Launching Your Subscription Box in 30 Days? Here’s Exactly What I Would Do

Launch day is almost here, and if you're 30 days out, it's go time. In this episode, I'm walking you through exactly what I do in the 30 days before launching a subscription box. From email strategy to video content to building that waitlist, the focus is clarity, action, and momentum. So whether you're launching for the first time or you're reopening your subscription, this episode will help you show up with confidence and a clear plan. Grab your headphones, let's dive in.

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.

So you might be thinking, where has the time gone? Like, you literally blinked and suddenly your launch is in 30 days. And then panic sets in and you're asking yourself, did I do enough? Is my audience ready? Or what do I actually need to focus on right now? Don't worry, I've got you. Whether though you're launching your subscription box for the very first time or you're reopening your subscription to welcome in new members, this episode is your launch day prep plan. I'm walking you through exactly what I would do in the 30 days leading up to a launch. What I would focus on, what I would ignore, and what to double down on so that you can show up confident, ready, and actually get those signups. So if you're 30 days out or even thinking of picking a launch date 30 days away, this is your episode. So I got to thinking about this. This is a question that I got inside the Launch Your Box group that said, I'm 30 days out. I feel like I'm spiraling. And I want to know what should I be doing right now? And so here's, here's my thoughts. Like I sat down and said, if I was 30 days away from my launch day or if I was ready to launch, I would pick 30 days to launch in. And this is exactly what I would do. So number 1, like I would set the date, like for real, like this is the day I'm launching. Maybe you already have that. Set right now, and maybe you're like, I need to launch, but I just keep putting it back, you know, pushing it back. Well, we keep saying I'm gonna launch soon. I really get particular with people when they tell me like, I'm gonna launch in April. Oh, I'm gonna launch in May. I'm gonna launch in June. When? What day? What's your launch date? I want you to actually commit to a launch date. Having this very vague timeline will guarantee a delay. It'll guarantee that something else more important is going to come up and it's going to set back your launch. So I don't want you just to put it on the calendar. I want you to announce it. I want you to say it out loud. I want you to tell your biz besties. I want you to tell your audience. I want you to tell me inside Launch Your Box what your, um, launch date is because that's where accountability comes in. Once your audience knows that launch date, like once it becomes public, it starts to shift your energy and you can start showing up differently. You're like, okay, I've now announced it. This thing is real. I've got to do this. And so you have something that you're working towards. And then all we have to do is we have to start reverse engineering our plan and set it to that date. If you don't have tech set up at this point, you haven't built your list, or you don't have products sourced yet, you may need to look at 60 or 90 days instead. But if you've been doing the work, 30 days is plenty of time to get your launch out there and finish strong. Okay? So if I was 30 days away, I'm gonna start emailing my list like right now. This is where launches actually happen in the inbox. It's not just social media. So if you haven't been emailing your list, this is where we have to start taking action Immediately. And hopefully up until this point you've been list building, even if it's small. I've, I've been seeing some things going on inside Launch Your Box. We just did training about collecting opt-ins, building your list inside. And so people are actually starting to list building and somebody's like, oh my gosh, I have 30 people on an email list now. I have 100 people on an email list now. That's important. Even if it's small, it matters. So now we have to go from the stranger in the inbox to a trusted expert over the next 30 days. Like, we need to get them to know, like, and trust us through our inbox. So if you've been building that list, but you haven't been emailing them, we need to start emailing them weekly. We have 4 weeks to email them. That's 4 opportunities that we can get for them to fall in love with us. Right? If you've been sending an email weekly at this point, I want you to ramp it up to 2 times a week. We really have to warm them up going into the launch. Okay? So if you haven't started at all, get an email out ASAP and let's email them once a week. If you've already been emailing them once a week, let's push that to 2 times and really warm up that audience that we've been building. Now emails don't have to be fancy or long. They just have to be consistent and they have to provide some value. Okay, so here's some things like people always say like, I don't know what to put in an email. So let's talk about different kinds of content. What I love to really do is take some content from social media and put it in an email. We know that not hardly any of our social media list is actually seeing that. So how can I take what I'm doing on social media and put it into an email. So here's some things that we can send in an email. If you've done a recent unboxing, so if you, if you're just relaunching in the next 30 days, let's put the unboxing in an email, break it down item by item. We could do a subscriber share, like testimonials, quotes that they've given, little like, oh my gosh, it's my favorite box. Let's do some subscriber shares if we already have that. If we don't have— this is our very first launch. Let's do some sneak peeks. Let's do some behind the scenes. Let's tell your story to your new, to your new audience. Like, why are you creating this subscription box? Because I think it's really, really powerful. So let's build up to the launch that's coming. We've got to warm up this list because it's going to do a couple different things. It's going to build the trust that we need for them to purchase from us. It's also going to help get into their inbox instead of their spam folder, especially during your launch when you're emailing them more. So whatever you're doing now for emails, I want you to do it more frequently. So right now I'm getting— I'm gearing up for a launch in a few weeks and I'm emailing them very often right now because I want to make sure that these are getting delivered and I want to make sure that when my launch emails start pumping out, that they don't go to spam. So there's a couple reasons why we need to get in their inbox before launch, okay? And if you're not list building, if you're not building your list right now, this is something I would work heavily on for the next 30 days. If you haven't built a list, you might be more than 30 days out. If you have a small list, that's okay, but let's start talking to them. The other thing that I would do if I was 30 days away from launching is I would increase video views. Videos warm up your audience fast. So this is gonna be lives, this is gonna be reels, this is gonna be any of the videos. Okay? So they, when they hear your voice and they see your face, it's instant trust. You're actually a person. You're not a bot, you're not AI, you're not You're not like, they need, this helps them warm up. So static posts are fine, but video views are important because you can retarget anyone who's watched 3 or more seconds of a video from you. And this means that your content becomes an audience builder in your ad strategy. So the more video views we can collect over these 30 days, the more we have to retarget and also the quicker you're warming up your people. So I want you to do Facebook Lives. Um, if you— again, this is the same concept as how we're talking about in emails. If you're doing a Facebook Live weekly right now, 30 days before my launch, I would double it. I would do 2 of them. If you're doing Instagram Reels, um, I would double what you're doing. If you're doing stories, let's see if we can get into their stories every day. Anything that you can do to get views on your voice and your face is going to be, is going to be really important. And not every one of them have to be face to camera. Like you could do some videos of packing day or packing items or making items. You could tell a story about a product that you have in your shop. You could just talk about the what and the why of why you do your subscription. Same way that we're doing email. Whatever you're doing in email content, let's make video content in the same way. And you don't need to go viral, okay? Like, that's not the purpose. We're not trying to go viral. We're not trying to collect anyone. We're not trying to attract anyone. We just want the right people watching, and we need to create video that attracts them, okay? And then not in every video, But I would say 90% of your videos, I want you to sprinkle in that call to action of joining your waitlist. Again, getting them from video over to email. That's what we need to be doing. We need to be collecting the people that are most interested. And that really takes me into the next step that I would do. I would be driving people to my waitlist like nonstop, relentlessly, 30 days. This really should be your only call to action for the 30 days before you launch is driving people over to your waitlist. So if I'm posting something, maybe it's a behind-the-scenes shot of whatever I'm doing in the business, and I'm like, hey, it's coming, don't forget to get on the waitlist. If I'm doing a video, I'm saying join the waitlist, be the first to grab one of our subscription boxes. Like, I want to drive people over to my waitlist. Because that waitlist is going to be your hottest, warmest leads for future subscribers. So we should be spending these 30 days driving people to the waitlist. I want you to think of it as like your VIP line. Like, these are the VIP people that are going to be buying first, okay? So talk about it constantly. I want you to talk about your waitlist in every live. Almost every video, every post that you're doing about the subscription needs to be driving them to the waitlist. And I want you to put it at the end of every email. They are on your email list, but let's get them over to the waitlist, okay? And we can— like, there has to be something in it for them, right? So we want to create urgency with some benefits. Like, why would I want to be on your waitlist? You're going to get early access. So that's the best thing that we can do to convince people to get on our waitlist is that they're going to get to purchase before anyone else. Okay, so that's super important. And then, um, you could also offer them like a free bonus in their box, an exclusive gift in their first box. I want you to think of your waitlist as like this mini launch before the launch because you're going to send them the emails before the public launch. So that's really the benefit of getting on your, your waitlist, okay? Um, because they're gonna get first dibs. Like, that's the FOMO. Like, that's what we want to create. We want to give them the urgency from being on that list, okay? And so when someone joins our waitlist, here's another thing. I don't want you to just leave them on that list to go cold before their launch. Okay, so I've got like, I've got like 4 simple emails that you can put in an automation that when somebody joins your list, they'll get these 4 things maybe a few days apart. Okay, so let's talk about that 4 simple email sequence for someone joining your waitlist. Number 1, you wanna give 'em a welcome and an intro. Thank you for joining my waitlist. Here's what the business is. Here's what we're doing. Here's what's coming. Like, give them the overarching view of what your subscription box is and what it's gonna have. Give them the little intro to your business. Then on the next email, email number 2, I want you to go deeper into your why. So like, let's just talk about my t-shirt club for an example. If somebody was going to come into my waitlist for my t-shirt club, I would just probably have a picture of me in this email wearing a t-shirt saying, hi, I'm Sarah Williams, I'm owner of Framed, I live in Wichita Falls, Texas, where we print and pack all of your, you know, shirts right from our warehouse in Texas. We use soft quality, high t-shirt, you know, high quality soft I mixed that up in my head. Soft, soft t-shirts, high quality. Like I wanna tell them that these are really good shirts, inspirational messages. I'll probably show maybe some of the past shirts, like maybe 3 to 5 of the past shirts. So I'm introducing them to the t-shirt club. Then in the second email, I wanna get deeper with them. I wanna build a connection point with them. So I'm gonna tell them my why. I started the t-shirt club because number one, I was overweight. I didn't love the way I looked. I struggled with what to wear to make me feel good. And I, you know, I bought a t-shirt from some shop when I was on vacation, and I absolutely love the way it felt, the way I, you know, as far as physically the fabric and the way that I felt in it. And I knew from that moment I wanted to build a t-shirt club to make women feel confident and deliver inspiring messages. And I could go deep into that, right? Like, that's gonna— and there's gonna be another picture of me in there, right? Then on email 3, I can do a behind-the-scenes prep. So like, this could be maybe, um, the t-shirts coming off the screen printer, out of the heater, or maybe it's just folding the shirts and packaging them. Like, let's do some behind-the-scenes And then on email number 4, I could either show them the t-shirt that they're gonna get, or I could sneak peek like a couple of like a little part of the design or the color of the shirt. I could do a sneak peek, or I could just show them, hey, this is what's coming, you, you, you want to go ahead and sign up. But that is just 4 simple little emails that I can send to the waitlist to keep them excited and and to really help them connect with me. They, they may hear my why and say, man, I felt like that before. She can relate to me. She's not a super skinny, you know, model, Instagram model wearing the cute t-shirts. She's actually my size. She's actually a real person. She actually has curves and doesn't like her muffin top the way I don't like my muffin top. And so that creates content that makes you real and relatable. What's your why? and all we have to do is just keep feeding that to our list to keep them connected, and they're more likely to convert into subscribers when we open cart. Okay, so I want you to think about these strategies. Now, I would definitely be running ads as well. So if I was 30 days out, I would be strategically running ads, and here's a couple different ads that I would um, that I would be running. So I want to run a page-like ad. I want to keep collecting followers to my social media, right? So I would be running a page-like ad to get them over to my social media. I've got to constantly be building up my following and my list. I'd be running a freebie opt-in lead magnet ad. So just like we talked about, have you built your list? Don't stop list building. Okay, keep collecting people these 30 days before your launch. And that also goes with doing a waitlist ad. I would do like a sneak peek or some behind-the-scenes content of the subscription box is coming. Are you on the waitlist? You get first dibs on our limited quantity. I'd be running a waitlist ad 30 days before my launch so that I could continue to collect people. So if we're doing all these things, that's going to set us up to be the most successful during launch. And then here's the other thing that I don't want you to, to not do. Yeah, we need to be building our following, we need to be producing content in the form of videos, but also this is how you prep your launch stuff. You want to spend your 30 days not only really driving traffic to you and collecting the people, but you wanna be setting up for your launch. Like, don't wait until the weekend before your launch to write your emails. Don't wait to the day before your launch to schedule your social media or even plan out and create graphics. Like, all of this takes a lot of time. And you think, oh, I can do that the day before. Oh, I'll do my post the day before and the emails the day before. But what happens when you get into your launch timeframe, whether you pick 4 or 5 days or a week to 10 days, like whatever your launch timeframe is, you are showing up over and over. You're showing up on video, you're showing up in the inbox, your customer service is gonna increase. Like there's a lot of showing up you have to do. And when you get in the weeds of your launch, The last thing you want to be doing is building your content when you have like your brain capacity is on, you know, your last— I call it like your battery, like your battery's drained. You don't want to be building content when your battery is drained. What we want to be doing is writing those emails right now. Spend the 30 days. Working on graphics, writing your emails, planning your ads. Like, let's spend those 30 days planning the launch as well as still collecting people. And this should be our biggest opportunity to collect the warmest people for our launch. Excuse me. So here's, here's the bottom line. These strategies are not just for the 30 days before their launch. These are really habits of strong, consistently growing subscription box businesses. So while we may be in time crunch and we need to take action now, I want you to think about how you can be taking this action year round because that makes the difference in our growth and our long-term sustainability. This is what you should be doing 30 days before your launch, but this is also what you should be doing year round. I should be building my list, building my following, nurturing that list. And if we can get that habit in now, we won't have to constantly feel like we have to jump through hoops 30 days before a launch all the time. Your email and your video are foundational. They're not optional at this point. If you're like, I still don't want to do video, Sarah, you're, you're not going to have as great of a launch. So if you're okay with not having a great launch because you refuse to do video, that's something that you have to decide yourself. You've heard me say it over and over and over again, and if you're still refusing to do it, I need you to ask yourself why. It was hard for me when I was in that situation. I didn't want to do video, and I fought it for a long time. And I would see my business friends who weren't shy about video, they were growing faster than me. And I, I've been there. I've been with how you're feeling right now about it. And I'm telling you, we have to get over ourselves. We have to show up on video in this day and age, or we will be left behind, period. And if you're a procrastinator announcing that date is going to be your best accountability tool. So here's your homework. Set your official launch date if you have it, and we've got to announce it to the world. I want you to plan out your next 4 weeks of email to warm up that list. I want you to decide on a video schedule, whether you're going to do reels or lives, and what those topics are are going to be, let's, let's make a plan. And then I want you to create some urgency and energy around your waitlist and let's nurture them so we can treat it like it's our presale to the launch. This 30-day countdown, I want you to think of it not as pressure, but almost as a gift to force you to focus. You're not behind, you're right on time, but this time is so crucial and so important We've got to go. If you're a procrastinator like me— yes, I am— this 30-day jolt is really going to get you motivated and going, and I'm actually really, really excited for you. And then once we get this launch done, I want you to take the habits you've built in for these 30 days and apply them monthly. We should be doing these things every single month to continue to build our business continue to grow our subscription, and have that long-term sustainable business that we've been looking for. All right, let's get busy. We can do this.