106: 7 Ways to Market Your Subscription Box Cost Effectively

Hey Sarah, how do I get more subscribers? I feel like I've hit a plateau and I just want to grow. Listen, I hear it all the time, y'all, all the time, and there isn't an easy answer. But what I do know is that you don't have to have an investor or extra piles of cash laying around to do it. On this episode, I've put together 7 ways to market your subscription box cost-effectively. Come listen.

Welcome to the Launch Your Box podcast with weekly tips, tricks, and strategies to start, launch, and grow your subscription box. Now here's your host, Sarah Williams.

I've got a great little episode for you today, and I want you to really think about it. So when I go through some of the things I'm going to talk to you about today, I just want you to think about what you're doing, what you're doing consistently and effectively. What you could be layering in. And I want you to open your mind to the things that maybe you're doing that are just a routine habit. I want you to think about them differently, because if I can get you to think about them differently, it'll change the way you do these, these things. Okay, I'm being vague right now, but we're going to get into it because today I put together 7 ways to market your subscription cost-effectively. And a lot of people think about growing their subscriptions, and you might think about growing your subscription, and it means that you have to spend obscene amounts of money on ads. And while that is one option, I wanna talk about more cost-effective ways that we can do this instead. We don't all have big piles of cash laying around just to throw into ad money agencies. Ad sets, Google, Facebook, TikTok, all the places where you could run ads. We don't all have big piles of cash laying around to do that. We don't have venture capitalists just giving us wads of money to market our business. So how can we as small business owners of America or across the world, how can we use our skill sets, our capacity, our knowledge without having to put a lot of money behind it? And how can we market our subscription box effectively for a, a relatively low cost. And so I've got 7 ways that we're gonna talk about that today. Think about what you're already doing in this list that I've created and think about ways that you could go a little deeper in these 7 areas. Or maybe there's one that I'm gonna talk about that you've not thought about before, or maybe you've not had capacity to do before. So we're gonna layer that in as well. Okay, so let's start with number 1. Number 1 is leveraging social media, and I know that you're thinking, well, duh, Sarah. But here's the thing, we don't think about it in this way. A lot of times we think about it— social media is something we have to do. We think about social media as like this daunting task. But listen, I want you to think about it in a different way. I want you to think about how social media is basically free. We set up an account for free, we start posting for free, we can interact for free, we can talk to our potential ideal customer for free. These accounts are free and they're going to help you reach your ideal customer. I know I've said it before, I know y'all laugh at me every time I say it, but I have been around in the days before social media. Like, it is so expensive to do a newspaper ad. It is so expensive to run a TV commercial. Social media is free, and we need to leverage that to market our business. And all we have to do is get social. All we have to do is get social. We have to create things that are social We have to socially communicate with people on social media. We have to give them some content there. And I want you to think about which social media platform your ideal customer is hanging out at. Okay? Think about who it is. Think about what their age range is. Think about what they do in their lifestyle and think about where they're hanging out. Because here's, here's the fact: you don't have to do all social media. Okay, you don't have to be everywhere. Now, the more places you are and the more places you are consistently, the more potential reach that you'll have to find new customers. But we can start with where our people hang out, with where our ideal customer is. That's Facebook, could be Instagram, it could be Pinterest. Maybe your customer's hanging out on Twitter. Maybe they're YouTube junkies. Maybe they're over on LinkedIn. Let's figure out the best place that our ideal customer is hanging out, and let's get social on these social media platforms. We want to create posts that serve and engage that audience. The idea here is that we need to leverage these free platforms. Y'all, they're free. It's the most cost-effective way that we can put ourselves out in the world, put our business out in the world, put our subscription box out in the world and be seen. Let's not hate it. Let's not fight it. Let's use it and leverage that to benefit our business. Okay. I love social media. And I think that when we like what we're doing, when we love the way we're marketing, we can really lean into it. I want you to start loving social media so you can leverage it in the right way. Number 2 is influencer or affiliate marketing. Partnering with micro-influencers in your space or your industry, or maybe even offering an affiliate commission is super cost-effective because listen, a lot of times we could send influencers the product for free. That doesn't cost us a lot. Or we can set up an affiliate partnership with them that where if they sell something, they get a commission. And the great part about that is you don't have to pay someone until they sell something. So you've already made money and then now you're paying it as a commission. This can be super cost effective for getting in front of new audiences, especially when we think about these people have been social. They have no like and trust factor going on. They've already built an audience. People trust them. People consume their content. They've built these relationships, and now it's very easy for them to pull in your product, your subscription box, and show it to their audience who they already have a relationship with. So this could be one of the most cost-effective ways that you could use to market your subscription box. Number 3, you hear me talk about this a lot in Launch Your Box. I talk about it in Launch Your Box. I talk about it in Scale Your Box. I talk about it with my mastermind students, and it is email marketing. Okay. There is some cost involved in email marketing, but it is very inexpensive compared to all the other ways that we can spend money to market our business. Email marketing is still an effective way to get in front of our audience. Okay, so there's a couple things that you need to think about when we talk about email marketing. First, I want you to think about how you're going to get them on to a list. This is creating some content that people are going to want, that they're going to give you their email so you could send it to them in email. So think about how you're going to get people on a list And then I want you to have a strong strategic plan to market to that list. So it does no good spending your efforts getting people on a list without using that list to create a marketing plan for your business. So number 3 is email, and it's super, super important. Number 4, it goes right along with what we were just talking about as far as email marketing, but that is our content marketing. Okay, this is us creating valuable content such as blogs, videos, ebooks, opt-ins, etc., to attract your ideal person. We want to use that content to get them on an email list, and then we can use that email list to market our subscription box. We don't even have to use email when we use content marketing, but it's the most effective way that you can do this. So we want to make sure that we have some strong content. The best way to market your business is to have some strong original content that serves your ideal customer. So think about the ways that you can help your ideal customer. Maybe it's how-to videos. Maybe it's some cheat sheets, maybe it's a checklist. Think about different ways that you can serve your customer. Then we get them on the list that way, and now we can market to them through our email marketing. So number 3 and 4, they go hand in hand. Number 5 on my punch list today is customer reviews. So word of mouth is super, super powerful, right? I mean, how many of you listening right now read the Amazon reviews before you ever buy a product on Amazon. I, I mean, I'm one of them. My son will say, Mom, can you get me this on Amazon? I said, did you read the reviews? Like, we need to know what other people think before we buy that product. How many times are you on an app like Yelp and you're looking at reviews based on where you're going to eat dinner that night? We all do it. We all do it. So that's what we— I want you to think about. I want you to think about how powerful word of mouth is. And I want you to use those customer reviews as ways to market to your audience. We want to encourage and maybe even incentivize our audiences to leave us a review, to go over to Google, to go over to the website, leave us a review, leave your thoughts and feelings about something, because that's all we need sometimes to market our subscription box. People need to know how other people feel about you and your business. Sometimes all you have to do is ask. And so I'm just going to ask you right now, can you make sure you leave me a review about the Launch Your Box podcast when you get done listening to this episode today? I'm asking. A lot of you are going to go over there and leave me a review, and I'm going to appreciate it so much. And that is also going to bring in other people that will come listen to my podcast based on your feelings about the podcast. So Customer reviews is number 5. Number 6, and this has been something we've not done a lot in the last couple of years, but number 6 is in-person events. And I'm gonna tell you, like, in-person events is how I built my entire retail business. I did shows, I did events, and this is where I built my customer base. And so that is something I want you to think about. What is happening in your local area as far as an event? What are other places that you could travel to, to be a part of an event? And think about it this way. Think about pop-up shops. Think about farmers markets. Think about expos. Think about shopping events. Like, where does your ideal customer go? That they could find you in person. And yeah, there's some costs involved to this. So you probably have like a, a booth rent, like a booth fee. There's maybe some travel expenses with that, but you're going to get in front of people that have never seen you before. And then you're gonna leverage your social media so they can follow what you're doing. You're gonna use your email marketing. Hopefully you're getting them on a list while you're at an event, and then you can market to them. But in-person events are a really cost-effective way to get in front of new people. Those people use word of mouth with their friends and family, and that again, it gets you traction and it gets you in front of more and more people. The next one on my list, number 7, is building a community. You guys are part of this community. You're part of the Launch Your Box community, whether you listen to my podcast regularly, whether you are a member inside our membership, you've taken a course, or you just follow the Facebook Lives that I do every Monday, you're part of a community that I have built. And you can also do this with subscribers. And that's why your content is so important. It will help you spread the word faster than anything else you can do if you build a strong community around your business, around your brand, around your subscription box. And you've gotta remember that it's not about the stuff. The community is about the people. And you can use that community and you can create a brand ambassador program. You could do a refer a friend promotion with your community. There's lots of different ways that building a community can help you market your subscription box really cost-effectively. There's 7 things we just talked about. I'm going to go through them real quickly. Leveraging your social media, influencer and affiliate marketing, your email marketing, content marketing, your customer reviews, going and participating in in-person events, and really taking the time to build a strong community around your subscription box business. And the bottom line here is that you can't rely solely on one of these items, okay? You can't just say, I'm going to do this one only. You really, really need an effective multi-channel marketing strategy. Having this plan doesn't have to be so time-consuming and costly. It's about taking one of these ideas Building it into your regular routine and do that for a while. Like, you don't have to say, okay, this month I'm going to do this, and next month I'm going to do something else, and next month— it's taking that one item, making it a routine, making sure you're doing it to your fullest extent. And it might take 6 months for you to get really comfortable with that. And then it's about taking something else and building that into your marketing strategy as well. We talk about this a lot in my Scale Your Box course about how we start with one marketing aspect and we continue to layer them in. And before long, we've got this really solid multichannel marketing system that we're rinsing and repeating what we're doing. And it's a proven strategy to continue to grow and scale your subscription box business. So I want you to think about all these ways as finding new people. Getting in front of new people, and new people equal new subscribers. Okay, I want you to always remember that when this question comes up inside our membership of how do I get more subscribers, we have to get in front of more people. That's the only way we're going to continue to grow and scale. New people equal new subscribers. All right. So I want you to sit with this and I want you to really think about what you're doing, what you could be doing better, and what you could lean into and start new. All right. And I'm going to remind you to go leave me a review about this podcast. Make sure you subscribe to the Launch Your Box podcast. I'd love for you to take a minute to rate and review it. Let me know which episode is your favorite so far. Don't forget to join me next week right here.