Welcome back to another episode of the Subscription Box Answers podcast! Following up on last week's episode, we're diving into answering questions sent in about follow-up marketing.
This episode will help any subscription box owner determined to take their marketing to another level in 2024 and build a highly successful business.
If you have a question you want answered on the episode, make sure you head over to www.subscriptionboxresources.com and join the free Facebook group to post your question there.
Welcome back to another episode of the Subscription Box Answers podcast! Following up on last week's episode, we're diving into answering questions sent in about follow-up marketing.
This episode will help any subscription box owner determined to take their marketing to another level in 2024 and build a highly successful business.
If you have a question you want answered on the episode, make sure you head over to www.subscriptionboxresources.com and join the free Facebook group to post your question 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 your day is going really well. On today's episode, we're following up on last week's episode and I'm answering some questions that came in Now. If you never listened to last week's episode, I highly recommend checking it out, because I'm discussing follow-up marketing and I give some tips about how to do it correctly. Now. Follow-up marketing is absolutely essential if you want to grow your subscription box company, or any company for that matter. If you don't do it, or you don't do it enough, it's highly likely you're going to have a really high customer acquisition cost and it's going to be really difficult to grow your company. So definitely check that out. Now let's jump in to the five questions.
Speaker 2:Question number one when it comes to email marketing, should you focus more on text-based emails or should you focus more on image-based emails? Great question, both work and we rotate between both of them in BusterBox. The general opinion these days is if you go heavy on images, your email is more likely to be flagged by spam, but I have never really noticed this. We do a lot of image-based emails and they perform really really well. If you don't have immediate access to a graphic designer, it may be better to focus on text at the start. Obviously, you need to be decent at writing copy and selling your box and your offer to actually make it work, but text can work really well. We get a lot of people signed up from text-based emails as well. Now, if you don't have access to a graphic designer, I highly recommend working with one to help you with your design, because a good one will be able to help you take your emails to another level, and that will make a massive difference to your sales. But yeah, test both of them. Rotate between both of them, because both of them can work really well. Question two how often should you switch your offer in follow-up? The simplest way to look at this is you should switch your offer when your existing offer stops selling. Okay. Now, obviously, if you're just hammering your list over and over again with the same offer, it will get boring really quickly. So it's important you find different marketing angles to present your offer. But it can definitely help you to switch things up. If you're on the BusterBox list, you will see we have a lot of different angles and offers that we switch between, and this definitely helps to keep things fresh. I would recommend spending some time testing different offers and marketing angles, and then you can switch between them going forward to keep things interesting for your leads.
Speaker 2:Question number three Facebook messenger blasts. This is my first time hearing about this. Can you explain them in more detail? How do they work? No problem, okay.
Speaker 2:So back in the day before chatbots, we used to send out an engagement post on Facebook and the copy in the engagement post would say something like hey, we're running our best ever offer. Comment yes below if you want to find out what it is. Now the image on the post will be a collage of really happy dogs and packed booster boxes. We will then boost this post and we will get a lot of people commenting yes because they have dogs and they want to find out what this offer is. So we would then talk to each person who replied yes directly through Messenger. We would try to build some rapport, ask about their dog and then we would try to get them signed up to a BusterBox subscription. Now, this was obviously very time consuming, but it worked great and it helped us get our first few thousand subscribers for a very cheap price. The CAC was only something like six euro.
Speaker 2:Back then, facebook were heavily promoting Messenger as a great way for brands to connect with customers, and they were very lax about what was allowed and what wasn't allowed. Nowadays it's completely different, because they changed the rules so many times. But back then, after you spoke to somebody on messenger, they were automatically added to your messenger leads and obviously, if you are speaking to a lot of people every single day, it won't take long until you get to the point where you have thousands and thousands of messenger leads, which we had. When you build up these leads, you could then send a blast to all of them at the same time, basically following up with them through messenger with a offer. Now the open rates on messenger are pretty much 100, so this was really, really powerful and you could get a lot of people signed up. So we were regularly doing messenger blasts and we were getting great movement from it.
Speaker 2:Then, eventually, facebook changed the rules and it was kind of iffy what you were allowed to do and what you weren't allowed to do. Then they changed them again and again and again. Eventually it got to the point where it was pretty confusing about what you were allowed to do and what you weren't allowed to do, and if you made a mistake, they would pretty much shut your ad account down, so it became kind of iffy. Anyway, we stopped doing this strategy because it was just so annoying trying to stay on top of what was allowed and what wasn't allowed. Now I know some brands still use messenger and there are still variations of this strategy going, probably involving chatbots. So if you are interested in doing it, I highly recommend Googling and looking for official Facebook pages which explain what the messenger rules are these days and make sure you follow them so you don't put your account at risk. I haven't done this for a long time, so I don't even know what's allowed or what isn't allowed anymore.
Speaker 2:Question 4. What do you use to send SMS? We use TextMarketer and Twilio to send text messages. Textmarketer is a UK company, so I'm not 100% sure if it works in the US. It probably does Check that out, though, as they make it really easy to send messages. But, as I said before, be careful. Don't be blasting people around the clock. They will get very angry and sms is expensive. So if you make some mistakes and your offer doesn't convert well, it can get expensive really, really quickly. So always make sure you're measuring your roi and make sure what you're doing actually makes financial sense. But yeah, sm SMS is a really powerful marketing channel when used correctly.
Speaker 2:Question number five can you talk a bit about Subway's automation feature that you mentioned? Yeah, sure, no problem. So Subway's automation feature allows you to automate things and you can get really creative with this. Now, in the context of follow-up, I was speaking about using it to follow up with your existing subscribers to make more money from them. I'll give you a example. Say, if you identify that if a subscriber makes more than, say, three payments, they're a really good subscriber and they're likely to buy more products from you, well then you can use the automations to reach out to everybody as soon as they make three payments and give them the opportunity to buy more products, upgrade their subscription, add something to their box. Now you can get creative and you can do this again at, say, six payments, 12 payments, 14 payments. Whatever way you want to do it, they just make it really easy to follow up with your existing customers and make more money. And if you set them up correctly, that will compound over time and you actually can end up making a lot of extra money that you normally wouldn't make.
Speaker 2:Now that's obviously not the only thing you can do with these automations. You can get really creative with them and you can use them to help you decrease churn, help you tackle failed payments, help you follow up with people that have cancelled and try to win them back. There's so many different things you can use them for to win them back. There's so many different things you can use them for, and at some point in the future I'll probably record an episode dedicated entirely to them. Now we'll be back next week at the exact same time. I hope you enjoyed this episode and can I ask you a massive favor? If you've been listening for a while and you've got value from this show, would you mind giving me a review on apple or spotify or wherever you listen to this podcast? It just helps me get the show out to 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 your question there. I'll chat to you next week. Have a great day.