Subscription Box Answers

Let's Talk Black Friday / Cyber Monday!

• Liam Brennan

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In this episode of Subscription Box Answers, we’re talking about Black Friday / Cyber Monday! I’m sharing what we’re doing at BusterBox to inspire you and give you ideas to make as much money as possible. 

You don’t need to discount everything at this time of year. 

Instead, you can get creative with free gifts, which will help protect your margins while still offering your customers a great deal.

The last thing you want to do is give away all your margin and drive a lot of revenue but no profits!

Check out this episode if you want to have a highly profitable Black Friday / Cyber Monday In 2024!

If you have a question you want answered on the show head over to www.SubscriptionBoxResources.com. Join the FREE Facebook group and post it 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. On today's episode, let's discuss Black Friday and Cyber Monday. We all know Black Friday and Cyber Monday is probably the busiest day by far for retail online businesses. Consumers are looking for bargains, they're looking for gifts and you can make a lot of money, but you have to be careful.

Speaker 2:

Over the last few years, I have noticed a trend where some brands are no longer participating in black friday or cyber monday because they feel like it's not worth the hassle. You give away too much margin and it's too expensive to acquire customers, and that's very, very true. It does get really, really expensive around this time of year. It's expensive to sign up customers, it's competitive, it's noisy and it can be difficult to get movement. If you don't know exactly what to do and if you give too much discounts or you go too crazy, you can end up giving away a lot of margin and, yeah, the whole thing isn't worth the hassle. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to explain what we've been doing in buster box and what we will do which has been working really really well so far. So hopefully you can get some inspiration and some ideas so you can run a very profitable and successful black friday, cyber monday.

Speaker 2:

So the first thing, right, all of our websites have been rebranded now. Well, all of our offer landing pages and we have Black Friday information in the header. We make it clear this is a exclusive Black Friday deal. So many subscription box brands out there don't even do that. They don't even bother changing their website for Christmas or Black Friday. I think you're leaving a serious amount of money on the table by not doing this. It isn't difficult to change the header on your website, so do it. Promote your offers. This will create urgency and scarcity with consumers and make them want to pull out their credit card and actually sign up to your box or buy your products. The same with your ads. We have launched loads of new ads with loads of Black Friday creatives. We have Black Friday exclusive plastered across the top of a lot of our ads now and guess what? Those ads are converting much better than our normal ads, where we don't promote Black Friday. We're running a lot of things at the moment and, yeah, you should do the exact same. Make sure in your creatives you have information about Black Friday. All this stuff sounds so basic and simple, but I see brands not doing it every single year and you're definitely leaving money on the table. Just do it, it's not difficult.

Speaker 2:

As far as Black Friday offers go, we are staying clear from discounts, and I'll explain why. A lot of the consumers who sign up throughout Black Friday can behave different compared to other times of the year, and this isn't only us saying this. I've spoken to so many different subscription box businesses and a lot of them say the exact same thing. They can behave differently. They come in, they've hired, churn, they grab whatever aggressive offer you and they've no real intention in staying signed up for a long period of time. So we're not doing deep discounts. What we are doing is free gift. Now our free box offer may come back for a segment of our email list that's been there for a long time, but we will not be pushing that hard this week. It will all be free gift and we're bringing back some of our best performing offers. We got some stock in and we're bringing them back. We'll be running free camera, we're running free projector, we're running our free bed, we're running a free advent calendar. We're doing all of this stuff okay and we're wrapping it with Black Friday messaging Now. We've actually been doing this for the last few weeks or so and all of these things have been converting really, really well for us.

Speaker 2:

Now, if you're thinking of going really hard with a discount, what I would say to you is be careful with that. Okay, be careful if possible. I would highly recommend going with a free gift now. You definitely don't need to reinvent the wheel here. If you have some stock sitting there and you've ran a particular free gift offer in the past and it worked really well and you haven't ran it for a while, you can bring it back. Worst case scenario is you haven't prepared for any of this, and that does happen too. What I'd recommend doing is just running what you're currently running, but changing all your banners and to say black friday exclusive. You'll be surprised when you do this, because not every consumer is keeping up with what you're doing. It will be new for a lot of people and if it's converted previously, it will more than likely convert again.

Speaker 2:

Or what you can do is add something slightly new to something that's been working previously to bring some life back into it. I'll give you an example. So we're running a free bed offer. If you sign up for six or 12 months, you get free dog bed worth £60. This offer has converted really well for a really long time and instead of scrapping it, we're just making it a bit better. So we got a really good deal on some blankets, some teddy bear shaped blankets, and throughout this week, if somebody signs up on our bed offer, they will also get a free teddy bear blanket. It's the perfect combination, if you think about it. You get the box with the toys and treats, you get the bed and you get the blanket, which obviously goes well with the bed.

Speaker 2:

Now you should be thinking of the exact same thing. How can you make a winning offer slightly better without destroying your margin and ruining yourself financially? Well, you can definitely include a small extra gift, or you can do something like this, which is really easy to pull off and, yeah, it's low effort. You can put a tiny discount on your checkout and you can position it as a secret discount, and I'm talking about a really small discount. Now, not, you're not going crazy with something. I'll give you a example.

Speaker 2:

So say you were running a beauty box and you were giving away I don't know free lipstick with the first box okay, this is just pulled off the top of my head and you've been running that offer for a very long time and your email lists are very aware of that offer to bring new life into it. You could send out email for black friday and could basically say hey, um, I'm reaching out to you today because your black friday upgrade has gone live. If you sign up today, you're going to get this free lipstick plus a very secret discount which will only be revealed by going over to our checkout, and then you automatically have on the checkout a discount which gives them like 10% off, something really, really low. So they end up getting the lipstick and the 10% discount, but to find out what the 10% discount is, they have to click over and, to be honest with you, that's nearly half the battle getting people over to the checkout. When they're there and they have it in the cart and they see the lipstick, and then they're like okay, I can see I'm getting an extra 10 discount for black friday. I need to be quick, otherwise I'm going to miss out on this to pull out their credit card and a good proportion of them will actually buy. So, yeah, that's a low effort thing you can do, which will definitely help, and it can be a small discount, nothing crazy which is going to destroy your margin. Now that's obviously all on the front end.

Speaker 2:

You should also think about doing black friday, cyber monday deals in your post purchase. Now we're obviously on subly and they make post purchase upsells really really easy and you can add in all different products, different subscriptions, and it's a great way to increase your average order value. I highly recommend doing some deals in your post purchase as well, because when you get somebody in on the subscription, you want to increase that average order value. Especially around this time of year where it can be more expensive to acquire a customer, you want to earn back as much as possible. So you cut down that subscription payback period and it just helps with your cash flow.

Speaker 2:

Now, a very easy thing you can sell in your post-purchase upsells are mystery boxes. Position them as exclusive black friday upgrades. Okay, upgraded mystery box for black friday. That will sell really really well for the majority of subscription box businesses. For some reason, consumers go absolutely crazy for mystery boxes and obviously the benefit of that is you're able to clear old stock and turn it into cash flow. Now, a couple of episodes ago, I recorded an episode called 5 Easy Things you Can Sell To Make More Money this Q4. I highly recommend going back and listening to that episode if you haven't listened already, because that will give you more ideas about the type of things you can sell here in your post-purchase upsells. But yeah, black friday doesn't have to end on the front end. I would highly recommend selling other products in your post-purchase as well. Trust me, it will more money now.

Speaker 2:

We recently rebranded and launched our new store, busterpetscom. We always had a standalone store over the years, but we're putting a lot more effort into it. Now. We have a much better website. We rebranded it and it's doing very well so far. We're running ads to it and, yeah, the conversion rate is really, really high and we're obviously going to want to do stuff over there as well. And you're going to be the exact same. If you have a standalone store or you sell standalone products, you're going to want to run some kind of black friday, cyber monday deal with them. Well, now, what we're doing is very, very straightforward if they spend a certain amount, we're going to give them a free dog toy. This will help us clear excess stock and it will also help us keep our margin up.

Speaker 2:

Whatever about discounting a subscription on the first box, I don't recommend doing a heavy discount, like I said, but it can still work. If you have a good retention rate. Around this time of year, you get people in. Hopefully they'll stay for a decent amount of time. There is a method to the madness, but with standalone products, you definitely don't want to be going down the crazy discount route, unless you want to clear out your warehouse and get rid of loads of excess stock and there's a plan behind it that makes sense in a way. But apart from that, you want to try avoiding doing crazy discounts on standalone products, because with e-commerce products, a lot of the time, the margin isn't there to do these crazy discounts. It's simply not there. So what you should do instead is get creative. Come, come up with some bundles, do some free gifts and do everything you can to make it that the customer feels like they're getting a good deal, but you are protecting your margin and you're actually making money. Now, obviously, when you're giving away a free gift, you you are losing a bit of your margin, but the point behind it is the perceived value of a free gift can usually be a lot higher, so you can still protect your margin while the customer feels like they're getting a good deal.

Speaker 2:

As far as following up with people, we will be sending lots of emails this week. We'll be doing texts, all that stuff. Follow up is really, really important, especially around this time of year. Whatever you do, make sure you follow up with your list very regularly. There's other brands out there which will be absolutely bombarding people with emails. I don't recommend bombarding people, but do send a good amount of emails so people are aware of your deals.

Speaker 2:

Okay, the big mistake people make is they put a lot of time into coming up with these deals and rebranding their website and all that stuff and then they just don't get their message out. They might send one email on black friday morning and that's it. That's simply not enough and a lot of your potential customers will buy from you, but if they don't know you're actually running a deal and you're not top of mind, they won't come over to your website to check because they're being bombarded by so many other companies. So, yeah, make sure you follow up Now. I hope you found that episode helpful and I hope you have a very, very successful Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Now, 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. I'll chat to you next week. Have a great day.