172: Promoting Your Holiday Box Using Facebook Ads with Josh Coffy

The fourth quarter is upon us and one of the best promotions we can launch is a one-time holiday box. But why launch a promotion without ads? Let's talk about it today with my friend and colleague, Josh Coffey. Come join us.

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.

Welcome back to the Launch Your Box podcast. I have an awesome interview for you today. I'm talking with my friend Josh Coffey. Now, Josh is the founder of the Ecommerce Alley. He's helped over 300 clients generate more than $70 million in sales. He's also the host of the Ecommerce Alley podcast. And like me, he started his business 11 years ago in his spare bedroom. Mine was at the kitchen table. But I'm so excited to have Josh here today. Josh, just say hi to all the Launch Your Box listeners out there.

Hello everybody. Nice to meet you. And did you say you started 11 years ago as well?

Yes, I did. Mm-hmm.

2013.

Yeah, 2013. It was May 2013. Good times.

Oh, you beat me. We were October. So you have so much wisdom you can still bestow it.

So much knowledge from that kitchen table on you right now.

Heck yeah.

Let's talk. I want to tell them the story of how we met and our friendship, how it's developed over the years. But I got the best Instagram DM from you. I didn't know you at the time. I don't know how you knew me at the time, but you sent me— was it a video or a voice message? Do you remember?

I usually— when I usually it's video because I feel voice memos are a little sketchy if there's no video to it. But if you see the video, it's, oh, this is legit. And I sent you a video. Yeah.

So I get requests to be on people's podcasts literally daily. And so it's— I don't have time for— I would love to talk to everyone all the time, but it comes down to a time factor for me. So there's a lot of things that I pass up on and I'm like, I'm just really busy right now, or I don't have the time or things like that. You sent me a video and nobody had ever done that before. And I watched your video on Instagram and I was like, I love this pitch. I love the way that he sent me a video. Nobody— it's always like a formal email or something, and I'm just like, no. And it caught my attention and I was like, this dude seems fun. I would love to be on his podcast. And so you had me on as a guest in the Ecommerce Alley podcast, and that's how we met and quickly became fast Instagram friends. I think we chat over there a couple of times a month, and then I recently had you as a guest inside Scale Your Box, my higher level membership, walking them through some ad structure, which was super helpful. We still talk about it on a regular basis. They're like, I just watched the Josh Coffey training, I have questions. And, and so that was really fun. And then we also got to share a table together at Sub Summit this summer where we got to hang out a little bit more in person and have a good time. So that's how we met. Like, you can have real life internet friends and meet them in person and have a lot in common. I feel like, Josh, you and I could sit around and talk business like it— like somebody was talking about going on a trip or something. Like, we would just have this exciting flow. Like, we're— our excitement over geeking out over e-commerce businesses is really fun.

Yeah, I think it's, it's interesting because, like, when you're in the journey— by the way, if you want to know how I found you, okay, I went in Google and I typed Who is the coolest subscription box person I could ever interview on my podcast? And it's like Sarah Williams was every single option. And I was like, I guess I got to talk to Sarah Williams.

I love that. Thank you for that.

What's cool is like that podcast gets views and downloads every single day. And even on that YouTube video, that's 2 years old now, we get comments. We had 2 comments last week on— we have comments still coming through on that, which I think is just really amazing. And I think the other cool thing is that you start to get into this space, and when you're online, the challenge is you're often isolated in your own place. And then when you make these internet friends, like, it gives you this community. And what makes it better is when you realize how kindred spirits you are and how your personalities and a lot of your values and how you view life and business align. And I think for me, that was just reemphasized when we were at Sub Summit, and I just go to the front table and I just sit down there for your talk that you were giving that first night. And I just hear you talking and the way you just led this room with all of these ladies. I was like one of 2 and a half guys that were there, by the way.

Yes. All these ladies.

Yeah. And you get, you just led them in this way that life isn't all about this hustle, this grind. You got to die for your business. It's like about building a life that you love and building a business around that life that you love. And I think that is why we probably connect so well.

Yeah, I think so. I think that's why, you know, when we talk about things. We get so excited to talk to each other because we do align on so many different things in business and also in life. And so that just makes us really well-rounded. We are in the thick of Q4 right now. Like, we are hitting it hot, we're hitting it heavy. And I was thinking about— when I was planning out podcasts, I was thinking about what value can I bring to my listeners in Q4. And one of the things I was thinking about, and I've talked about it on the podcast a little bit before, but one of the promotions I like to do in Q4, and it's early on in Q4 is a one-time holiday box. So Josh, for me, this is just a one-time box that anyone can buy and it mimics my subscription box. So the items that are in it are similar to the items in my subscription box, but they essentially are going to gift this box to someone. A lot of times my subscribers are scooping these up because they don't want to miss any box that I put out there. So there's really a couple of ways that I promote this, like for our members listening. One, this is a great opportunity for you to test out your type of box before you launch. So get your idea into a holiday box, one-time box. I, I want to bring up our friend Nicole because this is how she started the GPig Box. She had joined Launch Your Box. Within a month, she put together her one-time holiday box for the guinea pigs, sold hundreds of them so quickly, and then in January of the next year, she launched the GPig Box and is killing it in the pet industry. But this is an idea for you to solidify what you're thinking before you actually launch. And so that's number one, how this is good. Number two is, like, for me, this adds additional revenue to my already solid subscription box business because I have subscribers that buy it for themselves, I have subscribers that buy it for other people, and it's an opportunity for my audience to get a box where they've never been a subscriber before and understand the that goes along with receiving a monthly box. I really use this as leverage for my subscription box business. Everybody listening has one of those two things. One, it's a perfect time to test your idea before you launch, or two, let's grab additional revenue on our existing subscription box business.

I love that. I like increasing LTV. So you're saying in this, say, in this scenario, this is not part of the ongoing subscription already. This is a one-off separate. So you get to increase lifetime value with existing customers and you also get a themed entry point with a lower commitment because it's a one-time for new customers that you can then potentially, if it's not just only a gift, but potentially ascend into a subscriber. Yeah.

Like what it would— how would you feel if you got a box like this every single month? And then for my subscribers, it's such a convenience factor. They don't know what's in this box. This is a mystery box, just like my subscription. They don't know until they open that box. So for me, it's a great way for my subscribers to gift to someone because they— it takes the stress of what do I buy this person? You're just grabbing a box because they're going to love it. It's going to be for me because you love your boxes. So I'm curating a whole gift experience for someone on your list and it just reduces the stress of those people that are purchasing that.

Okay, so when you do a mystery box, you don't show anything that's inside it.

So I give them— I've learned over the years, if I give them a little bit of information, I sell more. Okay, so before I would just say mystery box, here's the price, it's on sale now, go grab one. And I did well with that. I would sell hundreds of, hundreds of boxes. And it was mostly my subscribers because they knew what to expect from me. And so in order for me to really get in front of new people or really have new people take a chance on me, because that's basically what they're doing, I had to give them some more information. So I've got two, I've got two holiday boxes I'm about to launch. So one of them's a $75 box. And this is what— this is the information they get. It comes with an oversized tote, an exclusive design sweatshirt by Sarah Williams, a pair of earrings, and a mystery item. This is what's in box number one. Box number two is our PJ box. You're going to get a super soft pair of pajama bottoms, a monogrammed item and a mystery item. So those are— and that one's $45. So those are— that's all the information they get. They don't know the color, they don't know the sayings, they don't know any of that. But if you like tote bags, sweatshirts, earrings, go ahead and grab this one. If you love our pajamas, because our pajamas are a staple in our subscription, in our shop, go ahead and grab this one. So I've got two price points for two different customers, and I've got two options so that they have choices, but they don't know anything else. They don't know how cute these items are. They don't know what they're saying on them. They don't know. That's going to be the surprise.

Okay. You said the second box, how much is that? $45 PJ. Okay, gotcha. It's interesting because this methodology goes against a lot of marketing logic, right? Because you want great clarity in what people get. But I think— but there's this other component of mystery that is also exciting, particularly during the holidays and gifting. Because it's already going to be a surprise for the person receiving. But now you add this other layer of comp, of excitement for the giftee, for the person, or gifter, the gifter. Yes. To the giftee. So I think that's like double level of excitement. That's pretty cool. PJ Box. That sounds awesome.

Yeah.

Love that.

So when I was lining out this podcast, I thought we need to talk about ads because here's what I know. A lot of people that come into my coaching group they're building their business organically and I 100% support that. I built my, my business organically for years, but I also know the importance of Facebook ads and how I spent a lot of time curating these boxes, Josh. So there's a lot of investment here, not only in product, not only in packaging, but in the time that I spent curating these boxes. So I want to maximize the sale of these boxes. And so the best way to do that is with Facebook ads. Would you agree with me on that?

Advertising is probably one of my number one love languages, so I'm definitely going to agree with you on that. I think the other thing too is like everyone's going to be— everyone listening right now is in a different phase of their business. And so whether it's now or later, the most important thing to know is that you have to figure out advertising. You cannot be a predictable new customer acquisition business that gets customers every day if you don't have advertising figured out. And if you look at— if you want to be a top 1% store, what do they all have in common? It's the ability to predictably acquire new customers. And I would even ask you this, Sarah, in your— some of your more— the ones that you know in your group that are crushing it, are there any that are crushing it and predictably scaling and growing like that, that don't run any ads? There might be an outlier or two. I will say there's always outliers.

I think about my mastermind and I wouldn't say that they run no ads, they just run very few ads, but they spend massive amounts of time showing up in front of their audiences. And that's the difference. You can grow organically and you can sell organically without ads, but they are spending massive amounts of time on live and nurturing that community and just showing up in stories, lives, posts all the time. And then they sprinkle— what I love about them is they have this massive audience I'm thinking about two in particular, and all we have to do is sprinkle a little ad juice all over what they're doing and it just explodes. So whether you have a massive audience— I don't have a massive audience, Josh, so I need more help than that. If you have a tiny audience or you have a medium-sized audience like me, we need— what we— this is my thoughts on ads, Josh. It's like a fire. Okay? We got to have the wood down. We got to have the base of the fire, the foundation of the fire. That's our business. That's our messaging. That's our products. That's what we do. We have to have the base and then we light that fire with some sales. And that can be organic sales. It could be a sale here, a couple of sales here. That's what we're building the base of our fire. But the gasoline that we throw, that lighter fluid that we throw on that fire, that's our Facebook ads. And so you can have a slow burn in your business without any ads. But if you're really trying to get some traction and really trying to make a difference and really trying to make sales and profit, we got to have lighter fluid. And so that's what I think that most people don't understand about ads is that we got to have a good foundation first in our business. And then once we see something is working, we throw the lighter fluid on it.

Yeah, no, I think that's a great analogy. Just not if you're in California, because you might set the whole place on fire. But for non-Californians, yes. In advertising, I'd even say for the outlier scenarios of people that build big businesses organically, that have this like TikTok goes viral— we had a client that did 3,200 orders in a day because TikTok went viral for them. That stuff happens. But for the rest of us human beings that or not that there is this component of like to grow, you have to figure it out at some point. And that's why I say it's not like, it's not like, should you? It's like, when should, like, when should you figure this out? And sometimes you're in the beginning and it's like, yeah, let's get these logs laid. Let's make sure they're dry. Like we, that we could light a fire here or else we try to light it and it doesn't work because my checkout is broken and my product has issues and I can't get product in time to fulfill on that. And people are upset. So get the foundation. But like advertising is one of those things that The beautiful thing about it is you don't have to spend $100 or $1,000 a day or these like crazy amounts of money to get going in it. It scales as your business scales. And so we have people that we work with in the, in our ecosystem and world that are just getting going. So they're starting with smaller budgets. And then we have people that are spending absurd amounts that you couldn't imagine every single day. And but they didn't just show up there. And so I think the good thing is the thing to know is that you have to figure it out at some point or another. So why not start now and start small? And by the way, the best time— if you— it's probably going to skew your perspective of advertising, but the best time to start is in Q4 because people are spending money like it's going out of style. Regardless of the election, people will still buy. There's always like this skepticism around that idea, but like people are going to buy money, spend dollars like it's going out of style for the holidays. And so you have this additional advantage of buyer behavior that changes. So if anyone listening right now is like, I've never advertised, I'm barely into it, still trying to figure it out. Keep pushing. This is the time to do it so you can take advantage of this Q4 momentum that's kicking in and it really will kick in starting in October.

I love that. So let's just for anyone that's unfamiliar with ads or maybe just dabbled a little bit, can we walk through some different types of ads that we could be running in Q4?

Yes. So Do you want— so from like an ad standpoint, the first thing we look at is when you run a campaign on Meta, you have different objectives you can choose. Now, my perspective on what objectives you should only almost ever choose is different than other people's. So like I just had a— I just was on a podcast. Susan Bradley, another friend of ours, I had her on the podcast. Her episode released actually this Monday and we were talking about it and you could run for engagement, you can run for traffic, you can run for video views. Or you can run for leads or the thing that we run 90% of our budget to, and that is conversion purchases. And as a note, if you are starting at zero, I do not believe— and I have a— we have over 300 brands that we work with and I have their ad accounts, access to all of them. And I will say that of all of those, some that are new, some that are very seasoned, even the ones at zero, we're able to go straight to purchase campaigns and start driving purchases that were at Zero. We had a subscription box that I met in January of this year, and there are 500 subscribers now, and they went from nothing to spending tons of money a day profitably, by the way, on Facebook from zero. So straight into purchase campaigns. So if I'm looking at what do I do, number one recommendation, run purchase-based campaigns. That's the first thing. The next thing is I'm going to lean into what is simple. Like you could go on YouTube and search, how should I run a Facebook ad campaign, and you're going to get a gazillion different recommendations. So I'm now a gazillion and one for you, but my recommendation overall is to just stay simple. Advantage+ shopping campaigns, and we could talk about it. I have a structure that I'd probably recommend. I'm recommending all of our clients, but they don't get this recommendation for another couple of weeks. So we'll see how this— you guys get first dibs, but you keep it simple and, and go in and just start slow and just increase as orders begin to come in. That's probably the easiest thing. And I don't know how deep, by the way, you want me to go into structure. I'm also happy to do that. Or if we want to save that for later, I'm happy to share what I would do from a structural—

Let's, let's talk about it. So you're saying, okay, so everybody that's new to Facebook ads, I'm going to break this down for you. We're going to go in and set up a conversion campaign. We're going to run to an Advantage+ audience, which is the easiest, simplest way to set up a Facebook ad. And so let's talk about that campaign.

Okay, so what I would do is, yeah, so we create a conversion campaign. I'm going to go Advantage+ Shopping campaigns. That's like a default now, but you can do manual. Ignore manual, that gets some more advanced stuff that we would do. And what I'm going to do is select Advantage+ Shopping. And then when you are in this campaign, you can set budgets daily or you can set budgets lifetime. It depends on what kind of campaign you're running. And let me ask this. Are most of the boxes— so is it like a— are you like doing Black Friday, Cyber Monday sales arrival for Christmas, or are you like trying to do it all? Is this all something you start running in October all the way up to—

No. So this would be a preorder campaign. So I'm going to walk you through the structure of this promotion for me. So I take 5 days in October and I run a presale campaign. I'm all for urgency, scarcity, and giving people a reason to buy. So I put a time frame on it. So I'm running it like a mini launch, Josh. So I'm going to show up, I'm going to say it's your opportunity to preorder your Christmas box. And so I will do emails, lives, ads, all the things for those 5 days and I'm cutting it off. And typically I will either sell out or I will have just a little bit left that I'll then resell once we start shipping these out. These will ship the first week of December. So my goal is to get all of these orders in now before November so I can start working on these before I get into my Black Friday sales.

Ah, okay. This actually makes this really easy then, because I was going to say, because you can sell up until a certain point and then you have Black Friday and— okay, so let's build it out based on this strategy here. We're just building this plane as we jump out of the air, which is, by the way, really good. Sarah and I are really good at building planes. On in the midair. We've gotten really good at this with a lot of people. If I'm launching a campaign, it doesn't matter how seasoned you are or like, or how much you're spending. So if I'm like at zero, I'm running the same campaign structure I'm going to give you. If I'm spending $3,000 a day, I'm going to run the exact same campaign structure. So I'm giving like this wide zone.

So I'm saying with this, if I'm, if I've been zero, what should I start with? What is a good daily amount that I could start with if I'm really budget conscious?

So I'm going to have to think in terms of what is your AOV of this box? Are most people doing 1 or 2 boxes?

Probably 1.

1. Okay. What— let's just put a $50—

let's put $50 on 1 box. If that— does that help you?

Yes. Yes, that does help. So let's say you're a $50 box. You have to think in terms of what your expectation is based on what your price point is. And so if you have a $50 box, you can't spend $5 a day. And expect to get a purchase a day. And because if you did, that would be what's called a 10 return on ad spend.

Yeah.

$5 in, $50 out.

Yeah.

That is not realistic. So we have to look at realistic expectation. Now there's some variation in here, right? Is this only one box or are they offering people to also potentially prepay for 3 months? Gift this.

This is just a one-time holiday box. That's another promotion we do in November.

Okay. You have to think about your AOV and then think, what is— what am I trying to accomplish? I'm going to reverse engineer this. Let's, let's play a scenario. I have a $50 box. What's an average amount of boxes somebody is going to try to move for that?

Maybe I want 10 sales a day.

Okay. 10 sales a day. So I'm going to reverse engineer this. And if some of you starting at zero, you might get a little scared, but you got to think through this. This is 5 days, right? If I want to move in a day, Right. I'm trying to move 50 boxes. If I'm trying to move 50 boxes, I need to say I need to establish a— now this is going to get a little nerdy here. I'm going to have to draw this out here. So if I move 50 boxes, what's the average margin? 50%. Can we say 50% or is it—

Yep.

50%. Okay. So essentially minus $25 in COGS, let's just call it you have $25 that you're working with. So if I'm working with $25, I need to then say, okay, is my goal just to break even? Sometimes, by the way, the goal is to break even. The goal is to say, how do I acquire a customer and break even so that way I can get them to buy other stuff later and subscribe? Because all of you wonderful subscription people have this great thing called lifetime value that is way higher than most other people. And so sometimes the expectation is to break even. What would you say, Sarah, is what's the typical expectation here? Most people want profit, I get, but like what's a realistic expectation?

Realistic expectation would be $15 to $18. Acquisition costs for me.

Okay. So if I was to look at this out of $20, $25, that means you're— let's use $18. I'm going to use $15 because this is easier. If you have $25 left in profit and you want to say, I want $10 in profit per box, I want to have essentially $500 in profit from this. I can spend $15 to acquire somebody. Just run the math on that. 15 times 50 is $750. So I'm going to take 5 days and I'm going to spend $750.

Okay, let's stop there because I love this, because here's what we just did. We just managed our expectations. A lot of times in what I see in our group is that we want to spend $10 a day, and when we don't see results from $10 a day, we think that our ads are a failure, our product isn't good, I don't know how to do this. But we have to manage that expectation. It's going to cost you probably more than $10 for an acquisition on a purchase like this. So if you're only spending $10 a day, you're likely to acquire one or none a day. And so you have to manage your expectations with your ads. What I see from our members is that they're spending $10 a day expecting to have multiple sales a day, feeling disappointed, feeling like they don't know how to do ads or they're— what they're doing is not working. You just broke it down and managed our expectation in that one simple segment right there. And I think that's important for anybody that's running ads. And it's a great reminder for me too. Like, I'm thinking I need to increase my ad budget that I just gave my ads manager because that was not a realistic expectation budget that I gave her. And so that's the mental load that we have to take. And so we, we've got to be able to say, what is this worth to me? Can I get 50 boxes on ads and probably 50 boxes on my email list? So now I can sell 100 boxes. That might be my expectations, but I'm going to have to go spend $750 a day to get those 50 on the top, on the ad part of the business. And so we've got to manage our expectations on getting that purchase, right?

Yeah, I think this is a really good— it is a good pause moment here to say that one of the first things that we— because we teach Meta ads, like, we were— Meta ads is like our love language, and we teach it inside and out all day, every day. And one of the first things that we teach all of our clients is that marketing is a mathematical equation, not an emotional decision. And so often we become emotional about our marketing because we think that this is the— this ad is going to do great, or this is what's going to happen. But statistically statistically in life, most things fail. But, and, and what, that's what usually makes people leave. It makes them drop out. It makes them just like get in their heads about this and then they just wither away. But it's also good because the thing is, if you have this expectation, the most stuff I do will fail. When I get to the thing that works, that changes the trajectory of my entire life. And so this is part of those skills you have to acquire. And with advertising in particular, because it is mathematical, it's not emotional. What that means is it requires great degrees of mental fortitude. That's what it requires. And I'm going to give you— we have— we give our clients a couple of rules when they join and start working with us. And everybody here should do this. If you have Ads Manager on your phone, delete it, because what's going to happen is that wrecks your— that, that messes with your headspace. You're going to be going to bed and it's 9:37 p.m. at night and you see that you have no sales or you don't have the sales you want, or the cost per acquisition or return on ad spend isn't what you want, and insert whatever. and then suddenly you're going to bed in this negative headspace. You can't sleep, you're stressed out, and then you wake up in the morning and you find out, oh, wait a second, all the sales came at 11:42 PM and 1:37 AM and everything worked out. And so we tell our clients, delete Ads Manager, get that, because you aren't making decisions based on what you read on your Ads Manager on your phone. So if you download the Ads Manager, even if you're brand new, a lot, they try to push you to download it. They like really try to push you to And if you download it and you're doing it and you're going into your kid's birthday party or you're going to some friend's house and you happen to check Ads Manager, it's not what you want. You're going to be in this negative headspace. And so advertising requires great degrees of mental fortitude because it is mathematical. It is not emotional, which goes against how human beings work. Human beings are very emotional creatures, which is why emotional marketing works. But advertising is a numbers game and you— and so you have to remove that. It's really hard to do that. So I think that's— that is a really good pause moment. Like everybody here, you have to manage expectation. And if your tolerance for what the math I just ran— let's use this scenario. If your tolerance for spending $750 in 5 days, which by the way is $150 a day, is above the tolerance threshold in which you're okay with, then your expectation has to come down and you have to say, okay, what is my tolerance level? And then manage that expect— I never say the word manage expectations, but that's the word I should probably start telling all our clients. Yeah, you need to manage expectations. I say your threshold has to come down, but that's a better way of saying it. That's good.

Yeah. And that also tells me, okay, if I spend $150 a day, I'm working towards acquiring 10 boxes here. What would happen if I spent $300 a day? Can I push my budget? Can I push myself? Can I push myself out of my comfort zone to really maximize this promotion? Because here's what spending that kind of money is going to do for you. When you're going to make sales, they're not going to be as profitable as your organic sales, but that's okay because you're getting in front of more people. And that should be our goal every single day as a business owner is how do I wake up and think about how to get in front of more people every single day? And that could be from a great offer, that could be from that ad, that could be whatever that is. We constantly have to get in front of more people. You're right, we have recurring revenue, our LTV is higher, but we also have cancellations every single month. And if we get in front of more people and get into people's shopping carts and get into people's homes, we will never have more subscribers. So when we think about selling this one-time box, it's not just about the sale, but it's about this funnel of getting them to become a subscriber at some point.

Yeah, and like, my goal in my business is to spend as many dollars as humanly possible on advertising without losing money. And even if I'm breakeven, I'm okay. Because what happens is it's like the whole, the more you spend, the more you make. Ads are a, a, a tide that raises all boats. Here's what I see happen. When I advertise, people come to my website, they join my popup, and they don't buy for 2 and a half months. They come to my website, they add to cart, then they see an ad 17 days later, and then they buy because they're in my retargeting audiences. They follow me on social media. So So your email list grows, your social media grows, your brand perception— like them just seeing you grows by just seeing your ads constantly in the feed. And the goal over time should be to continue advertising, manage the, the percentages, which I think I covered ad spend percentages in your, in your program, target allocations and current allocation percentages. Manage those and your ad account will be in check and it won't eat your bank account, which is the goal at the end of the day. Yeah. So what I would say is, so there's two ways to look at this. Way number one is to say, how many boxes do I want to move? And reverse engineer to how much I need to spend based on that expectation. Way number two is to say, I am willing to spend this much and then reverse engineer that to say, this is the expectation. So I might say I'm willing to spend $300 over the net, over this $5,000. That's my tolerance level. I'm just like, I recommend our clients if they're coming from zero and they don't know what to do, work in what I call budgets. Sprints. Say I'm willing to commit this much for this week or this much for this period of time. And then once it's done, you get to look at all the results and say, what went well? What didn't go well? What can I learn from this? And then the next time I do it, I'm 42% or 28% more efficient and better because I learned. So if that's the other way to do it, say I'm willing to spend $300, reverse engineer. So my expectation now is 20 boxes.

What kind of advice would you give for someone that is maybe starting out, maybe they've ran some ads, they really want to run some ads in Q4 and get themselves out there. How— what advice would you get for them to make the most of sales and the most of their budget going into Q4?

I'm going to say— yeah, sorry, sometimes I have to pause and think.

I'm totally putting you on the spot right now. I can see all the wheels turning in your head. Right now.

So if I'm going to maximize sales, you have to look at how behavior starts to shift in Q4. What happens in Q4 is that a lot of gifting becomes popular, which is great. So you have to model your pricing and you have to model your options and plan for that, right? Because if gifting is popular, what does that mean about LTV? If they buy one box and it's a gift, the probability of the renewal is probably a lot lower than if they're buying for themselves or someone in their family or for their kid. So you have you have to prepare. So if you want to maximize sales, you have to say, okay, there are two buckets of people. There's probably going to be people that will buy and remain subscribers, and they're probably going to be people that don't want to subscribe, but they want to buy this one-off. So dependent on your model as a subscription business, you need to look and say, how can I appeal to the gifters and potentially move them into this evergreen where they'll subscribe for a long time and then make sure that it's all uniformly presented without having to have a lot of different campaigns. So what I'm going to do is say, okay, If I know that some people are gifting, I'm going to try to maximize what I could potentially get on that with offering 3, 6, 12-month upfronts, knowing that grandma is going to buy this for a grandchild. And if you only have one box, you're only going to get AOV times 1. But if I offer these prepaid, so I'm going to prepare for the fact that it's gifting season. Even if you normally don't do gifting, this is a time to say, let's take advantage of that. If you— but then on the flip side of that, I'm also going to say By the way, even in the one-off box, this is something I would consider doing, adding in an upsell in that because people are buying it one time, offer an upsell to say, hey, you could also start your subscription for a discount on the November box or on the Thanksgiving or the next month's box to get them in there. Like, oh, I just bought this box, I get a discount, get 50% off or whatever on the next box. I might as well go ahead and do this. So I'm going to offer what's called a pre-purchase upsell so that I'm taking these one-offs in these gifters and saying mathematically, I will get a percentage to say yes to ongoing. So that's from a sales standpoint. I'm going to look to say, how do I maximize that along with like, how do I add additional stuff? And that's not very ad-y, but that's from a strategic standpoint. Your ads should not be going to a million different places. They should be going to one really consolidated, really focused so you can master that funnel, that you can offer the gifting because that's what season is. But then also you have the ongoing you can do. And you try to get to the point where you move gifters over to ongoing as well as maximize lifetime value of those right up front, knowing that they're probably not going to renew in January unless they prepaid.

Okay, I love that. I'm thinking about, okay, I got to get a thank you page onto that one-time box with an upsell for a gift subscription. I'm on it, Josh. I got this. And then I've got to create an email flow on the back of that one-time box to get them to buy the gift subscription as well. Thank you for putting that in my brain because that's really important because then you're maximizing that $15 acquisition cost to its fullest potential, right? So then you take that $15 acquisition cost and you're like, it's not just for that one-time box, it's for this and this because you've got them in your sales funnel now. And then the cost doesn't feel so heavy that I'm giving away over half of my profit on this box, but I'm actually increasing their LTV as I go right off from that first purchase. So I love that.

Yeah, I— if you're okay, if you're okay, Sarah, I do want to finish the structure. I got rabbit trailed, right?

I'm sorry. That's because of me. Because it's important.

Yeah. So we need to reverse engineer what we need to do. But then now what do we do? I reverse engineer and I've created a budget. Let's say I am going to spend $750 in 5 days. How should I actually do this and what is required? When you're working in short timeframes, I call them promo sprints because you're sprinting a promotion in a short period of time. We just did this. We just held a bootcamp and I sprinted all of our ad spend in 14 days for this event. It's all in 14 days, which is still a tight window. You're in 5. It's tighter. Black Friday, Cyber Monday, it's 4, so it's a little bit tighter. So when you're doing sprints like this, there is no time for real optimization to like really kick in. It's just because it's so fast. And so we want to go in with our entire game plan and all of our ads and everything ready to go. So I'm not in the middle of this panicking and trying to create create new ads. And so you want to go in with all of your ammunition so that way you give it to Facebook and then you start to trim fat as you go. So here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to run one campaign. It's going to be Advantage Plus, and I don't know, stop me if you need me to explain anything based knowing your audience. I'm going to go Advantage Plus shopping campaign, which is a purchase campaign. Inside of that, I'm going to set a lifetime budget, not a daily budget. Lifetime budgets behave a lot differently. We see them perform a lot better. Lifetime budget, meaning you set a start date and an end date. Perfect. You got 5 days. So start at 12:00 AM on day 1, end at 11:59 PM or 12:00 AM technically on day 6 because it'll shut off right after 5 days. Set the time frame, go lifetime budget. Inside of Advanced Shopping, you can choose what are called existing customers and engaged audiences. I don't know if you want me to get into nerdiness there, but I could just give a high-level This is where you can add in under customers. You could define your customers. I don't want you to put your customers only in there. I want you to put your purchasers, your customers. If you have a list integrated and your website visitors in the last 180 days, those 3 things. After that, you could choose a percentage that you want to go to retarget those people. I recommend that you do 5 to 10%. You can choose your pick there. Then the only last thing you need to do are ads. With ads, I go in heavy and we're seeing this our observations right now are that more ads is way better. So I'm going to go in with like 10 to 15 ads and it sounds crazy and a lot of people like, oh my goodness, like creating 10 to 15 ads, like that's a lot of ads to create. The thing is, people will see one ad and they may not like it and then they get retargeted and they see another one they don't really like and then they get retargeted and they see the, the fourth ad in 2 days and then they buy. And so what we're seeing is large volume of ads. And by the way, we're going to do an ad is just one headline, one primary text, one creative. We see images outperform videos.

As a side note, it just outperformed video right now.

Yeah, across— I would say if I could probably count on one hand, and I work with— we work with almost 300 clients— I can count on probably one hand how many are their top performers are videos. Maybe two hands, maybe two. I can maybe go to two. 90% video does. Video CPMs, or cost of advertising, is almost double typically what images are. Images we see doing really right now. And the other type of ads that we see doing really well— this is for everybody, take note of this— I'm coining the term "addy ads." They're ads that look like ads. They're not ads that look like they're supposed to blend with lifestyle images into the newsfeed, because a lot of those are people that they don't— they're intrigued, but they don't have a high degree of intent. So they click and then they don't buy. So an addy ad looks like this. You show the box, you show someone what's in it. It says mystery box and it says only $50, only $49, whatever. That is an addy ad.

Ad.

It looks like an ad, and we're seeing behavior as people want to know what's an ad and what isn't. Just a side note there. So we would do that and then have 10 to 15 ads. Now, this depends on your ad spend. I'm going to go 15 if they're spending heavier. I'm going to go at least 10. And it sounds like a lot, but the requirements of greatness are greater than what you're probably doing now. If you want to get mediocre results, do mediocre crap. If you want to be great, do great things. You know what greatness requires? A lot of stinking reps. It requires a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff on the courts, shooting for 10 hours a day before you're in the playoffs or before you're in the Super Bowl. They don't just show up and expect to win. They prepare for that. And so if creating 10 ads sounds like a challenge and it sounds hard, it's because it is hard and it is a challenge. But the people that put in the work are the ones that win in the long run. So if you want your best shot out of the gate, if I was starting at zero, and I'm like, this is my first time, I'm going to hedge against loss and say I'm going to go above and beyond in the time that I invest in creating these ads so that I have the best probable outcome and it minimizes my potential, my potential loss or my potential like negative stuff happening inside my campaign. So that's what I would probably— that's the campaign structure and that's it. And then as you go, here's the optimization for everybody as you go. Just trim, turn off ads if the performance of the ad is just really bad. It's all going to latch on to 1 or 2 or 3 ads. It's very normal for that to happen. If the campaign is performing fine overall and you're happy in the total campaign is at $15 cost per purchase, don't touch anything. But if it's higher, then go to the ad level and then just turn off ads that are getting all the spend but aren't producing anything.

I love it. You broke it down. And I think the mindset of You got to put the reps in. I think that's so important, Josh, because we think that we have to win at every turn. We think that we're going to do something and we're just going to have amazing results. But we have to practice. We have to understand ads. We have to know how to optimize. And if we never get started, we're never going to get good at them. And so it's a fear a lot of people have because it's complicated. It's not easy. But you just said greatness doesn't come from something being easy. It is hard. Hard because it will produce really great results for you. If it was easy, everybody would do it, right? That's the part of being an entrepreneur. If it was easy, everybody would be an entrepreneur. No, we wouldn't have any employees because everybody would be working for themselves. It's not easy to be an entrepreneur. You have to have the reps in to be an entrepreneur, right? And so I love the way that you talked about that as far as, um, book ads goes. Now, before we close this up, what is your one piece of advice that you would give to anybody listening right now that is maybe, I have never run an ad, I'm inspired, I'm motivated, I want to do this. What would your advice be for them as they dive into this world?

The first person to climb Mount Everest was probably scared. That had to have been terrifying. The first person to have summited Mount Everest and survived was probably really scared as well because nobody had gone forth and done it before them. And so if it feels like Mount Everest is in front of you, the only way to get to the top is to start climbing and to weather the storms. And as you start to get up, you're going to— you become smarter, you become wiser. And so if you feel like it's a mountain in front of you, of stuff because Meta ads is complex and you've never done it and it's new. That's part of the challenge and it's scary, but it's beating every one of those giants along the way that make truly great entrepreneurs. And it is a requirement for that. And so I just want to encourage you because you know what, I see people every day, just like I know Sarah sees people every day. Take that first step with their box, start the process. It's scary to figure out your vendors and figure out all of that, but they do it. It, and they are greater because of it. And so I would leave on that. I think it's going to be scary, just do it.

Nike. Josh, yeah, where can they find you? Because you're great to follow. I'm just going to tell you all that. Go follow Josh, go listen to his podcast. Give them all the deets of where they can— the best places to follow and consume some of your information.

I love Instagram, so yeah, @JoshCoffey, C-O-F-F-Y, like the drink but more caffeinated usually. On Instagram, yeah, check me out, Josh Coffey. And then also we have a free Facebook group as well called the Ecommerce Alley. There's like 8,000 of us or something like hanging out in there. Check that out, that's pretty cool. But, uh, yeah, that's really it for me. I'm not really much of a Facebooker or a TikToker. I am a podcast, Instagram, Facebook group guy.

Go check out and subscribe to the podcast. It's the Ecommerce Alley Podcast. Josh, thank you so much for your time today. I know that my audience got a lot of value out of this episode. So we'll be back next week for another great episode. Thanks for joining us on the Launch Your Box podcast. If you're looking to grow your audience, head over to launchyourbox.com and grab the 10 steps to help you start building your audience guide. It's packed with practical tips to help you connect with your future subscribers. Until next time, keep launching and growing on your Subscription Box Journey.