Are your Facebook Ads slow and expensive after the holidays? If so, listen to this episode, as I am going to show you exactly what to do to get them performing well ASAP.
January can be a strange time where you are either soaring and your ads are working great, or it's really slow and it seems like no matter what you do, you can't get your ads back to performing well.
In this episode, I will share exactly what you need to do to get your Facebook ads firing and new subscribers signing up to your box around the clock.
If you have a question you want answered on the show, head over to www.SubscriptionBoxResources.com, join the free Facebook group, and post it there.
Are your Facebook Ads slow and expensive after the holidays? If so, listen to this episode, as I am going to show you exactly what to do to get them performing well ASAP.
January can be a strange time where you are either soaring and your ads are working great, or it's really slow and it seems like no matter what you do, you can't get your ads back to performing well.
In this episode, I will share exactly what you need to do to get your Facebook ads firing and new subscribers signing up to your box around the clock.
If you have a question you want answered on the show, head over to www.SubscriptionBoxResources.com, join the free Facebook group, and post it there.
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 2:Welcome back to a brand new episode of Subscription Box Answers. As always, I hope your day has gone really well and I hope January has gone really well for your business. If it hasn't gone well, well, don't worry, because in this podcast, I'm going to help you kickstart your year. A question came in during the week and I picked it out straight away because I know there will be other business owners going through this and this answer will definitely help them. So let me read out the question.
Speaker 2:Hello, ever since we came back in January, our Facebook ad performance has been terrible. Our customer acquisition cost is really high and it's really difficult to get any new subscriber signed up for a cost that makes sense. Everything was working great before Christmas and we were getting a lot of new subscribers for a very reasonable customer acquisition cost, but ever since we came back in January, performance has been terrible. Do you have any advice? It feels as if we're completely stuck. Okay, this is a very good question and your problem is not uncommon. This can happen.
Speaker 2:The funny thing about January is it's normally a feast or a famine, and what I mean by that is right. You either come back in January and everything is working great and your ads are flying, lots of new people are selling an open. You start the year really strong and it fails, as if, no matter what you touch, everything will just work for you. Then there's other January's when you come back and it's just really difficult to get going again. It's really hard to get your ads performing and, no matter what you do, it just feels like it won't work. Nothing will work for you, right? And the thing about this is we've actually experienced both of these scenarios in Busterbox in various January's. Now, thankfully, this year, things have actually been really good for us and we've been driving a lot of new sign ups over the last few weeks. But that's because we have been doing this for so long and we basically know what to do. We've been able to avoid a January slump because you learn over time, and I'm going to share that information with you today to hopefully help you kick on. And that's what I mean when I say it's either a feast or a famine in January. You're either flying or it's just really difficult. So let's hopefully get you back flying and fix your ad problem. So one thing I've learned right there's two different ways you can kickstart your January, and the first way is right and this is more difficult. But it can work really, really well, and we have done this many times in the past.
Speaker 2:And the example I'm going to give you is a few years ago. We kicked off a January with an absolutely killer offer, and the offer was if a new customer signed up for six or 12 months, they got a free camera with their first box. And the way we positioned this was it was coming right after the pandemic and people were returning to work. So we said you're going back to work, but you can keep in touch with your dog from the office, because they could connect to the camera with an app on their phone and they could monitor their dog and even talk to their dog, and nothing like this had ever been done before in our market in the UK. So we had a really good feeling that this was going to absolutely blow up, and it did blow up. As soon as we got into January, we started promoting this and it exploded. We had new ads, new emails, new header on the website promoting this, a really strong team paired with the free camera, and it just exploded.
Speaker 2:Now it's not always possible to do this, because you have to plan ahead, and every offer you come up with isn't going to be a big hit. Sometimes you put a lot of effort into an offer and it comes out and it doesn't perform as well as you think it should perform. But when you get it right, like we did with that camera, it can be a complete game changer because you're getting more people signed up than you ever got signed up before. Your customers love it. They're sharing it with their friends. The acquisition cost is low. It's brilliant. So if you want to really kick things off this year, I would highly recommend getting very creative, thinking outside the box and coming up with an absolutely killer offer that will help your ads stand out on the news feed and make your customers essentially respond to them straight away, because they're so excited at the prospect of getting your offer. That's the first way you can kick off a new year in your subscription box and getting going again and driving a substantial amount of volume.
Speaker 2:But there's also another way that is much easier and quite simple. Actually, this may sound obvious, but a lot of people miss this and they don't actually do it, and it's just pretty easy. So what you want to do is if you can't get your ads to perform. If you've been struggling and you don't know what to do, you want to load up your ad account and you want to look back over the last few years and find something that was working really, really well in the past and you haven't done it for a while. Okay, so stick with me here. Right, you want to go into your ad account and you want to find an offer that performed really well. It may have performed really well in 2021 and, for whatever reason, you haven't rang it since.
Speaker 2:Go back and find that offer. When you find it, pull all your old ad creatives right, the same copy, the same images, the same videos, the same headlines all of that, okay. And then you want to set up a brand new Facebook ad campaign using those assets. So set it up from scratch. But pick engagement. Okay, go with an engagement campaign Now.
Speaker 2:We've covered this previously on the podcast, but it's the best way to run Facebook ads these days. This is how we get our best performance. So set up A engagement campaign using assets that worked in the past. If they're videos, put them in a separate campaign than images, because if you put them in the same campaign, facebook will prefer videos and it'll pump all your budget into the videos. So you want to separate them. Put the engagement campaign or campaigns on a regular old budget. Change the placements on the engagement campaigns to only the Facebook news feed because you don't want to pay for engagement in any other place, because it's essentially a waste of money with this strategy. Optimize them to have engagement on the actual ads. Okay, because you want to get many comments and likes on these.
Speaker 2:You can go with open-tagging for this. Now, like I said, keep the budget really low on the engagement campaigns. We spend like 10 to 20 per day on our engagement campaigns. Then set up a conversion campaign. Now your tagging will be either open-tagging or you may test your best performing look-alikes or some interest-based tagging whatever usually works for you. Then you're going to pull the engagement ads one by one using the post ID into your conversion campaign, okay, and then you leave your engagement campaign running beside your conversion campaign and what happens is the engagement campaign gets your conversion ads a lot of social proof, likes, comments, and it just helps the algorithm and also helps you bring down your customer acquisition cost.
Speaker 2:Then you'll set up your re-tagging. You can pull your re-tagging ads from the engagement campaign if you want. If you want to do it that way, that's been working really well lately or if you want, you can just set up normal re-tagging ads okay, and then you run the campaigns and what you're essentially doing is you're bringing back something that worked really well in the past and you're adapting it to the best way to run Facebook ads in 2024, in my opinion, and if it worked well in the past and it converted well back then, there's a high probability it's going to work again for you now, and this is just a really simple strategy to getting things moving for you in 2024 and getting your performance back up to a good level in your ad account. So this is what I would do. We do this many times. If we ever end up in a slump and we can't get something new, working ultra chicook-back to something that performed in the past, and I'll bring it back and you should do the exact same. It sounds simple, but often simple is the best way to do things in business. Keep things simple. Don't overcomplicate things. Keep it simple. If it worked well in the past, there's a high probability it's going to work well again in the future, so you can use your previous ads. You can even use your previous sales emails, the previous header you had on your website, all your previous assets that worked for you in the past. Bring them back and that should help you kick things on.
Speaker 2:Now you may be listening to this and you're like that sounds great, but I absolutely hate changing offer on my website because of the amount of work that's actually involved with it. And I agree with you, it can be quite time consuming to change your offer. But that's all part of the game. You have to be willing to change things. You have to have a system in place to actually be able to change your headers, your sales emails, your ads, all those assets, because it's required with this business model. There will be times when you will have to change things, so you need to have somebody there who can help you with that, whether it's a graphic designer yourself or somebody on your team who can actually help change and create those assets.
Speaker 2:And actually, a bit of good news for anybody who uses Sobly I actually reached out to the Sobly team about this just before Christmas and I explained to them look, we do a lot of price testing. We're changing our offers quite frequently. It takes up a lot of time doing this. Is there anything you can do to help? And there actually is something they can do to help, and they took all of our feedback on board and now they are developing a way to price test really quickly and to change your offer really quickly, and that's definitely a welcome addition because it's going to save so much time and hassle. So if you're on Sobly, definitely look out for that at some point in the future.
Speaker 2:Now we will be back next week at the exact same time. Can I ask you a massive favour? If you got value from this podcast or you've been listening for a while and you're enjoying the content, would you mind giving me a review on Apple, spotify or whatever you listen to your podcasts on? It just really helps me get this show out in front of more people. If you have a question you want answered on the show, as always, head over to SubscriptionBoxResourcescom, join the free Facebook group and post it there. Try till next week and have a great day.