Subscription Box Answers

Reels Follow-Up – (I share what’s working and what isn’t)

• Liam Brennan

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On this episode of Subscription Box Answers, I’m following up on last week’s episode about Reels. We’ve been testing what I covered, and it’s working really well for us. Hopefully, this helps you with your customer acquisition.

If you have a question you’d like answered, 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 I'm following up on last week's episode where I was sharing some advice around Rails. For anybody who never caught last week's episode, I highly recommend checking it out because there's a good amount of stuff in there which will hopefully help you improve your customer acquisition With meta ads for the rest of 2025 and beyond. But very quickly let me recap. So our rep very kindly invited myself and the other two co-founders of BusterBox Into meta headquarters in Dublin for the day day. We spent the entire day in there and going over strategies for ads in 2025 and the big takeaway was the biggest opportunity on meta right now is rails. Okay, if you get rails right, you can bring down your customer acquisition cost. I'm talking about organic reels and paid reels, but my focus is more on the paid side of things, because that's where you can really scale up and get customers in a reliable, repeatable and scalable way pretty much okay.

Speaker 2:

So when I got back from going into meta, obviously my main focus was to push the stuff that I learned into action, because if you learn stuff and you don't put it into action, it's just a complete waste of time. So the next day I went searching for a tool to help me make the kind of Reels that we need to make. Now we do Reels ads, and we've been doing them for a long time, but they've really been second thought. Okay, we're making videos, we're putting them in the Reels placement, but we're not really making unique videos for that placement type, and I decided we're going to change that and give it a go. So I found a tool called Feed okay, f-e-e-d, and this tool helps you create Reels. Right, you can change it to the reel screen size. There's music in there you can use. You can chop up clips, you can do transitions, you can put audio over the video. You can do everything you need to do. Pretty much okay. So I found that and I went looking at all the content that gets sent in to us and, lucky for us, we get a lot of content sent in to us every month Dogs going crazy with the box. We've so many videos because we've been running this business for such a long time. So I created about 20 rails, okay. Now, a lot of the rails were very similar, but they just had different hooks, because that's what we learned In meta. They basically said you can have the same body if it converts with the offer at the end. But you should test different hooks on the video to attract different kinds of customers and to see which type of hooks actually convert the best. So we had many different hooks.

Speaker 2:

The style of the videos were pretty straightforward. There was music, happy music playing in the background a hook. Then it would switch to a dog being really happy with the box. Then there will be a voice and some captions across the screen saying things like this will make your dog really happy. It will save you time and money compared to going to the pet shop. Every box is hand-picked so it will suit your dog. All the stuff that I know converts for us in emails or other types of ads. Okay, all that stuff. Logical reasons and emotional reasons why somebody would buy really happy dog packed box and then at the end it would switch to the offer. It would say join now and get a free dog bed worth 60 pounds with your first box. And in some of the videos they were not promoting the bed. So to solve that, I got a picture of a dog in one of our beds and I just put it at the end of the reels. Okay. So, final shot, the final call to action, the offer.

Speaker 2:

Then I went into ads manager and I set up a campaign and I done the classic thing. I done the complete opposite to what Meta told me to do. Okay, classic, you go in, you learn all this stuff, you come home and you just don't do what they told you to do. I put about 10 different real ads into one campaign. Now I was speaking to people at the event who are having a lot of success with reels and all they do is reels. So I decided to try that setup. I just wanted a test campaign with only reels ads in it, wanted to test, um, as many different types of reels as possible, because I spent a lot of time creating and editing these.

Speaker 2:

But anyway, I put it live and it looked okay. It wasn't great. I was watching it for a few days, it was all right, it looked like it could potentially be good, and then it just completely bombed. And the reason why I think it bombed Was I had too many videos in that campaign. Okay, and maybe not enough budget, but there was too many videos and I turned it off.

Speaker 2:

Then I decided to make a new campaign and follow the instructions from meta. Now, if you're not familiar with those instructions, from the last video, let me remind you. Or from the last podcast episode, let me remind you. They say the ideal ad set should have at least one image, one normal video and one reals ad. Okay, and maybe, like you can add another image or another reals ad, depending on how big your budget is, but you should have different types of ads in the campaign. Okay, so you're hitting different types of customers and you're giving the algorithm opportunities to go after people across different placements. That's why they recommend that. So I put that live and the results on that have been much, much better.

Speaker 2:

Now it's still early days, okay, we haven't been running these for months or anything like that for me to like 100% say this is our campaign type going forward. But I will say what I have seen so far is very promising and our customer acquisition cost on that campaign has seriously dropped. It's dropped a lot. Still early days, we haven't scaled it up to any crazy budget or anything like that, but from what I can see so far, it has been pretty good. Now the hooks we are running at the moment are the following number one what's in this box will shock you. Number two what's in this box will blow your dog's mind. Number three this is what happens when you forget to buy your dog dog toys and it has like a short video of a sad dog and then it transcends into saying until buster box arrives and it's a really happy dog, happy music. And then, yeah, it follows the video type that I discussed earlier in this podcast episode. But, yeah, that's what we're testing with rails at the moment good signs.

Speaker 2:

Just wanted to record this episode to do a follow-up on last week's episode, to show we're actually putting this stuff into action. I'll do another episode at some point in the near future and I'll share how all of this is going now. I would highly recommend testing this stuff in your ad account and if you do test it, please let me know how it goes. I'm always curious to hear how things work which are shared on this podcast. You can reach me at leem at subscriptionboxexpertscom.

Speaker 2:

Now, before we finish up, can I ask you a big favor? If you've been listening to this podcast for a while and you've got value from it and you enjoy tuning in every Monday, would you mind giving me a review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts? It doesn't matter where. It just helps me get this show out to more people. Now. We'll be back next week at the exact same time and as always. 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. Thanks very much and chat to you next week.