Subscription Box Answers

More Emails, More Subscribers

• Liam Brennan

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In this episode, I explain a couple of changes we made to our email marketing that have greatly increased the number of subscribers we’re getting while lowering the CAC. You'll learn from this that the general opinion about something isn’t always right.

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 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. Hope you're having a really good day. On today's episode, let's talk about email marketing and follow-up. Now, if you followed this podcast for any amount of time, you will know I talk about how important following up is with your leads through email, sms, picking up the phone, whatever. It's really important and in some cases it's essential if you want a customer acquisition cost that actually makes sense In today's economy. Things have shifted a lot and the impulse boy is gone from a lot of subscription boxes. Sorry, but it's simply the truth.

Speaker 2:

Back during covid, people would see ads. They'd pull out their credit card, they'd sign up on the spot. They had a lot of money. They were sitting at home, not a lot of things to do. The climate was completely different. Now there is so many different subscriptions and people are more cautious about what they sign up to. In a lot of cases they need to be convinced to sign up. They're not going to just pull out their credit card and sign up on the spot, and that's why follow-up and email marketing is so important. Now the good news is, if you take your follow-up and email marketing very seriously, you can greatly outperform your competitors who just aren't doing the right things.

Speaker 2:

Let's jump into it. November and December were the best two months we've ever had in BusterBox. They were even better than anything that happened a few years back, when ad prices were ridiculously low during the pandemic, and that was all down to one simple change we were sending way more emails than we've ever sent before. Now this sounds so simple, but I guarantee the majority of subscription box owners aren't doing this. Now let me explain exactly what's happening here. Up until very recently, we were sending three sales emails a week. Then we were doing resends to people who never opened them. The schedule looked something like this On a Monday a new email would go, on a Tuesday, a resend. A Wednesday a new email. Thursday a resend. Friday new email. Thursday a resend. Friday new email. Saturday a resend. And Sunday a rest day. We had an email going out every day except Sunday, and we kept this schedule running for about four years and it worked really well for us. We got a lot of people signed up.

Speaker 2:

Now most of the emails we were sending were well-designed, graphic-based emails and they pushed people heavily into our intro offers. Now they always performed well, so we just left them as they were. But during Q4 we decided to make a change and test some new stuff. So we dropped the graphic based emails and switched pretty much fully to text-based direct response emails. We found that these worked and resonated really well with our audience because they felt very personal and actionable. We also increased the number of emails we were sending.

Speaker 2:

Instead of sending three new emails a week, we started sending two a day. We would hit the list at 11 45 am and then again at half seven in the evening. If the first email performed well, we would build on it in the evening and send a forward or just repurpose the email a different way. If it flopped, we would completely change direction halfway through the day and come up with something new. Now the reason why this worked really well was well, one of the reasons. It gave us multiple chances to sell each day, which resulted in our new subscriber numbers going through the roof. A lot of days we managed to sign up 100 to 200 new subscribers per day. Now, if you're on the BusterBox email list, you would have noticed these changes, and before we finished up for Christmas, I wrote 36 new emails and we scheduled them to go out. Every day we weren't there. This resulted in us having our best ever period during those few weeks at the end of December, when it's normally pretty quiet.

Speaker 2:

Now, if you're thinking of doing something similar in your business, there are a few important things you need to consider. Number one a consistent supply of fresh leads. We collect thousands of new leads every single month in BusterBox, and this helps our email marketing perform very well. Our sign up flows and squeeze pages collect new leads all day, every day. These are high intent purchase leads, not the rubbish leads you get from giveaways, where you need two million of them to sell 20 subscriptions if you're on subly. They recently released a brand new feature that allows you to mimic the buster box selling up flow and that will seriously help you collect a lot of leads. If we didn't have a steady stream of fresh leads, this would not work, because we'd burn out our entire list really quickly. The same applies to your business. If you want email marketing to perform at any level, make sure you're collecting fresh leads every single day.

Speaker 2:

Number two copywriting is very important. I would highly recommend spending time improving your copywriting skills, especially if you want to increase the number of emails you're sending. We try our best to be entertaining, which keeps our leads engaged and our list healthy. We write all different kinds of emails Funny story-based, bizarre direct offers, emotional, logic-based. We switch things up frequently to keep things fresh. So our One thing that definitely does not work is AI slop. Ai is a tool and it can help, but if you're using it to generate the most generic, bland AI copy possible, you won't get far. You can spot AI copy from a mile away and all that will happen is you'll burn out your list. The good news is the majority of your competitors are blasting out AI slop regularly, so with just a small bit of effort, you can drastically outperform them.

Speaker 2:

Number three having multiple intro offers helps. Number three having multiple intro offers helps. This isn't 100% essential, but having multiple intro offers helps keep things fresh. We've been alternating between five different intro offers over the last few months to ensure our leads don't get bored with our emails. Don't get bored with our emails. There are only so many emails you can send about one offer before things start getting very repetitive. Here are the offers. We've been switching between A free bed, a free bed and blanket, a free box, a free camera, a free projector. Also, different offers attract different kinds of customers, so another benefit of switching offers is that you get different types of people signing up to your box. This is why I'd recommend switching between offers when possible.

Speaker 2:

Increasing our email volume and switching to text-based emails has been a serious game changer for our company. It's one of the reasons we've been able to push forward and unlock our next stage of growth in a very tough UK economy. Now I don't know if we will keep up this amount of emails going forward In Q4, it made a lot of sense. Now that we're into February, we've actually cut things back a bit, but we're still sending a lot of emails. Should you do this? That's completely up to you.

Speaker 2:

The point of this podcast was to share my own experience about something that worked really well for us. A lot of people will say you should never send that number of emails, and I completely understand why you don't want to come across as spam and really annoy people. Now I can tell you from my own experience. This never happened to my company. All we got from increasing the number of emails we were sending was positive things. We got more people signed up than we would have thought possible and we dropped our customer acquisition cost while doing this.

Speaker 2:

If I was you, I would test different frequencies to figure out what performs best for your business. During certain months of the year you may ramp things up and in other months of the year you may slow down sends. But yeah, there's no one size fits all approach that works for every single business. Every single situation is unique and I've learned anyway, sometimes the general opinion about things can be completely wrong. So test yourself to figure out what's going to work best for you. Hope you enjoyed this episode. Just as a reminder, the Subscription Box Experts Academy actually opens tomorrow. So if you're interested in joining, head over now to SubscriptionBoxExpertscom and join the waitlist. I'm only opening this to 50 businesses and I'm pretty sure it's going to sell out really quick with the amount of people that have joined the waitlist. 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, head over to subscriptionboxresourcescom, join the free facebook group and post your question there. Chat to you next week. Bye, bye.