Subscription Box Answers

The Power Of Sign Up Flows & Surveys (With Stefan Pretty)

• Liam Brennan

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On this episode of Subscription Box Answers, I’m sitting down with Stefan Pretty to discuss the power of sign-up flows and surveys in growing your subscription box business.

I firmly believe that the majority of subscription boxes need to implement a survey to properly onboard their customers. Surveys help you collect vital information, allowing you to better serve your customers, keep them subscribed longer, and improve overall satisfaction.

But that’s not all—surveys can also significantly reduce your customer acquisition costs and boost sign-ups if you strategically place an email collection point. By doing this, you capture high-intent email addresses, giving you multiple opportunities to convert potential customers into paying subscribers. This is incredibly powerful, yet so many subscription box businesses aren’t doing it.

Up until now, creating and integrating these surveys has been a challenge. However, Subbly has solved this problem with their new survey builder, inspired by the success of BusterBox. This tool makes it easier than ever to design and implement effective surveys that drive results.

If you’re not using surveys in your subscription box business, now is the time to start. Tune in to learn more about how surveys can transform your business.

If you have a question you want 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. Today we have the pleasure of welcoming back Stefan Prithi, the CEO of Sobri again. How are you, stefan?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I was just about to say again. Yeah, your audience are going to be like oh, here we go again. No, in all seriousness, thanks for having me back, liam, and yeah, I'm doing great thanks. Black Friday's in full swing. We're seeing some really encouraging numbers. All seriousness, thanks for having me back, um, liam, and uh, yeah, I'm doing great, thanks. Uh, black friday is in full swing. We're seeing some really encouraging numbers on our side. Um, just to kind of give you some context, actually just an anecdotal uh data point uh, black friday was 24th of november last year and, um, we're not even on black friday yet and we've we've actually seen a surge, uh, on mond Monday. That was bigger than Black Friday last year.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, that's amazing. Well, today we are speaking about something I've talked about on this podcast before. It's come up a good few times the importance of collecting potential customers' emails and the best way of doing that. And if you've been following my company posterbox, you will notice we have a survey on sign up. Where a customer comes over, they put in some information about their dog, the size, their name, and before they get to the payment page where you select your plan and how long you're staying for, there's an email collection point, and that email collection point literally collects thousands of high purchase intent leads for us every single month, and it's one of the main reasons we're able to keep our customer acquisition costs under control and to keep our business running without things getting really, really expensive. So the reason Stefan has come on this episode is and we can go into it in detail, but to put it in the quickest terms possible Subli have released a feature to allow you to replicate a survey very similar to ours, no matter what your box is, and this is massive because over the years I have had so many people reach out to me going how do you get that survey, how can you make it happen?

Speaker 2:

And for us. We have to pay a lot of money to get that survey built and we actually have a full-time developer who is updating that for us all the time. But if you're on Subly, you don't need any of that. You can just use the survey. So do you want to talk about this? Because this is really big.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, no, I think you've teed that up really really well, actually, liam. So, yeah, ultimately, um, the email capture step is is probably low-key, the star of the show, um, but essentially what we've done is built a new survey template. We're calling it right now um for the subscription box use case, which is probably most of your listeners, and um, basically, it takes a very you know, the tried and tested format that we've seen on many subscription box websites that full screen layout with the step-by-step, one question at a time, um format and, uh, we've made it customizable, uh, so that you can add your own stylings using the checkout designer as well. So pull those through to match your brand. So, yeah, we've introduced that new template. But there's also some new steps that we've introduced as well, which one of them is the email capture actually. So the moment the customer finishes typing in the email and they click next question, next step, it's already in the leads inside of Subli and those can pipe through to the automations Klaviyo, mailchimp, zapier, whatever you're using you can get the emails into the system that you're using for sending those follow-up emails. The other two steps that we've introduced are actually the plan selection step, so you can do that before getting onto the checkout. But also you can do it without building like hacking together your own page to select the plan. And then, the last one is certainly not the least, it's an upsell step. So now we obviously have the upsell funnels with your pre-purchase, mid-purchase and post-purchase. Those still apply, actually, but before that, when you're in the survey flow, you can also add that upsell. There it could be one time or it could be forever and in perpetuity with the subscription. So, yeah, it basically is inspired by BusterBox and it's, you know, going back to those early days where we built a custom flow for you guys and, as you said, people have been asking how do we do it like Posterbox. So it is a really big step for us and we do have more plans in this area directionally, and we have for a long time. It's why we built the API a couple of years well, over the last couple of years and rebuilt our, our checkout and redesigned it from first principles.

Speaker 3:

Um, I think we missed the mark. To be honest with you, I think we missed the mark and we could have done this earlier and cut a corner and saved ourselves that the this long, lengthy process to get here. Um, that's a, that's a meme, a me problem, a sublet problem and a mistake that I'm willing to own. I think we could have gotten here faster, but it's still a big deal.

Speaker 3:

And, um, there's a part of the story that I should probably also highlight.

Speaker 3:

I think it's very relevant.

Speaker 3:

I know that, uh, gary was working on formify and, um, a lot of the subly users were using formify to achieve exactly what you know we're talking about this type of a survey and, um, you know, gary ultimately decided to sunset formify, as my understanding, uh, due to wanting to just focus and double down on on uh, buster, um and um, there's a whole you know that's a whole separate topic.

Speaker 3:

But yeah, uh, ultimately we realized a bunch of the subly users were going to be left without a solution and they were going to be taking a step backwards. So we actually reached out to a bunch of those users and said, hey, we had ultimately had plans to do it, but just not right now. And we said, if you're willing to commit to the outcome here, we'll commit to bringing this forward on our roadmap. And it worked out. Those people, I just want to say you know who you are. Thank you so much for your commitment on that, like it wouldn't have happened if it wasn't for you guys and girls, and so, yeah, um, we're here now and it's uh, it's been a long project and it's very exciting and yeah it's big news, yeah, it's really really good.

Speaker 2:

And in regards to Formify, yeah, that's exactly what happened with Gary. He wanted to just focus on BusterBox because, as you know yourself, building a software like it's very, very complex, it's very expensive and if you're trying to run another business at the exact same time, it's quite challenging.

Speaker 3:

I mean, that's probably one of the probably the biggest challenges, being like a excitable entrepreneur. You know, you've got all these ideas bouncing around your head and you want to execute on all of them. But you know, I I'm very lucky that I had that realization and conversation at a younger age. Uh, one of you know a friend, family friend who's very dear to me. He's a very successful entrepreneur and he, uh I had a meeting with him and I went on a train to go and meet him and it took me half a day to go and meet him. And got to his house office and he sat me down and he said so what you're working on? And I told him, like I've got this idea, I'm working on this, I'm working on that, and I was so excited, thinking he's going to be so impressed, what a great young entrepreneur. And instead he just looked at me and went you need to focus, stefan. And I was like bored and hurt but at the same time like, oh well, actually he's right. Um, and I did, and that was like one of the biggest lessons for me. That probably led to me being here right now. But but yeah, focus is key.

Speaker 3:

Um, but to go back to the, the survey announcement. I think that, um, you know what gary was trying to achieve was absolutely spot on with formify and um, so, yeah, we, we have rolled out the private beta. Um, there's a group of people who have got on our wait list, um, and again, thank you to those who have submitted their interest on the wait list. Uh, that can be, uh, that you, you'll basically receive an email soon, uh, over the coming days. We shut the waitlist last night.

Speaker 3:

Um, that will tell you how to use the new feature and how to get access to it. Um, and then, yeah, we would welcome feedback and we're you'll probably hear from us. Our team will probably reach out to get it configured and set up with you, and then we'll look at a wider release in due course. One other thing that's really important and this is critical is that you can actually embed the survey on any website, so you don't have to use the Subly hosted page, where you don't have control over the header or the footer of the page because it's hosted on subli, but you can actually embed it directly onto any existing website and it will load inside any page, so you can have your own header and footer, which is actually, uh, surprisingly important as well.

Speaker 2:

Um, so, yeah, I'm very excited about this yeah, and just for the people listening who may not really realize, like how impactful this can be, I'll just explain what happened with us. This was actually this is coming back four years ago. This was the last election and, as you know, ad prices go crazy around the election time. This year actually wasn't too bad, but the last time really really bad, really really expensive, really erratic facebook was, I think it had. I don't know exactly what was going on. Might have been something to do with the ios changes that were coming slightly after or whatever. Really bad on facebook. The really really challenging and to get people signed up we're spending fortune.

Speaker 2:

And we were looking at it and we were like we have to find a way to make more from our existing traffic. We can't just keep spending on more and more traffic like the numbers literally won't make any sense. So we came up with the idea of putting the email collection point in the survey. Now we had the survey from when you, when subli, actually built the first version of our website. The survey was built but it never had the email collection point and obviously we made some changes to our years. It was a good few years before that, but we put the email collection point in anyway and within like a day, we were inactive campaign and we're like, whoa, we're after collecting like I can't even remember it might have been like something like 500 emails. It's like, well, now we have an opportunity to sell to these multiple times, like we're paying. So even if we don't sell, we're collecting the email. We can run them through sequences, different offers, and it'll bring down our overall customer acquisition costs. So because of that, we've gone on to collect over 200 000 emails anyway.

Speaker 2:

More, even more, more. I can't. I don't know the exact number and it was all from that. And what I always say to people is right, you can collect the emails by running things like competitions, right. But come on, let's be honest now, they're garbage leads. Look, let's just tell you how it is you're collecting. I'm not saying you can't make some sales through competitions. You can. But you need usually massive volume to make a movement with competition leads. They're poor quality leads pretty much. You can still do okay, cheap leads, easy to do. Poor. The leads you collect through a survey like this. These are high intent leads. These are people who are actually interested in buying your product. Because they've seen your ad, they've come over to your website. You're optimizing for purchases. They've come over and they've got to the point in your flow to leave the email. They're way higher quality leads. So even if who really cares if the customer acquisition cost comes down and they're actually good quality leads.

Speaker 2:

So I shared this with a lot of people in subscription box experts, my course, and at the time, to put together something like this, it was really difficult. It was really difficult for people because people had to either have to hire a developer really expensive to build this and then if you're changing offers or whatever, you have to have him on call because you're probably not going to be able to do it, or they were pasting together different apps that worked. They didn't really work. It was plugging things together and anyone who did manage to get it built reached out to me after I was like that has been a complete game changer. We're collecting so many leads.

Speaker 2:

Anyone who did manage to get it built reached out to me after I was like that has been a complete game changer. We're collecting so many leads. We're selling so many more boxes. Our customer acquisition cost has come down and every time I was getting on group coaching calls with everyone in that program, like they're saying, I have a high customer acquisition cost. I'd always look at their email point and I was like, like this, isn't covid anymore where you could put that ads out and people saw them when they bought. On the spot the purchasing decisions are way different and you have to give yourself multiple opportunities to sell to people and to give yourself multiple opportunities. You need to collect the email lead because some people will not be ready to buy straight away.

Speaker 3:

But yeah, I just wanted to say that because it's actually that important yeah, no, I think it's a really uh great breakdown of of how significant it is in terms of the email capture step and it changes the unit economics of the business, and that's what you basically described. And, and I think you're going from a revolving door, cold traffic, just trying to like fill a bucket with a hole in it you're you're making that hole smaller and, um, you're ultimately owning more of that traffic. Um, that you're you're purchasing already. So it's um, yeah, I'm excited to see what impact this has for for merchants. I wish we'd got it out maybe a week earlier than we did for black Friday, but I encourage everybody to, as soon as they get access to it, go in and at least configure that step.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, like the thing, like it's not going away Anyone who's serious about growing their business. This is something you need for next year and, like, without even the email collection point, this can help you reduce your churn because you're collecting information about your customers when they sign up for us. We're collecting the dog's name, its size, what kind of toys he likes all this stuff. If we never collected that, what would our churn be? It would be terrible because we'd just be sending out the same box to everybody and it wouldn't be suitable and a lot of the time it'll be the same for nearly every single subscription box.

Speaker 2:

There are questions you should be asking. No matter what niche you're in, you have to be getting information of people and even if you're looking to sell your company at some point in the future, if you're collecting all this data, that is actually really, really important. That can actually drive up the value of your company and get more people interested too, instead of just saying like, oh, we send out this box and we just force it out to every single person. We don't know any data about anybody and the churn is really bad because people are getting the wrong things. So yeah, if you use that survey properly, reduce churn and collect more leads for you.

Speaker 3:

It's that powerful yeah, and then I think there's also an interesting effect effect when you ask these questions, um, you know that it leads to these micro commitments. Yeah, so there is an optimal length probably for each business, like some might lend themselves to, like a longer survey with 10 questions and some might be two or three, but ultimately you'll need to test that. It depends on your audience and what your product and offer is. But, yeah, there's also this concept of micro commitments which can even lead to higher conversion rate, which is counterintuitive, but you need to test it. Um, but, yeah, this is a massive step for us. I'm really proud of the team and what they put together. Uh, you know it is is still in beta, and so you, I'm excited to get it out to more and more people. But, yeah, I really I'm excited to see what people build with it, to be honest with you, and what impact it has in the numbers and you obviously have seen it firsthand time and time again where these things, when you deploy them, they work and they're consistently working.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, definitely. I'm excited to hear about the results of this myself. So for anybody on the platform, where can they go to get this like, how do they activate?

Speaker 3:

this. Yeah, so, as of listening right now, the waitlist is actually closed. So, um, the anybody that is on the waitlist they'll receive an email, but it will appear inside of the survey builder. So you'll need to go into purchase experience and then survey builder, and then you'll need to go into purchase experience and then survey builder, and then you'll get the option to choose what type of survey to create, and you'll choose a subscription box survey type instead of the the original default one. So that's the steps to actually get to it. I can't give a timeline on when it will get wide public release. I'm hoping within a month or two, probably looking at early 2025. So, yeah, you'll be hearing from us one way or another. We'll send our emails and on the Facebook group as well.

Speaker 2:

Perfect, perfect and for anybody on a different platform, because I know on other platforms it's hard to replicate this. If they want to move over to Subli, they'll obviously be able to be over and you'll be able to. They'll be able to use that builder or the survey thing in early next year.

Speaker 3:

Yes, that's right. Well, actually, no, sorry, good point. So we are going to be making it available to new users who sign up as as of today or tomorrow. But the reason for that is because they're they're starting from scratch. So it's more risky for us to roll out new tech to people who already have traffic and sales, and so we have to be more careful and cautious in the rollout for those things, which is why we're doing this private beta for new users. They'll be able to pick up on issues as they're testing and building their stores.

Speaker 3:

So we do take a slightly different kind of hybrid approach there. So anybody who signs up as of by the time you listen to this podcast episode, you'll have access to it. And yeah, for those looking to switch from another platform, we do have some pretty compelling offers If you've got subscribers already, so you can find more information on our website, sublayco, to learn more. But, yeah, it's really exciting, I think, for people to be able to go from zero to whoever they're trying to copy essentially within a short period of time, without needing plugins and developers and stuff like that, which is clearly quite common and par for the course for this industry at this stage. So we're trying to eliminate that yeah, well, look.

Speaker 2:

Thanks very much for coming on. I'm definitely excited with this feature. I think a lot of people will see a lot of success with it into 2025. We'll be back next week at the exact same time. If you have a question you want answered on the show, head over to subscriptionboxresourcescom. Join the free facebook group I posted there. Thanks very much, have a good day. Bye.