#105 - Have you considered a Facebook Group for your business? Facebook Groups can provide the space for you and your members that will help in building good and long lasting relationships for your business.
In this week's episode of Subscription Box Basics, we will talk about five ways how your Facebook group can help your subscription box business.
LINKS AND RESOURCES
#105 - Have you considered a Facebook Group for your business? Facebook Groups can provide the space for you and your members that will help in building good and long lasting relationships for your business.
In this week's episode of Subscription Box Basics, we will talk about five ways how your Facebook group can help your subscription box business.
LINKS AND RESOURCES
Julie (00:01):
So you want to launch a subscription box and don't know where to start. Girl, you are in the right place. I'm Julie Ball, a subscription box coach, and your host here at subscription box basics, a podcast for new and aspiring subscription box entrepreneurs that want to avoid overwhelm. So grab a coffee, some pen and paper, and let's have some fun. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to subscription box basics. We are in the home stretch, happy holidays to everyone. I hope that it has been a fruitful year. It's been a challenging year, but I hope that it's also been blessed with so many things like friendship and growth and personal development and family and all the things. So today we're talking about five ways a Facebook group can help grow your subscription box business. I think this is important for me to talk about because we have had a Facebook group since almost day one.
Julie (01:01):
And one of the things that I love most is that when we survey our customers and we ask them, you know, what made you subscribe? Almost always. They say, it's the stuff, the goodies inside the surprise box, but then we ask them why they stick around. It's almost always for the community and that just warms my heart. It just really motivates me to continue the community and to pour into our subscribers in that way. And so I want to tell you five ways that we use it to help grow sparkle, hustle, grow in hopes that it will motivate you to have your own private Facebook group so that you can use these tactics as well. So it's important to say that our Facebook group is for subscribers only for sparkle hustle grow. It is a members only park. And because of that, there is a little bit of administrative stuff that goes into it.
Julie (01:57):
And I get asked this from time to time. So I'm just going to cover this upfront. How do you make sure that you keep your subscriber group up to date? So if you've used Facebook groups in the past, you know that you can ask certain questions on the front end before you allow someone in. So it's kind of like this gated thing where they can't just like jump into your Facebook group. They first have to answer some questions and then they have to have administrative approval to get into the Facebook group. So one of the things that we ask is what is the email address that you use to subscribe to sparkle, hustle grow? And then the second question is if this subscription was gifted to you, who gifted it to you, that way we can verify that they are an active subscriber. I have a virtual assistant that checks on that every single day.
Julie (02:47):
She basically goes in grabs that email address and yeah, it's manual at this point. Um, because we want to verify that they've actually paid to be a member since this is a members only park. So she takes that email address and crosschecks it in our Cratejoy software to make sure that they in fact do have an active subscription. If it was a gift giver, we're able to use that name and look it up in the same way. So that's out of the way. Now, here are the ways that we use our Facebook group and there are so many benefits. There's, there's way more than five, but these are the five I'm going to cover today. So number one is for communication. So often we have these things that we need to share with our subscribers. Maybe there's a product that's late. Oh, I hope not.
Julie (03:35):
But you know, sometimes it happens. Maybe you are, um, having some sort of customer service issue, or maybe there is just something that you need to tell them that's super important. Well, guess what, not everybody reads those emails. Even if you say urgent or important in the subject line, they might not open those emails. So your Facebook group gives you another outlet in which you can communicate customer service with them sales information with them, any sort of membership information with them. So for example, we communicate shipping day in there. We communicate when we drop our new business trainings in there on the first of the month, we communicate any time that we have a special sale or a perk or something like that. So you can use that Facebook group to communicate, and yes, we are sharing the same information on email, maybe as we are in Facebook as maybe even on social media.
Julie (04:34):
That's okay. Not, everybody's going to see that information in all the places. So I'd rather repeat myself and make sure they see it somewhere, at least in one place than feel bad about sharing the same information over and over and over again. It's okay. Share that same information. Use the Facebook group to communicate number two experiential elements. So one of the things that I think is important nowadays is that you're not just sending a box of stuff, right? You're more than a box of stuff. What else can you bring to the table? That's going to improve the entire experience or to just bring it up another level. And I'll give you a quick example. We have masterclasses in our Facebook group for sparkle, hustle grow. And so a masterclass is someone coming in doing a micro training, maybe it's 15 minutes, maybe it's 20 minutes, it's on a topic, um, that may or may not be specific to that month's theme.
Julie (05:28):
Sometimes we have them related to the seasons, whatever it is. We have a masterclass, someone coming in to share their expertise. Well that happens in the Facebook group. So that is an experiential element that can't actually be found as a product inside the box. And so think about that with your subscription box. Like what other elements can you bring to the table? Maybe it's downloads. It could be even something as simple as, you know, striking up conversation or having a poll or asking a question and getting people involved, getting them engaged in your community is so important for their experience. Number three, I kind of mentioned this earlier, but customer service guys, it's such a great way to blast out customer service information is by using your Facebook groups. So for example, if you are out of the office for the holidays, share that information in your Facebook group.
Julie (06:29):
If you have a shipping deadline for holiday gifts, share that information in there, customer service, maybe there's a problem with one of the products. Like I mentioned earlier, share that information in there, be transparent when it comes to that type of information too, because your customers will really appreciate you sharing the good, the bad and the ugly. They, they are not buying because you're this huge brand name they're buying because of you, they've been attracted to your brand, to your product and to you as the face of the brand. And so by being real with them and sharing customer service in there, you can really get closer to them and just have a better experience for all of your subscribers. Number four, upsell, you can use your Facebook group to share members only sales. We do this all the time. We do secret subscribers sales.
Julie (07:25):
In fact, we do a once a month members only deal. And so maybe that's save 50% on books this month, or maybe you're doing a, you know, um, buy more, save more kind of deal. Or maybe you are offering upgrades to annual subscriptions for a discount. There's all kinds of ways that you can do an upsale. W a lot of times we will offer new products in our subscriber group prior to putting them on the, like the regular website or sharing them publicly. And we position it as a member perk, like they get first dibs on this product, or they get first dibs on this, um, limited quantity deal, for example. So use your group to upsell. These people have already put down money for your box. Their credit card information is already in your cart system. So upselling them, these loyal subscribers, these people who have already spent money with you, upselling them is a great way to increase that average order value and to provide a, you know, make it a win-win like they get a deal and you get to do easy marketing.
Julie (08:38):
I love that. And the fifth way that you can use a Facebook group in your subscription box business is to build loyalty. People want to get to know you. So show up in your Facebook group to Facebook lives, um, post questions to engage in conversation with them, do surveys in there. There's so many ways. And all of the things that I talked to you about already, you know, communicating with them, um, doing customer service in there, that's all building loyalty. It kind of like the compound effect. All the things that we already talked about can help you build loyalty, build loyal fans. And as pat Flynn calls them build super fans. Those are the people that will go to bat for you. If you are having a challenge, those are the people who are going to shout it from the rooftops. When you ask them to share about their experience or, or to leave you a review.
Julie (09:31):
And those people will be with you for the longest time. So use that Facebook group to build loyalty with your subscribers and really get to know them. It's so fun when I, you know, slap a label on a box and I see that name and I'm like, oh, I recognize that person from the Facebook group, they're very engaged where they're a super fan and it just warms my heart. And it allows me to send them gratitude. And sometimes I'll even, you know, put a little handwritten note in. There were a little extra goodie and thank them for being a loyal fan. So let's recap the five ways that we like to use our Facebook group to grow our subscription box business. Number one for communication, number two for experiential elements, number three, customer service, number four, to upsell them. And number five to build loyalty.
Julie (10:30):
If you have any questions about how to run a Facebook group, or, you know, what do you post in a Facebook group? DMS on Instagram, our handle is subscription box bootcamp. You'll find myself and Renee in the DMS all the time. We love to chat with you. So send us a DM, an audio message, whatever it is with your questions or just feedback. We'd love to hear from you. So before I sign off for today, I just want to thank you so much for listening, for being a supporter of subscription box bootcamp and sparkle hustle grow. I'm sending you so much gratitude. It has been such a joy to serve you this year. And the next episode is going to be a re air of one of our most popular episodes while I take some time off for the holidays. So guys, happy holidays. I hope that 2021 was wonderful to you and I cannot wait to support you in your subscription box business in 2022. We'll see you then!