On today's episode of Subscription Box Answers, I am revisiting my SubSummit session on '7 Secrets to High Converting Meta Ads.'
A lot of people have reached out to me asking me to share the slides.
So I have decided to cover the session again for those that couldn't make it to SubSummit.
For the vast majority of subscription box businesses in 2024, meta ads are still the most effective way of growing your business.
We have acquired over 50,000 subscribers just from meta ads alone in BusterBox, and in this presentation, I share 7 secrets which I have learned over the years."
This episode will make a BIG difference to your customer acquisition.
You Can Download The Slides at www.SubscriptionBoxExperts.com/slides
On today's episode of Subscription Box Answers, I am revisiting my SubSummit session on '7 Secrets to High Converting Meta Ads.'
A lot of people have reached out to me asking me to share the slides.
So I have decided to cover the session again for those that couldn't make it to SubSummit.
For the vast majority of subscription box businesses in 2024, meta ads are still the most effective way of growing your business.
We have acquired over 50,000 subscribers just from meta ads alone in BusterBox, and in this presentation, I share 7 secrets which I have learned over the years."
This episode will make a BIG difference to your customer acquisition.
You Can Download The Slides at www.SubscriptionBoxExperts.com/slides
Welcome to Subscription Box Answers with your host, liam Brennan. You're no rubbish, no crap. Straight to the point podcast with real, actionable tips, real strategies and insights from the industry which will help you start and grow your own successful subscription box business. You ask the questions, you ask the questions, you ask the questions. Liam gives the answers. It's as simple as that.
Speaker 2:Welcome back to a brand new episode of Subscription Box Answers. As always, I hope you're having a great day. I'm just back from sub summit and, yeah, as expected, I had a great time. Really good conference and a big shout out to all of the people that I met in person. That's my favorite thing about sub summit connecting with so many people from the industry in person, who I know online and in some cases, I've worked with for years. Really great meeting all of you. And also a big shout out to everybody who came to my session Seven Secrets to High Converting Meta Ads. The room was packed and I hope everybody got a lot of value.
Speaker 2:On today's episode of the podcast, I'm actually going to go through the session one more time because after it I had a lot of people reach out to me via messenger messages, email, whatever asking to see the slides, either because they never made it to SubSummit or they were at Sub subsummit and they were busy doing something else and they couldn't make my session. So what I'm actually going to do is, in the show notes, I'm going to put a link to the slides and I'm also going to go through them one more time on this podcast now. Obviously, this is a audio podcast and some of the slides have ad examples, videos and images which you won't be able to see. But if you download the slides separately, you will be able to see what I'm talking about. So let's jump into it. Seven secrets to high converting meta ads. Now, the first slide is obviously about myself. I'm not going to go through that because you obviously know who I am if you're listening to the podcast. But let's pick up from the next slide my goals of this presentation.
Speaker 2:Number one share simple but effective information that will have a big impact on your advertising. We're not going to overcomplicate things today and get into the deep mechanical side of running Facebook ads or anything like that. No, we're going to keep things simple because I know for a fact simple changes to your advertising can have a big impact. Simple changes to your advertising can have a big impact. Number two I want to give everybody something they can take home and implement immediately. I want everybody listening to be able to grab onto at least one of these secrets and say to themselves this is a chance of working in my business. I'm going to implement it straight away. And finally, I want to help you improve your customer acquisition, because customer acquisition is the lifeblood of any company. If you want to grow a successful company, you have to be able to acquire customers in a repeatable, profitable and scalable way. If you can't do that, you are going to struggle. So let's jump in to the secrets Now.
Speaker 2:You're going to notice that the first few secrets actually have nothing to do directly with running Facebook ads. The reason I've included them is, if you get these dialed in, it will make the process of running Facebook ads so much easier. So, secret number one the offer is the key. Now, anybody that has followed me for any amount of time will know I'm always banging on about the offer. We test so many different offers in BusterBox, and the reason why I'm always banging on about it is it's really that important. Having an unbelievable offer makes everything so much easier. It makes it so much easier to sell your product. You will lower your customer acquisition cost dramatically when you have the offer dialed in and you will be able to drive more volume than you thought possible.
Speaker 2:Now, when it comes to marketing and offer creation, there is a balancing act. You do have to be careful, because if you go too aggressive, you may end up attracting bad quality customers who will drive up your churn. So there's actually a metric you should follow to ensure you're going in the right direction with your offer creation and marketing, and that's your LTV to CAC ratio. And your LTV to CAC ratio basically allows you to measure how much your customers generate in gross profit over the lifetime of the subscription compared to how much you spent to acquire them in the first place, and you should be aiming for three to one minimum. This basically means you earn back at least three times in gross profit compared to what you spent to acquire them in the first place gross profit compared to what you spent to acquire them in the first place.
Speaker 2:Now I'm going to show you some winning offer examples from my company, busterbox. Number one a free sweeping robot, aka a robotic vacuum. Now, the way we positioned this was if you sign up for a six or a 12 month subscription, you're going to get this free in your first box and it's your dog's personal cleaning buddy. It will follow your dog around the house, it will clean up after them and your dog will go crazy chasing it. It's a really popular offer. The next example offer is a free dog bed. So you'll get this bed for free in your first box, and everybody who owns a dog knows you will eventually hit the point where you have to throw the bed out or wash it, and for a lot of people, they just prefer to throw the bed out and get a new one, and that's why this offer is so powerful for us and why it converts so well. Everybody who owns a dog is close to needing a new dog bed at some point, and it performs particularly well, especially coming up to christmas.
Speaker 2:The next offer sign up and get 50 off your first box plus a set of free earphones. And the way we positioned this was you'll get the toys and treats, you get the earphones, you can bring your dog for a walk and you can listen to music in the earphones. More offer examples. The next one sewing up and get a free cooling mat with your first box. This is a really powerful offer, especially in summer when it gets really warm. The next one sewing up and get 50% off your first box plus a free portable projector. Now, the way we positioned this was sewing up, you'll get the toys and treats, you'll get the projector, you and your dog can relax and watch a movie together. Finally, sewing up and get a free smart doorbell. The way we positioned this was this doorbell can be used to stop your dog from going crazy barking when the mailman or somebody else comes to the door.
Speaker 2:Now, I could literally spend 24 hours sitting here talking about offers, because we've tried so many different things and we put so much effort into this, but we obviously don't have time for that. So I just picked out six offers that have done really well for us. Now, when it comes to offer creation for your own subscription box business, there is something you need to be aware of, especially if you're going with the free gift option Whatever free gift you pick needs to tie back to your niche in some way. This is really important because if you don't do this, you could end up attracting poor quality customers who aren't the right fit for your company. Now, all of the offers that I went through, some of them are pretty crazy, but they can all tie back to a dog subscription box in some way, and that's why they work for us, and that's something you really need to be aware of.
Speaker 2:Okay, moving on, here are some other subscription box offer examples from completely different companies to my own. These are gigantic subscription box companies my own. These are gigantic subscription box companies and the majority of subscription box companies that have really scaled up understand how important the offer creation is and they put a lot of time and effort into it. The first example is from Ipsy, and this offer is if you signed up around Mother's Day, you will get a free gift worth $50 for your mother. I imagine it drove a tremendous amount of signups. The next one is FabFitFun, and I love studying FabFitFun. They're brilliant at direct response marketing and they come up with some very powerful offers. The example I'm covering now is a free bundle. If you're signing up for an annual membership, you'll get a free bundle worth $200 and you can see all the different products in the ad image. I imagine this drove a lot of signups. Finally, butcherbox ButcherBox If you sign up, you will get free salmon in every box for a year, worth $384. Really powerful offer.
Speaker 2:Secret number two lead capture is essential. Make sure you have multiple opportunities to collect leads during the customer journey. So when somebody comes across one of your Facebook ads and they click on it before they get to your checkout, you should have an opportunity to collect their email address. If you do this correctly, you will drop your customer acquisition cost significantly because you're giving yourself multiple opportunities to sell to these people and you're also collecting valuable assets for your business every single day. And those emails can obviously be used to sell subscriptions, sell other products or, if you ever choose to sell your company at some point in the future, and you have a gigantic list that's going to help you drive up the price.
Speaker 2:Now we have two ways of collecting leads in BusterBox. The first way is our signup flow. If you head over to BusterBoxcom and you head down our signup flow, you will notice we have an email collection point built in. The next way is a simple squeeze page, and sometimes we will send half of our traffic to this squeeze page. And the purpose of a squeeze page is to do one thing and one thing only, and that's to collect as many email addresses as possible. And the way it works is it's just a really simple page some information about our box, some information about our offer and a red button saying yes, I want to claim this offer. They click it, then they have to input their email, then it redirects them to our homepage where they can complete sign up. Now both of these collect a tremendous amount of leads for us. We're converting, on average, 30% of visitors into leads and I actually think it's quite a bit higher. On our squeeze page, I think it may be close to 50%. So obviously both of these email collection points are performing a lot higher than just a standard pop-up that you might find on most websites that usually don't convert that great.
Speaker 2:Okay, secret number three it sounds so simple, but you need to follow up with your leads. Regular follow-up is essential. What we do in BusterBox is we have a five-day abandoned cart sequence. So what will happen is if somebody comes over to our website and they leave their email on our squeeze page or our sign up flow and they don't buy immediately, we will follow up with them automatically for five days. Then, if they don't buy from us, they still don't buy from us. They will move into our regular sales blasts and we'll send different offers at. Move into our regular sales blasts and we'll send different offers at them. And our regular sales blasts go out on a Monday, wednesday and Friday but resends going on a Tuesday, thursday and Saturday.
Speaker 2:And the reason why we do this is not everybody will be ready to buy straight away. You need to put yourself in your customers shoes, buy straight away. You need to put yourself in your customers shoes. There's great customers out there, but it just may not be convenient for them to sign up to your box right now. And that's absolutely fine. Imagine somebody is on the bus on the way to work. They come across your ad. They like it, but they don't feel comfortable pulling out their credit card. They're not going to buy from you. They could be waiting until they get paid on the Friday. There may be something on your website putting them off. Whatever, if you collect the lead and you follow up with the lead regularly, you will turn a lot of those leads into paying subscribers, which will mean you will drop your customer acquisition cost and increase your volume by doing this, and your Facebook performance will look so much better because you're not just depending on your direct cack from Facebook.
Speaker 2:Secret number four turn engagement posts into conversion ads. So this is an old school strategy that still works really well. What you want to do is you want to set up a engagement campaign on a lower budget and you want to grab the posts IDs and turn them into converging ads, and what will happen when you do this correctly is you will get a lot of comments and likes aka social proof on your ads, and these ads will convert so much better. Let me show you two examples from my company, busterbox. The first one is an ad that we've ran for a long time which had 6,400 likes and a lot of comments. The next one is another ad with 4,100 likes and a lot of comments. Now, both of these ads convert really well for us. I've tested the exact same ads without the engagement strategy and even though they do perform well, they perform so much better with the engagement strategy. And even though they do perform well, they perform so much better with the engagement strategy. And again, you want to put yourself in a potential customer's shoes. If you came across an ad on your news feed and you liked the product, but there wasn't much comments and likes, you might be a bit sketchy about pulling out your credit card and signing up, but if you saw the exact same ad with a lot of comments and a lot of likes, yeah, you're more likely to pull out your credit card. That's the power of social proof. This is really easy to do, so you should definitely do it with all of your campaigns.
Speaker 2:Secret number five Targeting is not as important as you think. So the days of getting very granular with your targeting are pretty much finished Not for everybody, but for the majority of subscription box niches they are Open targeting and bigger interests tend to do better usually cheaper cpms. So back in the day, if we were selling buster box on facebook, we may have to get really tight with our targeting. We'd be like we're targeting women between these ages in this location who like this, this, this and this, and then we'd find a really defined audience and it would work for us. Nowadays it's not so much like that anymore, because Facebook's algorithm has got a lot more powerful and you can actually help guide it through your creative. And that brings me to secret number six Creative is everything.
Speaker 2:A big mistake companies make is they put 90% of resources into ad budget and the technical side of running ads, when more time and effort needs to be put into the creative. People get absolutely obsessed about how many ads and ad sets they should run, what bidding strategies they should do, all of that stuff. And even though that stuff is really important, what's more important is having creative that actually converts, having a website that converts, having your follow-up in place and having your offer dialed in. If you've all of those things working, the tagging is not that important. And something else to bear in mind is, if you want to reach all of your potential customers, you should run a combination of video and image ads, because the way the algorithm works is it knows what people are more likely to respond to images and it knows what people are more likely to respond to videos, and if you're leaving one of those ad types out, you're potentially missing out on a lot of potential customers. And that brings me to the next thing producing video is not expensive.
Speaker 2:Now, in the next slide I'm going to, I basically show two example videos from buster box, where we got a lot of people signed up and we just produced some videos on the phone. What I did was I wrote a quick script and I went around to two people's houses that I know with a box who had dogs and we recorded really quick videos, we sent them out and we got a lot of people signed up. It's really straightforward to produce videos like this, especially for a subscription box business. Now, if you're interested in seeing the videos, I highly recommend downloading the slides, because you'll be able to see the two example, videos in there. Okay, and secret number seven unprofitable ads allow you to scale. So this is for the people who are looking to scale up and spend a good amount of money.
Speaker 2:To scale successfully, you will likely have to combine lots of ads, ad sets and campaigns. It's very unlikely everything is going to be profitable on an individual basis. You know, sometimes in some niches you will find that you can run like a couple of ads and a couple of ad sets and just crank up the budget and it'll work really well. But for the vast majority of companies this is not the case. You will probably have to combine lots of different things together and everything may not be profitable on an individual basis, and this is absolutely fine. Everything doesn't need to be profitable on an individual basis once it's all profitable together and all of the different ads and ad sets and ads are helping you drive the volume that you need to drive because, remember, blended cac is all that matters. So don't get so bogged down on all the individual different things, especially if you're looking to scale. I'll give you an example. You may have loads of different ad sets and like three of them are really profitable, two of them are kind of profitable and you have one that isn't profitable but it is helping you drive volume. And when you take a step back and you calculate your total CAC, it's on target and every single one of those ad sets and ads are helping you reach the volume you need to reach. That's all that really matters. Okay, so that was my presentation from sub summit seven secrets to high converting meta ads. Now, if you're interested in following along in more detail and seeing some of the ad examples and video examples, I highly recommend downloading the slides from the show notes.
Speaker 2:We'll be back next week at the exact same time. If you have a question you want answered on the show, as always, head over to subscriptionboxresourcescom, join the free Facebook group and post your question there. And just one more thing If you've been listening for a while and you've enjoyed the content and you feel like you've learned something, could you do me a big favor? Would you mind just giving me a quick review on Apple, spotify or wherever you listen to this podcast? It just really helps me get the show out to more people. Thanks very much and chat to you next week. Bye-bye.