on how it's going to go, but I'm cautiously optimistic about it. Fingers crossed.
Speaker 3:The sad thing for us is we can't actually get it over here because there's crazy privacy laws over here with GDPR. I don't know the full backstory, but Facebook in trouble pretty much for a while over certain privacy things and threads isn't available here, so I'm going to have to try to get a VPN or whatever and see if I can actually download it to check it out.
Speaker 3:And you have to hand it to Mark Zuckerberg, though Apparently I don't know if this is true either. They had that in the pipeline for a long time and they waited for the perfect opportunity to launch it. Obviously, with Twitter getting a lot of heat and stuff at the main house, he went for the kill with threads so clever.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I think his timing is great there. I think there's a lot of animosity towards Twitter People either love it or hate it at this point, and I think there is kind of an open spot for some competition there, and it also seems like the metaverse is dead. So I think Mark Zuckerberg has some room to direct his attention elsewhere.
Speaker 3:Yeah, they seem to completely stop talking about that, which is a shame. I was actually enjoying that. I got one of the I can't remember the name of the quest the headset and I was playing games on it. I don't know if it would be something where Because I was thinking like you're literally You're on your phone all day on WhatsApp he owns that. You're on Facebook all day doing work and writing to people he owns that. You're on Instagram, whatever after dinner or checking things out, he owns that. Then, before you go to bed, you do a workout with the 3D headset and he owns that and it's like Jesus, he pretty much owns all your time. It's crazy.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean it would be cool to see the metaverse take off, but I think it's a tough hurdle to get people to overcome, to just put on a giant headset and do it this alternate reality. I think Threads is a better short-term strategic move for him.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's easier to pull off and it keeps the shareholders happy as well, because he's actually fixing his car business and put more places to send ads out. So jump in, move along a bit Email marketing, because I know you do some email marketing. I know Thomas from the burn box. I believe you're very happy with your management of his marketing. He always has good things to say about you. If I'm correct, you do. We got a bit of email marketing? Yeah, we do. Yeah, any tips for subscription boxes?
Speaker 2:Yeah, Well, where to start? So one of the things that we're seeing right now is actually plain text emails are pretty much outperforming graphic emails across the board 100%.
Speaker 3:We're seeing the exact same thing as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we did a test of.
Speaker 2:I think we did like 23 or 25 split tests across a variety of different subscription boxes a variety of different verticals, niches, and it was basically it was just graphic versus plain text across all of these emails that went out and it was something crazy. Like 87%, or some high up their number, plain text beat out graphic. So that was an interesting takeaway. And so I think if you can just have a really good copywriter on your team that can communicate the value of the subscription well and, you know, position it with urgency and social proof and give people a reason to buy now and just throw that into a plain text email, one, they're easier to create and two, it seems like they're performing better. So I would start there.
Speaker 2:And then you know email marketing. Aside from that, it's not too complicated. Just make sure that you're segmenting properly, make sure you're sending to the right person at the right time, make sure you're always split testing campaigns that you're sending out. So at least split test the subject line. Or if you have creative split tests, you know, send that to 20 to 30% of your list before you send to the rest of your list. That'll give you a little bump in performance.
Speaker 2:And just make sure that you have, you know, automations throughout your entire customer journey. So you know when someone joins your email list on your site. What emails are they getting after that? Do you have a well-built out lead conversion flow? If not, put that in place and make sure that you're, you know, continually optimizing that. When someone signs up for a subscription and becomes a customer, do you have a really good onboarding sequence in place that's going to welcome them to the experience, kind of reverse that buyer's remorse, show them how to contact customer service, set expectations around shipping, you know, are you covering your ground there to kind of mitigate that first month churn?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so I could go on and on about all the automations you should have in place, but yeah, it'll save you so much time If you just actually it can be a bit of a pain to set them up, but get them settled properly and it will save you so much time going forward yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it's that's like again. You know we work with a ton of different subscription box brands. Some are more established than others. For the more established ones, it's a matter of like cleaning up their email marketing ecosystem and kind of optimizing you know the core flows that they have in place and then just make sure that their campaigns look good. But for a lot of the subscription boxes that are just kind of like starting out or looking to take it to the next level, start with just getting automations in place. You know like build them out, launch your lead conversion flow, launch your customer onboarding flow, launch your abandoned card flow, and, you know, just having it in place will give you a bump in revenue.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and like normally say, like I said, it can be a real pain sometimes sitting down and creating these automations, but just do it. Just set yourself a goal. I'll encounter. Setup my abandoned car automation, sit down for a couple of hours and just knock out the emails to move on to the next one. And yeah, to be there forever. Well, look at it. Is there assets in your business that will work for you behind the scenes? So it makes no sense not to have them.
Speaker 2:Yep, and do it well too. I see a lot of people that you know we'll go in and audit their email marketing and their their abandoned cart flow is like one email that says hey, you left something in your cart, here's your discount code and that's it. It's like that. Like don't just do it to check the box, you know, write some branded copy, make it make it exciting, make it engaging. You know to put out some quality work with your email marketing and do it right.
Speaker 3:And then you can follow me and put yourself in your customer shoes and go. If you were getting emails like this would actually excite you to buy. And that's the same with your ads as well. Some people, they come to me and so forth. And they come, my ads aren't converting. Can you take a look? You take a look and the box and I don't mean this to offend anybody, but it's the truth. You know, if the box looks like a leather junk in the box and it's dark and you can't actually see any of the products, and the products look like you got them from the dollar store. Put yourself in your customer shoes. Would you sign up for something like that if you saw on the news feed? Probably not.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and yeah I mean, you know sometimes it does go deeper than the marketing. Like, yeah, sometimes they got to look at your product and say am I delivering a quality product? Is this something people actually want? And you know, sometimes it takes going back to the drawing board and saying how can I make this better? And then that will be the thing that improves your marketing.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so look, thanks very much for coming on. It's always great to catch up with you, always great to check market and with you, and you always bring up some great points. So if anybody wants to work with your agency, where do they go and I definitely recommend this because I've only heard good things when do they go.
Speaker 2:Yeah, sure thing. Well, first off, thanks so much for having me. Always a blast catching up with you, Liam. And yeah, if people are interested in partnering with an agency, we specialize in subscription box marketing. Our agency's name is Harbor Marketing Agency and if you're interested in working together, just go to harbormarketingagencycom and book a call with us.
Speaker 2:Our sales process is very low pressure. We'll basically just hop on a call or more about your business, Like we chatted about in this conversation. If you don't have the fundamentals in place, we'll let you know and we'll kind of give you some guidance on what you need to work on before we're ready to work together. If you are more established and you're looking to just kind of like put your foot on the gas or fix some things, we'll be able to go in and do an audit of your entire business and kind of take a look at everything from a high level and let you know what needs to be fixed and how we can take your brand to the next level and if it's a good fit, we'll chat about working together and take it from there Perfect.
Speaker 3:Well, I will put a link to Harbor Marketing in the shell notes. Thanks again. We will be back next week at the exact same time. If anybody has any questions that they want answered, head over to subscriptionboxresourcescom, join the free Facebook group and post it there, or email me at leematsubscriptionboxanswers and. Thanks very much and see you next week. Bye, bye.