Subscription Box Answers

5 easy things you can sell to make more money this Q4

• Liam Brennan

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On today's episode, I'm sharing 5 easy things you can sell to make more money this Q4. It’s obviously very important to focus on growing your subscriber base over these busy months, but there are also big opportunities to make extra money if you know what you're doing.

The first Christmas we had was an eye-opening realization—we discovered our customers were happy to spend a lot more money with us on other products in the run-up to Christmas. Take a listen to this episode, and I’ll share some other simple things you can sell to make more money.

If you have a question you want answered on the show, make sure you 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 box answers. I hope you're having a really good day. Today we will continue talking about Q4 and I'm going to share some more advice to help you. Today I'm going to share five easy things you can sell to drive up revenue this Q4. We're not talking about subscriptions. We're talking about other products you can sell to your subscribers and to new customers New once-off products that can make you a lot of extra money.

Speaker 2:

So I've told this story before. I think it was on this podcast, but I'll share it again briefly. Back when we first launched BusterBox the first year that we were full-time in the business as in we had left our jobs, we were working in our first office and we were all in on this business. We had no other income that first year was eye-opening for us because we discovered that our customers would spend a lot of money on other products. So coming up to Christmas that year, things were going well and we were growing, but we were still a pretty small company and we weren't getting paid that well and obviously around Christmas time you have a lot of things you need to pay for it's an expensive time of year and we could see on the path we were going we simply would not be able to take much of a pay rise. The revenue simply wasn't there from our subscribers yet.

Speaker 2:

So we brainstormed and we came up with a solution. We decided we were going to sell really expensive gift hampers and one-time christmas boxes to our subscribers and to new customers. So we put together these expensive gift baskets, we put together expensive one-time boxes and we sent out some emails and we ran some ads and we were completely blown away because we made an extra. I think it was 20,000 in revenue and that was a lot of money back then that we were only a new enough company and that revenue allowed us to all get paid a pretty decent bonus and it saved Christmas really, when you think about it. And obviously we took those learnings and as the years have gone on, we've done more and more revenue and we've really honed in on these gift baskets and one-time christmas boxes. We're actually selling them already on our website. We have a new standalone store on busterpetscom it's called and we're already selling a lot of stuff on that and we actually started selling our Christmas stuff before Halloween this year, we gave people the opportunity to pre-purchase some of these boxes and some of these gift hampers because they can sell out quickly and it's been going pretty well.

Speaker 2:

So yeah, on today's episode, I'm going to share five easy things you can sell to drive up revenue this Q4. Number one a one-time Christmas box. What was really eye-opening to us was we have a lot of people who are signed up for a long time and they're getting our toys and treats delivered to their dog every single month and part of their subscription will include some kind of Christmas box. A lot of these people buy our more expensive Christmas box as well because they like to have something extra for their dog under the tree, and that completely blew me away. And it's not only in our niche where this happens. This happens all the time in different subscription box niches. So my advice would be create a one-time Christmas box and make it more expensive than your subscription. Market it as a limited edition Christmas box and you will be shocked by how many of your existing customers and how many people who hang out on your email list go over and buy this box. It's a really easy thing to sell around this time of year.

Speaker 2:

Number two, and this is my favorite by a mile and I've already briefly mentioned it Expensive gift baskets. So we will have different versions of these gift baskets and they'll be a lot more expensive than our box. We will sell these for like 150 euro 180 euro sometimes and it'll be a gift basket packed with toys and treats. We'll have a really big one that will include a free dog bed. We'll have a medium one and we'll have a small one. People go crazy for these and what we learned a long time ago is, if you package something in a gift basket compared to a box, you can usually charge a good bit more money for it because it drives up to perceived value. Now it will obviously have extra products in it and stuff, but yeah, it's a really good way of driving up your revenue throughout Q4. Now the great thing about this is, if you're selling these gift baskets for a few hundred dollars, you don't even need to sell a lot of them for it to have a big impact on your revenue. If you even sell a couple of them every day, it will make a big difference. Now I know I said that we sell multiple versions of this gift basket. You can do the same, or if you're only starting out and you want to keep things simple, just sell one gift basket and make it really expensive. You don't need to overcomplicate things. Number three this is a great way of clearing stock and you've heard me talk about it plenty of times in the past, and that's mystery boxes. You're coming up towards the end of the year. You may be building up some stock that you want to move on and you want to convert it into cash.

Speaker 2:

Create mystery boxes and sell them. People will go mad for mystery boxes. I don't know what it is, but anytime we do mystery boxes jumbo mystery boxes or super jumbo mystery boxes they sell out really fast, and I know it's the same for a lot of different subscription box businesses out there. Now, if you don't know what a jumbo mystery box is, it's just a mystery box, but it has more things in it, so we can charge a higher amount for it. And a super jumbo mystery box is just a really big mystery box with loads of things in it, so we can clear more stock and charge a good amount of money for it compared to just a normal mystery box. And we will use those three different kinds of mystery boxes all in the run-up to christmas. We'll sell them as post-purchase upsells. We'll sell them to our list. We'll do reply yes emails. We'll do all that stuff and it will make us a lot of extra revenue. I highly recommend you do the exact same.

Speaker 2:

Number four I know I said no subscriptions. Well, this is a subscription, but it's a bit different Annual subscriptions. Push annual upgrades to your customers. Do it through the reply yes process. Do it in your post-purchase upsells. Do it through inserts in your box where people can just scan a QR code and it brings them to a page to upgrade. Do all that stuff and to encourage people to take the prepaid subscriptions, come up with a really good Christmas offer so it could be like an extra free Christmas product. It could be double your first box for Christmas. It could be a free Christmas box. For christmas. It could be a free christmas box. Whatever.

Speaker 2:

Push your 12 month upgrades. You will see, around this time of year, people are feeling more generous. They spend more money. More of them will go for the 12 month upgrades and there's two reasons why you should do this. Number one you obviously want to make more money. But number two, it will help your churn rate massively come January. We all know when it comes to January for the majority of subscription businesses well, direct-to-consumer subscription businesses January churn can be kind of higher. It can be a bit higher because customers don't have as much money they overspent at Christmas, new Year, they want to sort out their finances, all this stuff, so the churn can be a bit higher. So you can get ahead of this by pushing people to upgrade to your 12-month annual subscription throughout November and December. Definitely do it. You'll be really thankful in the new year.

Speaker 2:

Finally, number five gift subscriptions. Push gift subscriptions to your email list and to your existing customers. You will have people on your list and in your customer base who absolutely love what you do and if you give them the opportunity to buy your subscription as a gift for their friends or family members or whatever, a good proportion of people will go for it because they love your brand and they want to share it with their friends and family. Okay, I hope you found this episode helpful. Just before we go, I have one more tip make sure you test all of this stuff in your post-purchase upsells. It's really important that you do this because it will significantly improve your average order value when you get this right which allows you to spend more money to acquire customers in the first place, and obviously around this time of year it can be expensive. So it's really important you have things in place which will help you increase that average order value and actually allow you to advertise their value and actually allow you to advertise. Now we use subly, and subly make it really easy to do this. They have a great funnel system and it's really easy to add subscriptions and one-time products to the post-purchase upsell. So if you you're on Subli, I highly recommend you do this.

Speaker 2:

Can I ask you for a big favor just before we finish up? If you've been listening for a while and you found value in the episodes and you feel like you've learned some really good stuff, would you mind giving me a review? It can be on Spotify, it can be on spotify, it can be on apple, it can be wherever you listen to podcasts. It just really helps me get this show out to more people. Thanks very much. We'll be back next week at the exact same time and, 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 I'll chat to you next week. Have a great day, bye.