In this episode of Subscription Box Answers, I'm covering the five biggest mistakes that subscription box owners make. After building my own subscription box business, assisting countless other owners, and spending years in the industry, I've observed these mistakes repeatedly.
These are some of the most common issues that are likely to hold you back.
I have made some of these mistakes myself at certain points, and sometimes it's hard to even realize that this is part of the problem holding you back.
Learn what these mistakes are, then do everything to avoid them, and watch how much more progress you make.
If you have a question you want answered on the show, make sure to visit www.SubscriptionBoxResources.com, join the free Facebook group, and post your question there.
In this episode of Subscription Box Answers, I'm covering the five biggest mistakes that subscription box owners make. After building my own subscription box business, assisting countless other owners, and spending years in the industry, I've observed these mistakes repeatedly.
These are some of the most common issues that are likely to hold you back.
I have made some of these mistakes myself at certain points, and sometimes it's hard to even realize that this is part of the problem holding you back.
Learn what these mistakes are, then do everything to avoid them, and watch how much more progress you make.
If you have a question you want answered on the show, make sure to visit www.SubscriptionBoxResources.com, join the free Facebook group, and 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. As always, I hope your day is going really well and I hope business is going really well for you. Now, on today's episode, I am putting together a list and I'm going to share it with you because I know for a fact it will bring a lot of value to everybody who listens to this. So I've been in the subscription box industry for a very long time, obviously with my own business, buster Box, since back in late 2015, early 2016. And we've grown that to a pretty decent size. But on top of that, I've also helped so many different subscription boxes in so many different niches that could be through my subscription box resources group, my subscription box experts program, one-on-one coaching, whatever.
Speaker 2:I've seen a lot and I've helped a lot of different subscription boxes and over the years, I keep seeing the same things over and over again, literally the exact same reasons why people are struggling and they're not actually growing and building that business that they really, really want to build. Now it doesn't matter what niche you're in. These are the common things that come up over and over again. Trust me, I've seen so many different boxes over the years. Now I'm going to share these with you for one reason, and one reason only I actually want to help you. Please don't take offense to anything I'm going to say here or anything like that. I'm sharing these five things because they come up so often and by listening to this podcast, one of these things, or maybe more than one, may resonate with you and you're like okay, I need to actually fix this. I need to change this, otherwise I'm just going to end up going around and around in circles for a very long time. So let's go through them, okay.
Speaker 2:Number one and these aren't in any particular order, they're just five big mistakes that a lot of subscription box owners make over and over again. Number one your website is not optimized for convergence. This could be down to poor images, confusing copy. It's not optimized for mobile, whatever. Whatever the reason is, it's just a poorly designed website and it does not look professional. And when cold strangers on the internet come over to your website, they have no desire to pull out their credit card and actually sign up, because they don't even know what you're selling. It doesn't look too good because your images are poor. They're confused, because the copy is like walls and walls of text, whatever. It's just putting people off.
Speaker 2:Now you should be aiming to have a minimum conversion rate of at least two percent. So the first thing you need to do is right you you may not even know if your website converts well or not because you haven't been tracking your conversion rate. So you can track that with google. It's a bit more difficult now with google analytics because of the new updates, but it can be done, and there are some other software as well out there that will help you track it. You need to track your conversion rate and see are you converting at 2%? If you're converting less than 2% and you have a really high customer acquisition cost, it's probably because your conversion rate isn't 2% and that means it's really your conversion rate isn't two percent and that means it's really really expensive to get people signed up because you have to send an enormous amount of traffic at your website to only get one sale. So yeah, that's a big, big issue that people have now. Back in the day when I was coming into industry, it was a lot harder to have a website that actually converted Well, because you may have had to hire a developer or a designer or whatever to help you actually achieve that, but these days some subscription box platforms are making it a lot easier to actually design professional looking websites. I've seen some newer subscription box companies use the subli website builder over the last few months and their websites look great and their founders told me it wasn't that difficult to actually design them. So yeah, definitely make sure your website converts and you're aiming for a 2% minimum conversion rate. Otherwise it's going to be really difficult and really expensive to grow your business.
Speaker 2:Number two another big mistake that people make and I touched on this a few weeks ago on a previous podcast episode no lead capture or follow-up marketing episode. No lead capture or follow-up marketing. They basically have nothing in place to capture leads and they have no follow-up marketing in place or very little follow-up marketing. They may capture leads on their checkout and they may send like one email a month or something. It's not enough. You have to have a system in place to capture leads every single day and you need to have a follow-up system in place to follow up with those leads, aka emailing them regularly, because not everybody is going to be ready to sign up to your box as soon as they come across your ad. At some point in the future, that person may become a great customer, but they're just not ready to sign up now and if you don't have a follow-up system in place to capture the lead and follow up with them, well then you're letting that potential customer just fly off into the sunset. So, yeah, you have to do follow-up marketing and you have to find a way to capture as many leads as possible. We use a sign-up flow in buster box to achieve this and this helps us bring down our customer acquisition costs and drive up the amount of new subscribers we get every single day. It makes a big difference.
Speaker 2:Number three no marketing at all, or very little marketing. Number four If you don't learn marketing, okay, you will struggle to get anywhere with your subscription box business, or any business for that matter. Now you may be thinking, okay, I can outsource my marketing and I can hire somebody to do this for me. That is true, but that is not cheap. When you're getting started in your business, you may not have the revenue to actually go out and hire a good agency who can come in and actually help you grow your business. And a good agency will actually be able to help you with your website design. They'll help you with your ad, creative and copy. They'll help you with your strategy. They'll help you with your email marketing. They'll put all of them pieces together because they're all essential if you want to grow a successful subscription box business. You have to have all of them firing and to get somebody to actually do all of those things and to monitor them and to come up with new strategies and to test new ads and to come up with new emails. It won't be cheap to get somebody good. Now you can hire a cheap agency because everybody these days thinks they know marketing and they're like oh, you can just trope a few posts on social media and boost a few posts and that's marketing, not true? That will not get you anywhere and you'll actually end up lighting money on fire.
Speaker 2:When you do hire a agency, it's really important that you do your due diligence and make sure you're hiring a good company and that they actually have experience growing a subscription or e-commerce company and they actually have real case studies where you can reach out to previous companies and check their work. And trust me, to get an agency like this will not be cheap. So at the start, it's usually a very good idea to learn marketing. Now you don't need to be a world-renowned expert at marketing, but you do need to know some of the stuff so you can actually grow your business. And ideally, what you want to do is, if you're not a big fan of marketing, you want to learn some of the stuff at the start and get the ball rolling and grow your revenue and then, when you have enough revenue, you can then transition over to an agency who can help you and grow further and who can really push the business on. That is a strategy that a lot of people do. Other people take their marketing very seriously and they do everything in-house and they may get some help with graphic design and stuff like that, but they run everything themselves. That's exactly what we do in BusterBox.
Speaker 2:You have to take your marketing really, really seriously, because if you don't take your marketing seriously, you won't be able to sign up enough customers and you'll end up going around in circles for a very long time. Now, if you're one of these people who may have dipped your toe into marketing at some point and you're like, oh, that doesn't work, and now you just spend hours and hours every week posting on social media, thinking that will grow your business, I hate to break it to you, but it's simply not true. The organic reach on social media is basically non-existent these days and it's highly unlikely to drive any kind of meaningful growth. If that is your strategy for growing, you're going with a hope strategy. You're hoping enough people see your stuff and you're hoping they sign up to your box. That is not a good strategy.
Speaker 2:To grow a business, you need to have a profitable, scalable and repeatable way of getting subscribers. When you have that in place, then you have a real company and things will really change for you, because you can build something that is very, very valuable and gives you a great life. Now, when it comes to marketing, there's so many different ways you can do this, and you need to at least learn how to deliver repeatable customers on one channel, okay, and that could be facebook, google, influencers, affiliates, tiktok, direct mail, whatever. There are so many different options out there, but study them and find one that actually works for your business and then double down on it. Number four doesn't bother to learn any metrics.
Speaker 2:Look, when it comes to a subscription box, right, it's a lot more than just putting things in a box and sending it out to people, and I think everybody understands that, but you need to act like a SaaS founder. Okay, saas software as a service. They obviously sell software through subscription. Well, we need to think and act like those founders, because even though we're not selling software as a subscription, we're selling our box as a subscription, and if you want to grow a profitable and sustainable business, you have to grow a profitable and sustainable business. You have to have a firm understanding of subscription metrics and, in my experience, saas founders usually do have a firm understanding of subscription metrics, where subscription box founders don't always take the time to learn some of this stuff. Founders don't always take the time to learn some of this stuff. Now, when it comes to metrics, I highly recommend signing up for something like chart mogul, bear metrics, sublitics, profit. Well, whatever plugs into your subscription box platform, because you will be able to see your metrics.
Speaker 2:Now you don't need to be like a world-class expert with metrics, but you do need to have a firm understanding of them. You do need to know what's actually going on, and a common issue that I see time and time again is a founder may not even know what their lifetime value is, and if you don't know what your lifetime value is, then you don't even know what you can spend to acquire a customer. And if you don't know what you can spend to acquire a customer, and if you don't know what you can spend to acquire a customer, how can you ever grow? You can't, as you'll either spend too much and get in financial trouble or not spend enough and spend years going around in circles. So yeah, take your metrics seriously. Learn about payback periods, customer lifetime value, average revenue per user, customer acquisition cost, all that kind of stuff, because that's what's going to help you understand how profitable your business can actually be and what is the current health of your subscription box.
Speaker 2:Number five you do everything yourself and don't value your time. So you might do your customer service, you might pack your boxes, you're posting for hours on social media every week. You're sourcing all the products. You're basically doing everything yourself. Now, I know when you're setting up a company at the start right, you do need to make sacrifices, and you may not have the revenue to hire anybody to help, and you may not have friends or family who are willing to help at a particular time. So you may have to go above and beyond, but the problem is doing it it forever, because if you're doing all those things, there's no time left for actually growing the business and you're just exhausted from doing all of this stuff, even though you aren't acquiring enough customers or growing. You're spending all your time working in the business and you've no time left to work on the business. This is a big mistake that people make and my advice would be when you start growing and you can see some kind of positive traction, you need to get some help. You know, the biggest time suck in my experience when it comes to a subscription box is customer service and packing your own boxes.
Speaker 2:Now, again, at the start, I think it's really valuable and really important for the founder to do the customer service, because you're able to actually see what your customers think of your product, you're able to see the kind of issues that come up, you're able to build rapport with your customers all that stuff And're able to build rapport with your customers all that stuff and you learn really valuable information about your company. But during those early days, you should be taking note of the issues that repeatedly come in and you should be setting up processes to solve all of those issues and you should be recording those processes and the aim of the game is. Then you can go out and you can hire somebody and you have all the training material prepared already and then you can pass the customer service over to somebody else and then, as the company hopefully keeps growing and you have to hire more customer service agents, you have all the training there and obviously you can add to it as time goes on. Now you're still going to keep in touch with customer service, you're still going to have a meeting at least once a week around customer service tickets and, like you're never going to turn your back on customer service altogether. But you do want to get out of actually doing all the tickets yourself. If you're running your business for a long time and you're still doing the customer service tickets, I highly recommend changing that now.
Speaker 2:As far as packing boxes, we had a episode a few weeks ago about the benefits of using a fulfillment center. I definitely recommend checking that out because a fulfillment center will save you so much time. You should build it into your margin and just go with a fulfillment center. That's my advice. We packed our own boxes in a warehouse. We had a big warehouse. We hired a lot of staff. They were packing boxes. We've since gone the fulfillment center route and, yeah, there's been no comparison at all. It saves us so much hassle and so much time and we can then put that time back into growing our business and not wasting crazy amounts of time managing staff or packing boxes.
Speaker 2:Now, I hope you enjoyed this episode.
Speaker 2:If you are struggling in your subscription box, it's probably because of one of these reasons.
Speaker 2:I have seen it so often in this industry. It literally doesn't matter what the niche is. If somebody's struggling, it's usually because of one of these five reasons. So, listen closely, if you're not where you want to be, and see if any of this stuff resonate with you. I've put this out because I actually want to help people push forward with their subscription box. I want to help you take your business to the next level. So, yeah, listen closely and if some of this stuff resonates with you, try to make changes. I have so much more content on most of this stuff on this podcast, on my blog, in my subscription box blueprint book or in the subscription box resources group. We cover a lot of this stuff too, so thanks very much for tuning in. We will be back next week at the exact same time and, as always, if you have a question you want answered on the show, head over to SubscriptionBoxResourcescom and join the free Facebook group and post it there. Thanks very much and see you next week. Bye, bye.