On This Episode Of Subscription Box Answers, I am discussing how important follow-up marketing is. If you want to grow a successful subscription box, you need to ensure you do this frequently and have a system in place for it.
Lead capture and following up with prospects is essential if you want to drive a lot of new subscribers and keep your CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) under control. One of the biggest mistakes struggling subscription box owners make is they have no way to capture leads and they do little to no follow-up. This leaves them in a situation where it is really difficult and expensive to grow their box.
When you do follow up correctly, you are giving yourself multiple opportunities to sell to somebody. This is really important because not everybody will be ready to sign up for your box straight away. Listen to this podcast as I discuss all the different ways you can approach this correctly.
If you have a question you want answered on the podcast, make sure you head over to www.SubscriptionBoxResources.com, join the free Facebook group, and post it there.
On This Episode Of Subscription Box Answers, I am discussing how important follow-up marketing is. If you want to grow a successful subscription box, you need to ensure you do this frequently and have a system in place for it.
Lead capture and following up with prospects is essential if you want to drive a lot of new subscribers and keep your CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) under control. One of the biggest mistakes struggling subscription box owners make is they have no way to capture leads and they do little to no follow-up. This leaves them in a situation where it is really difficult and expensive to grow their box.
When you do follow up correctly, you are giving yourself multiple opportunities to sell to somebody. This is really important because not everybody will be ready to sign up for your box straight away. Listen to this podcast as I discuss all the different ways you can approach this correctly.
If you have a question you want answered on the podcast, make sure you 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 questions, you ask the questions, 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. I hope you're having a great day. On today's episode, we are chatting about follow-up marketing and I'm going to explain why it's so important for your subscription box business. If you're not doing follow-up marketing, you're basically making it impossible for you to succeed. You're making the mathematics and the economics so much more difficult to work in your favor. Now, I'm not going to say you're making it 100% impossible, because there's always exceptions, but you're making things so much more difficult when they don't need to be that hard.
Speaker 2:Now, if you don't know what follow-up marketing is, let me explain. This is marketing where you essentially follow up with your prospects. This could be through email, it could be through SMS, it could be through direct mail, it could be Facebook messenger blasts, it could be Facebook ad retargeting could be any of those things, and you're giving yourself multiple opportunities to sell to your leads. Now, the reason why follow-up marketing is so important is people are busy. They have a million different things going on, and signing up to a subscription box is probably not at the top of their list. So you need to give yourself multiple opportunities to sell to these people for free or for a really cheap price, because when somebody comes across your ad the first time, there's a high probability they will not be ready to buy on the spot. And if you have no follow-up marketing in place, you're basically lighting money on fire, because you're showing ads to people and they're coming over to your website and they're just not ready to buy and then they disappear into thin air and you may never hear from them ever again, even though at some point in the future there is a likelihood that person may have become a customer when the time was right. Now ad prices are getting more and more expensive all the time, so if you don't have follow-up marketing in place, it's getting more and more difficult to get the numbers to work in your favor.
Speaker 2:So, number one right to do follow-up marketing, you actually have to collect leads on your website. The amount of subscription boxes out there that don't even have a system in place to collect leads is absolutely crazy. They're trying to sell a high enough priced subscription to cold traffic on facebook with no way of collecting leads, so they're essentially running ads. People are seeing the ads, they're coming over to the website. They're not buying. Well, not enough of them are buying anyway and the customer acquisition cost is really high because of this and the volume of new subscribers is really low, and these people are just vanishing into thin air then and there's no way to follow up with them at all. So the first thing you need to do is actually collect leads.
Speaker 2:Now, for us, we have a sign up flow built into our website where we collect an enormous amount of leads. If you go over to BusterBoxcom, you'll see what this sign up flow is. You just basically click the option to go to checkout and you'll be brought to a flow where you put in information about your dog and then we collect your email. Now, like I said, this collects an enormous amount of emails for us, and then we follow up with these leads pretty regularly and a high percentage of them eventually turn into subscribers, and the whole process keeps our customer acquisition costs low and keeps a large amount of people signing up regularly. Now I highly recommend implementing a sign-up flow on your subscription box website.
Speaker 2:It doesn't really matter what subscription box you have. There's always a flow that you can install which will help you serve your customers better. You can install which will help you serve your customers better, because not only is a flow used as a lead collection point. It's also used as a way of collecting valuable data from your subscribers so you can serve them better. For us, we collect information about the dog, so we send out a box which is actually suitable for each breed. The other great thing about using a sign-up flow to collect leads is the lead quality is usually really high because those leads have purchase intent. They actually came over to your website with the intention of signing up to your box. So in my experience, they may not sign up immediately, but with enough follow-up, a large percentage of them will turn into subscribers at some point.
Speaker 2:Now compare that to, say, competition leads. There's absolutely no comparison whatsoever, because competition leads are absolutely terrible. They're really really low quality leads because everybody wants to enter a competition, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they want to sign up to your box. Now, competitions can work for lead generation, but in my experience, it's usually a volume game where you need to generate a massive influx of entries if you expect to get any kind of movement whatsoever, because the lead quality is typically poor. Now, it's poor, but it's also cheap, whereas sign up flow leads are not cheap leads. They're usually a bit more expensive, but I don't really care about that. I don't mind paying more for a lead if the quality is actually higher and they're going to turn into a customer at some point. Cheap is not always better. Quality is Now. Another way to collect leads would be lead magnets, and they can be okay, but honestly, in my experience, when it comes to lead quality, sewing up flow leads are the best by a mile, so you're better off sticking to the sewing up flow. Now, if you don't know how to install the sewing up flow, I recommend heading over to getformifycom and using that to build your sewing up flow and check if it's compatible with your subscription box platform I think it's nearly compatible with everything. Now and use it to build a simple sewing up flow, install it into your website and start collecting leads.
Speaker 2:Now, when you have your sewing up flow installed, how many emails should you send? Because there's a massive false assumption when it comes to email marketing. I speak to some people and their ad performance is quite poor and they're struggling to grow and like what are you doing with email marketing? Are you sending many emails? You seem to be collecting a decent amount of leads, so you're probably sending quite a few emails and they're like no, I only send an email once a month. Now, that is simply not enough. You should have a abandoned cart sequence set up which can be spread out over four days and then, if somebody doesn't convert, you move them into a sales list and you send regular sales emails to them every week. That's what we do. We email on a Monday, a Wednesday and a Friday, with resends going Tuesday, thursday and Saturday to the people that never opened. This works really well for us. Now, I'm not saying you should send that many emails, but I'm definitely saying, if you're only sending a few sporadic emails here and there, you need to step it up and you need to send regular emails every single week. We have never got one email from somebody saying you email too regularly. If somebody thinks we're emailing too regularly and they're not happy about it, they can unsubscribe down the bottom of the email and, honestly, that's for the best, because we don't want people on our list who are never going to buy. There's absolutely no point. All that that is doing is hurting our open rates and it's increasing our cost because our email marketing platform is more expensive, depending on how many leads we have. Anyway, the point of this is send more emails. It can only be a good thing. It will increase the number of subscribers you're getting signed up and it will lower your customer acquisition cost when you do it correctly.
Speaker 2:The next kind of follow-up marketing SMS. Sms is really, really powerful. It has a really really high open rate nearly 100%. Now it can be a really good idea to find a place on your website to collect mobile numbers. It can be done in your sign-up flow. It could be done through a pop-up. Now for us use sms marketing only once a month, because people do tend to get annoyed if you're literally blasting their phone with text messages. It's not a good idea. Also, it can be quite expensive because you actually have to pay to send out these text messages where, obviously, email is completely free. So we only send a sms to cancelled subscribers every payday, which is at the end of each month, and, yeah, we follow up with them. Using sms marketing, we come up with a really good offer and we always get a large amount of them back. Now we also use SMS through Subli. Subli automations are really really powerful. We use them to follow up with our existing subscribers to sell them more stuff. So it's really cool using these automations because you can set it up where it's like if somebody makes a certain number of payments, then an SMS can go to them. So we know if somebody makes a certain number of payments, then an SMS can go to them. So we know if somebody makes a certain number of payments, they're a high quality customer and they're likely to buy more dog products from us. So yeah, when it comes to follow-up marketing, it's not only important to follow up with new leads, it's also important to follow up with your existing customers, because there's probably a high percentage of them who'll actually buy more stuff from you.
Speaker 2:The next form of follow-up marketing retargeting. Facebook ad retargeting. That's a form of following up with people and it's a lot cheaper compared to trying to reach new prospects with cold ads. So, when it comes to Facebook ad retargeting, let's break it down in the simplest way possible. When it comes to audiences, you should be targeting everybody who was on your website in the last 30 days and never purchased from you. You should also be targeting everybody who was on your Facebook and Instagram page in the last 30 days and never purchased from you. You should also be targeting everybody who interacted with one of your ads in the last 30 days and never purchased from you. You should also be targeting everybody who interacted with one of your ads in the last 30 days and who never purchased from you. And you should also target everybody who watched one of your videos in the last 30 days and never purchased from you. You should dump them all into a big audience.
Speaker 2:When it comes to your ads and your ad copy, you should create your ads around the biggest objections which are probably stopping people from signing up. I'll give you an example For us. They may be concerned that the dog toys are rubbish and they'll break really quickly. So an ad we have used in the past would be a slideshow showing all the different toys that we actually offer, so they can see they're actually high quality toys and that gets a lot of people over the line. Another ad which we've used in the past is centered around their treats, because they may not sign up because they're worried about the treat quality. So again, it will be a slideshow showing all the high quality treats that we have supplied over the last few months. There are two objections and we answer them through Facebook retargeting ads.
Speaker 2:When we follow up with prospects who never signed up initially. It works really really well. The next way you can follow up with somebody direct mail Now. The next way you can follow up with somebody direct mail Now. We have done this a few times with cancelled subscribers. We will send out a postcard to their house with a really really good offer. It gets a lot of people to respond. You can actually put a QR code on the postcard and they can just scan it with their phone. On the postcard, and they can just scan it with their phone, it will bring them to a special website where they can sign up and activate a special offer to come back. We usually go with a free box offer when we're doing this, because we know it's a high converting offer and we only send the direct mail to high quality customers who have previously had a high lifetime value with the company. So we know it's okay to give them a free box because they'll probably come back and they're more than likely going to stay signed up for a long time again. So yeah, direct mail can work really well when it comes to following up with cancelled subscribers. Now, cold subscribers and direct mail doesn't seem to work too well and it seems to be pretty expensive. But we need to experiment a bit more with that because we haven't done much.
Speaker 2:But just from what I've heard from other subscription box companies, another way to follow up with leads is through Facebook messenger. Now, a few years ago, we were doing this and we got thousands of subscribers signed up through facebook messenger with messenger blasts and it was really really cheap. We were getting something like a six euro cac. Now this was a good few years ago and and we stopped because the rules changed and they kept changing and it became really confusing about when you could follow up and why you could follow up, and I didn't want to risk making a mistake and getting a rad account banned, so we stopped. But we must check it out again in the future because it was really really powerful. It out again in the future because it was really really powerful and, like sms marketing, the open rates are really really high. When it comes to facebook messenger, you're getting like nearly 100 opens. So, yeah, really powerful channel. I definitely recommend checking it out. But, yeah, be prepared because the rules used to change all of the time and you really had to stay on top of them. What was okay a week ago could change and it wasn't okay. And if you weren't on top of that and you made a mistake, your ad account could be banned. So yeah, be careful if you do go down that path.
Speaker 2:So hope you enjoyed this episode and I hope I've got across how important follow-up marketing is and if you're not doing it, you're making things really, really difficult on yourself. It doesn't need to be that hard. People are not always ready to sign up straight away and it's perfectly normal in business to have systems in place to follow up with your leads, because at some point they are probably going to be ready and they will sign up to your box because they've expressed interest. We will be back next week at the exact same time. 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. Thanks very much and I'll chat to you next week. Bye.