Subscription Box Answers

Win Back Your Subscribers This Q4 with These Creative Facebook Ad Strategies!

• Liam Brennan

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On this episode of Subscription Box Answers, I explain an easy way to win back canceled subscribers using Facebook ads.

Allocating part of your marketing budget to win-backs can be a smart strategy, especially when you focus on your best customers.

These customers have already shown they are a good fit for your business, even if they canceled for various reasons.

People's circumstances change all the time, and they may be ready to sign back up now.

It's important to have a process for targeting and winning them back, especially around this time of year when competition can be fierce.

You can set up this strategy in just a few minutes, and it should be a big help.

If you have a question you'd like answered on the show, head over to www.SubscriptionBoxResources.com, join the free Facebook group, and post your question there.

Speaker 1:

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 really good day and I hope Q4 is going really well for you so far. On today's episode, we are continuing with the Q4 chat. We are focusing again on marketing and I'm trying my best to help you. The last few episodes you'll see. It's all about Q4, it's all about marketing. It's all about getting more people signed up. It's all about q4. It's all about marketing. It's all about getting more people signed up. It's all about making more money, and that's what we're going to continue with today.

Speaker 2:

Okay, so here's something you can do which is really easy to set up and will help you win back as many of your previous customers as possible. We all know, when it comes to any kind of subscription business whether it's a subscription box, a membership, a SaaS company, whatever there will always be cancellations. That's just part of the game when you're running a subscription business. When somebody cancels, though, it doesn't mean your relationship with them is completely over. There's a good possibility that at some point in the future, you will be able to win them back and get them to reactivate their subscription. They may have cancelled due to a variety of reasons. They may have been short on money, too much products, they're going away on holidays or changing job, whatever. Circumstances change all the time, though, and at some point in the future there's a good chance you will be able to win them back, and we focus a lot of our time and energy in BusterBox on win backs, because the longer you're running your subscription box business, the more customer data you're building up. All the time you've new people coming in, you've people cancelling. You've new people coming in, you've people cancelling. You've new people coming in, you've people cancelling. This is evolving all the time, and over a certain period of time, you can end up with a pretty big list of cancelled customers who you can target and try to win back.

Speaker 2:

Now, a very effective way of winning back cancelled customers is through Facebook ads, by targeting them and basically putting a really good offer in front of them and asking them to come back. Now, there's many different ways of doing reactivations, but on this episode, we're going to focus exclusively on Facebook ads. So this is how you set this up. The first thing you want to do is create a custom audience of your cancelled subscribers. Now here's a pro tip when we're doing this, we only create a custom audience of everybody who cancelled but made at. The reason we do this is we don't want to be reactivating people who only come in and take a couple of boxes and cancel, or take the offer and cancel, because we don't make any money off these people. We're a subscription business and for our business to work and for us to actually be profitable we have to keep people signed up for a decent amount of time. So we only want to target the good quality customers. So we make a customer audience of everybody who's canceled but made at least six payments. Then we set up a simple retargeting campaign. We target this audience and that's it A purchase retargeting campaign. We target this audience and that's it A purchase retargeting campaign, a manual setup, the old school way of doing it, and we just hone in on that audience. Now, if you're only a new enough business, this may not work as well for you, but you should still test it. If you only have a very small amount of people to target, obviously you're going to burn through that list pretty quickly, but you should still give this a go, do it on a small budget. So we have this retargeting campaign running and we've a few different ads in the campaign and I'm going to go through them right now.

Speaker 2:

Okay, let's read out the copy. Dear human, I'm this close to chewing your slippers. Seriously, it's me, your dog. Remember Buster Box? Of course you do. It was the best thing in my life Toys, treats and pure excitement every month. Now it's just well me staring at you while you watch TV. But here's the deal If you sign me back up. But here's the deal If you sign me back up, not only do I get all the amazing stuff again, but I also get a free bed £60 value Way more than your slippers are worth, by the way. So what are we waiting for? Let's bring back the fun before I start plotting a slipper chewathon. You're extremely under entertained. Dog ps. Seriously, human time is running out.

Speaker 2:

So it's a funny enough ad coming at them from the dog's perspective, grabs attention, tries to make them feel a bit guilty about cancelling the box and then hits them with a really strong offer. Now, obviously, if you don't have a dog subscription box, you can't do it from the perspective of the dog. But that doesn't really matter. Just get creative and it can still work really well for you. And then we have a image and the image says your dog misses this. Join today and get a free luxurious dog bed. There's a picture of a dog in the bed and a packed box and the headline is come back and get a free bed worth 60 pounds. Now we're using the same copy on every single ad, but we do have different images. The next image is an orange background and it says we miss you. Come back and get a free luxurious dog bed. And there's a picture of the dog in the bed and a packed box. And then the final image for this particular offer is a purple background and it just says come back and get a free luxurious dog bed, packed box and dog in a bed. And all of those images are different, with different dogs and different boxes. You should definitely do this and I'll explain to you why. Why you should definitely do it.

Speaker 2:

Around this time of year, it obviously gets more competitive. Around this time of year it can get more expensive to acquire customers, even though consumers are buying more things. It's a lot more competitive. You already have a list of people who you know are good quality customers. You know that these people have a record of paying customers your company for a decent number of months. You also know that these people are going to be buying things on the run up to Christmas, so you may as well go out and ensure they're buying things from your company and giving you money. It's much smarter to do this compared to going out and trying to acquire completely new customers. Those new customers, you don't know how they'll behave when they sign up to your box. They may be freebie hunters and they run up to Christmas. They may only want a couple of boxes for Christmas. You don't know how they're going to behave Now. Obviously, it is important to go out and acquire new customers, but it makes a lot of sense to also advertise to people who you know are good quality. They've already qualified themselves to your company because they've made a number of payments to your business in the past. So you may as well try to win them back.

Speaker 2:

Now, why does this work well? It works well because the ads are completely different. They're targeting those people, they're acknowledging that they used to be signed up, and then you're hitting them with a really good offer to try to win them back. The offer to try to win them back. If your ads look the exact same as your cold traffic ads, this will not work as well. It works well for us because it clearly says we miss, you come back and we acknowledge, obviously, that they were signed up previously in the past. Then obviously you have to have a really good offer. If you don't have a really good offer, you won't win them back.

Speaker 2:

So, yeah, this is a little tip that you can set up pretty much immediately. It's not difficult to set this up and it should work really well for you. We're doing this all the time. That was just one example that I shared with you for our bed offer. We've done this for other offers in the past as well, and we're constantly switching offer and targeting people who have cancelled. It works great. So, yeah, definitely give it a go.

Speaker 2:

Now. A big question I get all the time when I start talking about different offers and things like that and I think I touched on this last week, but I'll cover it again very briefly is how do we set this up? We're on Subly and they make running different offers really really easy because you can use different plans which will help you identify the offer. You can use different landing pages and you can also use their tag system to ensure you know what offer every customer signs up to, because the last thing you want happening is people signing up and you don't have a clear what offer they signed up on and they end up getting the wrong stuff. That will make them really angry. But yeah, I hope you found this episode helpful. We'll be back next week at the exact same time as always. If you have a question you want answered on the show, make sure you head over to subscriptionboxresourcescom, join the free facebook group and post your question there. Thanks very much and have a great day.