Subscription Box Answers

This Is How You Grow Your Subscription Box Business With Meta Ads In 2025!

• Liam Brennan

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In this episode of Subscription Box Answers, I explain exactly how to grow your subscription box business using Meta ads. For the vast majority of subscription box niches, Meta ads are still the best channel by far. Advertising on Meta successfully with a subscription box is different compared to other businesses, and you need to know what you're doing, or you’ll end up wasting a lot of time and money. This episode will help you.

The Subscription Box Experts Academy opens on February 11th. You can join the waitlist at www.SubscriptionBoxExperts.com.

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. I hope 2025 has been going well for you so far. On today's episode, we are back talking about marketing because I want to help you have the best possible 2025. We're talking about meta ads and I'm going to explain the correct way to run them. This year, if you want to get as many new subscribers signed up as possible, meta ads are still the place you want to put your marketing spend for the majority of subscription boxes. That's where the majority of your spend should go, but you have to know what you're doing, because if you don't know what you're doing, you can end up burning a lot of money. But if you know how to use them correctly, it can be a really powerful channel. We've got over 60,000 new subscribers from meta ads in the last few years and we know how to use them correctly and I'm going to share that with you in this episode to help we get you prepared for 2025. But before we jump into that, I have a very exciting announcement to make.

Speaker 2:

On February 11th, I'm reopening the Subscription Box Experts Academy. Now, if you don't know what this is, let me explain. This is my signature course. I've run it since 2020. And there's been so many different subscription box owners in so many different niches that have scaled up and have had a lot of success. I'm talking about serious success, going from a small number of subscribers to scaling their business up and being able to quit their jobs and work in their business full-time and have a great life from it. That's happened to a lot of subscription box owners who have gone through this course Now.

Speaker 2:

Last year I only opened it once. I opened it in March 2024 and, yeah, it usually sells out pretty quickly. This year, I may only open it once again. Over the last few weeks I have updated the entire course with everything that's working right now in 2025. There's nearly 60 new training videos in the course and new bonuses, and it has everything you need to have a really successful 2025. It's a self-paced video course. You do it in your own time, but you also get access to a private mastermind group where you can connect with other serious subscription box owners and get all the support and help you need, and you'll also get access to six group calls where you can come in and you can get support from me and ask me any question about your business, website ads, whatever and get all the support you need. There's other bonuses. I'll share one of the bonuses here, which is really cool.

Speaker 2:

I've created a brand new subscription box copywriting course. Now we had the best Q4 we've ever had in BusterBox this Q4. That's including the pandemic and any other year. Okay, we've just come off our best ever Q4. And a lot of that was down to the number of emails we were sending and the quality of the emails. Okay, I've learned a lot about copywriting over the last few years.

Speaker 2:

It really is a secret if you want to grow your subscription box, if you know how to write persuasive copy and use emotional triggers and logical triggers, it's so much easier to sell things. I've created a brand new copywriting course for subscription boxes that will show you how to come up with persuasive copy, and I'm including that as a free bonus with subscription box experts. There's other stuff in there too, but I'll share them in due time. But yeah, anytime I open this course, I only allow 50 people to join. That's it, and the reason why I keep it at 50 is because I simply wouldn't be able to help any more people in the private group. I want to give a really high quality service and make a massive positive impact on your business. So if you're interested and you want to join Subscription Box Experts on February 11th, head over to SubscriptionBoxExpertscom right now and join the waitlist so you can be one of those 50 people. I look forward to working with you. Then, right, let's jump into the episode. The biggest challenge for the majority of subscription box owners is getting more subscribers. That's why, on today's episode, I'm going to share some valuable tips and explain how we've managed to sign up over 60,000 subscribers to BusterBox over the past few years using Facebook ads, aka meta ads.

Speaker 2:

When it comes to growing a subscription box business, there are a million different things you can be doing, and it's very easy to get distracted by showing new objects. I know this for a fact, as we have put a lot of time and money into probably every marketing channel you can possibly think of. Some of them can work well, depending on your niche, but for the majority of subscription box owners, meta ads are still the place you want to invest the majority of your time and money. That's because the effort to reward ratio is really high. When you get them right, you can drive a lot of volume for a very consistent CAC. A lot of the other marketing channels do not have a good effort to reward ratio. You can end up working yourself into the ground and end up with a very bad return on subscribers. Now I'm definitely not saying there's no time or place for other channels. We do plenty of other marketing. If I had to recommend one channel most likely to be worth your time, for the majority of subscription box owners, it would still be meta ads. Now let me explain what we do to grow BusterBox every single day using meta ads.

Speaker 2:

Number one the offer. Now, if you have followed any of my content for any amount of time, you will know I always bang on about the offer. Now, if you have followed any of my content for any amount of time, you will know I always bang on about the offer. The reason I do it is because it's really that important. If you don't have an offer that converts, you're completely wasting your time. When it comes to any form of paid traffic, it's hard to sell subscriptions without any intro offer, especially if you want to scale using paid traffic. We are testing new offers all the time in BusterBox.

Speaker 2:

Different offers attract different customers and they're critical to our business. They are so important that if we don't have an offer that converts, our entire business does not work. A good offer will allow you to reduce your customer acquisition cost and drive enough consistent volume to keep growing your business. If your offer is poor, then you will have a very high CAC and it will be like pulling teeth when it comes to getting subscribers. This is the same for 99% of any subscription box business. These are the offers that usually work well Deep discounts, free gifts and double your first box. There's other ones as well that are specific to niches, but generally the ones I covered can work well. Now, different offers will attract different kinds of customers and not every free gift will work. You may need to test a few different ones until you find the right one. We've tested about 100 offers and the results are wildly different, especially when it comes to free gifts. A very common question I get is when will I know if I have a winning offer? And the answer is you will know, because your customer acquisition cost will drop and you'll be able to drive a lot of volume.

Speaker 2:

Number two targeting. The good news is targeting has become a million times easier for most niches over the past few years. In the past, you would have to layer loads of different interests on top of each other until you found your ideal customer. Nowadays, it's very different. This is because the algorithm is way more powerful and will do much of the heavy lifting for you, no matter what your subscription box business is. These are the audiences I would try first, number one open targeting. Number two look-alike audiences. You may need 500 purchases to get these firing, but they should be tested at a smaller amount and sometimes they will work. And finally, simple, interest-based targeting Just picking one or two obvious things and testing. Like I mentioned above, in most cases, facebook should be able to do the majority of the heavy lifting for you. If you go very tight with your targeting, you are more than likely going to drive your CPMs up. It usually works a lot better these days to give the algorithm room to work its magic. There are many different audiences you can test, but for the vast majority of cases, you should start with the ones I mentioned, as they are the most likely to work.

Speaker 2:

Number three structuring your campaign. People seem to get obsessed about how to structure their campaigns and the truth is the technical side of Facebook ads only account for a small amount of your success. I get so many people reaching out to me. What should I do? How many ads should be in the ad sets? What campaign should I pick? How many campaigns can I have? The truth is, the creative side of things is so much more important. Things is so much more important. That means having a website that converts an offer that converts an ad. Creative that converts. If you have those things in place, there's a very good chance you're going to succeed, especially in 2025, where the algorithm does a lot of the heavy lifting for you.

Speaker 2:

Once you pick the sales objective, any kind of campaign has a chance of working. Cbo works, advantage works, abo works, advantage Shopping works. The thing is you need to test to see what is going to work best on your account. To make things simple, I would start with an old school CBO campaign or a advantage plus shopping campaign. If you do go with advantage plus shopping, I would make sure your engaged audience and existing customers are defined and ensure you put your existing budget cap on zero. This is very important. If the only product you sell is your subscription box, it will stop you wasting money showing your ads to existing customers as far as the number of ads per ad set. As far as the number of ads per ad set, I'd always recommend four to six minimum. The algorithm always works much better when you give it some variation to test.

Speaker 2:

A big mistake people make at the start, when they're only growing Facebook ads, is they'll only put like one or two creatives into each ad set, and it's simply not enough. Now we usually keep all the copy and headlines the same and then we change the image or video on each ad. This lets us see what is working and what isn't. Number four creating ads that convert. Now, this will require testing, different copy, images, videos and headlines, and I would highly recommend using the Facebook ad library to see what the big sub boxes are doing. And here's a tip If you see they're running a particular ad for a long time, it's highly likely that it's working for them. Think about it If it wasn't producing subscribers, would they leave it running for a long time? Probably not. Now there are a million different ways to write copy and we do a lot of different things, but here is a very easy formula to follow which is highly likely to work for the majority of sub boxes.

Speaker 2:

Number one pattern interrupt. This is something which will grab attention on the news feed. Number two offer. Hit the customer with your amazing offer. Number three explain what you do and explain how your box will benefit them and why they need it. Number four social proof. Include some social proof Example customer reviews or if you have featured in something, say it on the ad. Number five call to action. Tell the customer to sign up and create urgency if possible. Example offer ends in 48 hours. So that's a very simple formula you can use when you're creating your ads. If you follow that step by step, it's just a really easy way to come up with copy and an ad format that actually converts.

Speaker 2:

We've used that for literally years in buster box now we obviously we do other things as well, but we always have some ads like this running at all times and they always perform really well for us. And the funny thing is, over the years, so many other subscription box companies have followed this exact format, like literally every niche you can possibly think of, and it's worked really well for them as well. So, yeah, if you're struggling to come up with ads that convert, I'd follow that framework number five images and videos. Now we're very lucky in buster box because we're obviously in the dog niche and we get literally thousands of images and videos of dogs sent in from our customers that we can use in our ads. People love sharing images of their dogs happy with our box.

Speaker 2:

Now I would highly recommend running a competition each month for best video and best image. This will entice your customers to consistently send in fresh content which can be used. It can be a very simple competition. It can be like we're giving away a free box for best image and best video and then you can write down some guidelines of how you want the images and videos to look. If you do that on a monthly basis, you should never be short of UGC content. We test a lot of different collages and simple box opening videos until we find the ones that work best, and then we'll use them for a very long time. Collages are really simple to put together. We use a program called photore and we'll just import our best ugc content and we'll turn that into a collage. And the collages have happy dogs and packed boxes. That format usually works well for the majority of subscription box niches, and then simple box opening videos always do well. Where you open up the box, you go through each product and you highlight the offer very straightforward, but yeah, it usually does pretty well for the majority of boxes.

Speaker 2:

Some of our best performing ads are ones that we created years ago. Like, it's actually really funny, one of the ads that we still regularly use was actually created back in 2018 and it's literally got thousands of subscribers signed up at this point. Every now and again, the performance will drop with it and some of our other older ones, and we'll have to give them a break for a few months, but then we'll bring them back, and once we rest them and bring them back, they usually start working well again, and there's something you can learn from that right you don't always need to reinvent the wheel when it comes to advertising. If you find a few things that work, you can double down on them and make more variations of those things, and you can bring them back for a very long time. Usually, if something is working well now, it's probably going to work well again in the future. So it's clever to have a selection of different ads that you know have worked well in the past. So even if your performance drops at some point and you're scrambling around looking for something, you can look at your previous ads and you can bring some stuff back and it'll keep your performance going.

Speaker 2:

I would also recommend slapping your offer across your static images in big ball text. I have covered this many times, but we have found when we do this on our image ads, they usually convert much better. This is because in some placements it isn't always easy to see the copy. So when you put it on the image, it's much clearer to your potential customers what you're actually selling and what your offer is. Okay.

Speaker 2:

Number six metrics so important.

Speaker 2:

If you don't understand your metrics, you shouldn't be using any form of paid advertising, as there is a high probability you will lose money.

Speaker 2:

You have to know what your lifetime value is. You have to know what your CAC is and how long it takes until a customer is in profit, aka your payback period. If you don't know what any of this stuff is, you won't know how much you can even spend to sign up a customer in the first place or what your cash flow requirements are to actually grow your business, and that's not a good place to be. If you're running any form of subscription business, now, obviously, if you're a brand new company, you're not going to know this information straight away because you're not going to have any data, but you should be tracking it at all times and building up a picture of how your business is actually looking. Now, if you don't know what any of this stuff is, my advice is to take a step back if that's the case and learn what all of this means. We cover it in a lot of detail in Subscription Box Experts.

Speaker 2:

It's really important because you will want to know if you're going in the right direction and you're actually building a business that is sustainable. And on the flip side, what can happen sometimes is people get stuck on a certain number of subscribers because they don't understand their metrics. So they don't know how much they can actually spend to acquire a customer and they're very conservative where if they just went a bit harder, they will be able to grow their business much quicker because they actually have really strong metrics that support that. But they don't understand any of this in enough detail to actually make that call. So, yeah, if you're planning to have any kind of successful subscription box business or subscription business in general, you have to know this Now. There's plenty of software out there which will help you track all of your metrics. I've mentioned this so many times, but there's a program called ChartMogul, bearmetrics, profitwell and there are some others. We use ChartMogul because it has a direct integration to Subli and it works really, really well. It's absolutely essential for our business to use this software and it has a lot of features built in, which makes it a great choice for anybody with a subscription box business. It's mainly for SaaS businesses, but they've added features over the last few years that make it a really good choice, because we've been going back and forth with them and some things got added. You an example Past dues are a big challenge when it comes to working out real churn for a lot of different subscription platforms, because you may have a setting in your Subway account where you don't cancel people if they don't make payment, if their card fails, or you cancel them after a certain time, and if you don't have a metric software that allows you to read that churn, you're going to have wildly inaccurate churn numbers. Okay, if you don't count that, it's going to make your churn look way better and it's going to make your lifetime value look way higher. But in reality it's not the truth and you could actually end up in trouble if you're going off them metrics. You could think you're building a great business but you're actually not because the churn isn't real. Whereas on chart mogul there's a setting for past jewels where you can count them as churn after a certain number of days, we we have it set to 30 days and that gives us a really accurate picture of what's really going on in the business. And Subli is great as well because it plugs in, and it allows that feature to actually work. Now that's the overview of how to successfully grow your subscription box business with meta ads in 2025. Now there's a million other things you can do to lower your CAC, increase your volume and make more money from your subscribers, but that's for another time, though, for the vast majority of box owners, you want to keep things simple, and this is the easiest way you can have a lot of success with your ads and acquire a lot of customers in 2025.

Speaker 2:

I hope you found this episode helpful. Can I ask a big favor? If you did, would you mind giving me a review on Apple, spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts? It just helps me get this show out to more people. Now we'll be back next week at the exact same time. 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 it there. I'll be back next week at the exact same time and I look forward to chatting to you then. Have a great day, bye, bye.