Subscription Box Answers
Welcome to Subscription Box Answers, the podcast for anyone looking to start or scale a successful subscription box business. I'm Liam Brennan, co-founder of BusterBox, a dog subscription box company that we started in a spare bedroom back in 2016.
Since then, we've grown to thousands of subscribers and over $13 million in sales, and along the way, I've learned a ton about what it takes to make a subscription box business thrive.
In this no-nonsense podcast, I'll be sharing all of my proven tips and strategies for building a successful subscription box business, from sourcing products to marketing to reducing churn.
Whether you're just starting out or looking to take your existing business to the next level, you'll find valuable insights and actionable advice here.
I will show you that it is possible to start your own subscription box business from your spare bedroom with little money and turn it into a full-time income.
Got a question you want answered on the show? Join my free Facebook group at www.SubscriptionBoxResources.com and post it there or email me at liam@subscriptionboxanswers.com. Thanks for tuning in, and I can't wait to help you build the subscription box business of your dreams!
Subscription Box Answers
Boost Your Subscription Box with SMS: What Works & What Doesn’t
In this episode of Subscription Box Answers, I share the most effective ways we've used SMS marketing to grow our subscriber base, sell more products, and retain customers. If you want to boost your subscription box business with SMS, you won’t want to miss this!
Got a question you’d like answered on the show? Head over to www.SubscriptionBoxResources.com, join our FREE Facebook group, and post your question there!
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 and, as always, I hope business is going well for you. On today's episode I'm answering a question that got sent in during the week and it's around SMS marketing. Let me read out the question Hi, liam, do you use SMS marketing for BusterBox? If so, what strategies have worked best for you? Very good question. So we use SMS marketing for two things pretty much. We use it to sell more products and we use it to recover failed payments. That's pretty much it now. When it comes to using it to sell more products, we obviously use it to sell other products to our existing subscribers.
Speaker 2:Now, when it comes to SMS marketing, you do need to be careful with it. It's not the same as email. If you're doing it right, you will obviously get a much higher open rate with SMS marketing, but you can't really send them as frequently as you can with email, and that's down to two reasons really. The first reason is you'll drive people absolutely crazy if you're blasting them with sms messages around the clock. People will get annoyed with that, and the other reason is it actually costs money to do sms marketing, whereas email is pretty much free. You don't have to pay to send out a email. So you have to be tactical with your SMS blasts. Now we have found the best time to hit people with an SMS blast is usually when they get paid is usually when they get paid, and for the UK and Ireland, a lot of people get paid on the last Friday of the month, so that's usually when we hit them, because we'll get the highest return then. And that's actually really important with SMS marketing too, especially as your company gets bigger and you collect more phone numbers, it can get really expensive really, really quickly. So you need to know basically you're going to get the return, otherwise you can end up burning money.
Speaker 2:So my advice would be, when it comes to doing SMS marketing, only do proven offers or proven products that are already selling. Otherwise you can end up burning a lot of money. It's definitely not a channel for testing new products or testing new offers. You should test those via email or Facebook ads or whatever and make sure that they're actually selling. Otherwise you could end up with a expensive mistake if you bring them straight to SMS and you have no validation that the market actually wants that. So that's something you really have and be on top of when it comes to this kind of marketing. The other thing you need to be aware of as well is the same marketing principles apply to sms marketing as email marketing. It's all direct response if you want to actually make the channel work for you. It's all direct response. So that's offers, creating urgency and scarcity all that stuff that we've covered so many times on this podcast. Obviously, you can't send really long messages with SMS, so it all needs to be shortened down, but the same marketing principles apply.
Speaker 2:Now I'm trying to think off the top of my head something that worked really well for us with sms. Oh yeah, we did a barking madness dog bed sale. We were already selling a good amount of these beds, so we knew there was demand for it, and then we brought that offer to sms and we hit a lot of our high value customers and we gave them the opportunity to grab a new dog bed and save some money in the process, and that did really well for us and, obviously, for new subscription recruitment. Like I said, if we're running an offer that has been working really well for the previous month and then we get to payday friday, a lot of the time we'll bring that offer to sms and it'll work well and we'll get um a good return on our investment and a decent amount of people will actually sign up.
Speaker 2:Now we also use SMS Marketing to help us with failed payment recovery. We're currently testing Stunning and I believe they have free SMS payment recovery built in, but we actually haven't got around to testing that yet. But we actually haven't gotten around to testing that yet. But what we do use are Subli automations which are connected directly to Twilio, and we have it set up that on the second subli failed payment attempt, a customer will automatically get a message from us asking them to update their cart. And the reason we have it set up on the second failed payment is because if we had it set up on every single one of the failed payments, it could get expensive pretty fast and we found that it works pretty well to just have it on the second failed payment. So those are the times we found SMS marketing to be most effective in BusterBox. Now for our sales messages we use a website called textmarketercouk and for our domain messages we obviously use Twilio, because that can integrate directly to Subli and the messages are sent out automatically. Textmarketer, by the way, is mainly a UK based website, but I'm sure there's many different websites in the US which can be used to send messages.
Speaker 2:Now, I hope you found this episode helpful and I hope that answers your question in detail. We'll be back next week at the exact same time, but before we go, could I ask a big favor? If you've been listening to this podcast for a while and you found value in the information I'm sharing, 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. 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.