Unbox the Inbox | Email Marketing for Online & Offline Businesses
Gary Redmond founded his Subscription Box business BusterBox.com in 2016 with no prior business experience (and no money).
After failing for many years, he eventually grew it to over $11 Million in total sales, learning exactly what it's like trying to grow a business on limited resources.
This led Gary to try and master the super-powerful and free (but often underappreciated) marketing channel which is email marketing.
Everything you hear on the show is proven, and Gary shares these battle-tested growth hacking strategies so you can implement them in your business right away to make more money.
If you're a beginner, you will get a grounding in the fundamentals of email marketing and how to apply it to get your business off the ground.
For more advanced folks, we'll dive deep into cool and clever hacks you can use to optimise and automate the most critical areas of your business.
This podcast is for entrepreneurs & business owners who want to learn how to use the power of email marketing to acquire, retain and upsell to their customers on autopilot.
Gary will also do his best to entertain and inspire you to create the business and the life of your dreams through your online business.
Topics covered include email marketing, e-commerce, consultant, coach, expert, entrepreneurship, automation, productivity, subscription boxes, advertising & business.
Unbox the Inbox | Email Marketing for Online & Offline Businesses
Why A Marketing Agency Can't Save Your Subscription Box Business
Ever feel like you're tossing your marketing dollars into a black hole? That's the gut-wrenching sensation I tackle head-on as I, Gary Redmond, share my unfiltered take on the pitfalls of outsourcing your subscription box business's marketing to an agency.
This episode isn't just a rundown of dos and don'ts—it's a candid conversation about the crucial distinction between simply generating traffic and actually making sales, plus the vital role you, as a founder, must play in steering the marketing ship, even with a top-notch agency like Blackbird Marketing on board.
Brace yourselves for an eye-opening session where I drop truth bombs on why handing off your customer acquisition might not be the magic fix you hoped for. Through hard-hitting stories and a no-nonsense breakdown of ad metrics, I expose the often-disappointing outcomes of a hands-off approach.
It's all about collaboration, strategy alignment, and keeping your finger on the pulse of your campaigns. Whether you're neck-deep in your entrepreneurial journey or just dipping your toes in, this episode is a treasure trove of insights to empower you to take charge of your marketing destiny.
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Welcome back to Unboxing Inbox with me, your host, gary Redmond. On this podcast, you'll learn how to grow your subscription business using the power of free and mostly automated email marketing, and we'll hopefully have some fun doing it too. I'm a co-founder of BusterBoxcom and also a mentor and coach helping founders like me and you create their dream life through their subscription business. So today we're going to talk about a topic deeply close to my heart for all the wrong reasons. Okay, talk about a topic deeply close to my heart for all the wrong reasons. Okay, talk about that for an intro. So this is something that I've heard so many times and it hurts me deeply, not least because, well, let me tell you a couple of stories. The first one let me tell you the topic of the episode why a marketing agency can't save your subscription box business.
Speaker 1:Okay, so I recently had an interesting talk with one of my students about using a marketing agency for a subscription box business and she told me oh yeah, I started working with an agency and they were now quote unquote, running her ads. Okay, and I was like how's that going? And she went blank, said well, and I said, before she had a chance to speak, said like what's the cost per click? What's the click-through rate? Is there any conversions on your ads? If not, why not? What offer did you run? And she looked at me like I just like stepped off a flying saucer and came from a different planet, right. So the problem was, um, she hadn't even logged into ads manager, had basically no idea if it was working or not. She's paying this agency, but all she knows is that she has not got any conversions yet. Okay, which kind of reminded me about the amount of times I've heard statements like this we hired an agency and they didn't get as great results. Okay, they tried their best but it just didn't work out. Or I've been really burned by agencies in the past. Okay, or my personal favorite one, gary, I've learned more from you in an hour than I did from working for six months with an agency.
Speaker 1:Okay, the second story that actually really hurt my feelings was a client who told me and this person was kind of hesitant about working with me and doing coaching with me and stuff for what I charge and she told me that she's been paying $3,000 a month for an agency who she doesn't speak to, who literally send out a few ads for her and I was like I need to start charging more money. So like I'm not here to bash agencies, because we use an agency, okay, and they're unbelievably good at what they do in BusterBox, blackbird Marketing and just give them a shout out, but they help us with creating all of our ads, all of our emails, all of our tech website changes. But the reason why it works well with us is because we still retain control of the strategy and the marketing. Okay, and the reason the relationship usually breaks down between founders and agencies is because you could just outsource all of the selling, okay. So I mean, look, I get it.
Speaker 1:The hardest part of running a subscription box business by far is getting customers. Okay, and it's still the hardest thing we have to do. We've been running for eight years and we've over 10 000 subscribers, okay. So when the thought pops into your head, when you get to a few, you know, a few hundred or a few thousand subscribers I wish I just didn't have to get customers. Okay, I should just hire an agency and they will get them for me. Okay, but the answer and I had this is my time to put up my stop sign and say stop, okay, because you're making a big mistake because you want to outsource your customer generation when really all you're doing is outsourcing your traffic generation, and even then, only a part of the traffic generation process in terms of the creatives and the images for use in your ads and your emails and, obviously, someone to put them into Ads Manager and into your email sender and send them out. Okay, but generating sales actually goes much, much deeper than generating traffic.
Speaker 1:Okay, because on a daily basis, the three of us and our art from Blackbird Marketing are basically involved in coming up with ideas to increase our conversion rate. That could be a new offer. That could be adding a new section to the website talking about the benefits of the subscription. That could be adding a squeeze page to capture more emails. That could be sending emails twice a day instead of once a day. We're also coming up with new products for stuff that we can use for offers. So what offer can we try? And if our offer goes stale, we have to come up with a different one or rotate it so we keep our emails and our ads fresh. We also have to test the new offers, we have to set them up on the website and we also have to come up with ideas for more email capture. How can we tweak the signup flow? What can we do? We're also monitoring ourselves. Liam is monitoring Facebook, instagram and TikTok. If we're using it, I would be monitoring the emails. And then we're also coming up with new upsells, new cross-sells, and testing those on our website as well. So, if your head is spinning, unfortunately, that's what you need to be doing in order to be focusing on actually selling your subscription box businesses.
Speaker 1:Okay, and that has to be done by the founder on your side, because only you understand your customers and or your competitors and the market enough to try these things. Okay, an agency is going to have 50 clients or 10 clients or 12 clients. They're not going to jump in and try and understand your customers and figure out what copy, what offers, what sort of upsells, what kind of tech ideas that you might come up with. They can suggest things here and there, but they're not going to basically join your founder team and come up with all the ideas for you basically themselves, but they can help you with the implementation of your ideas and they help us with the implementation of your ideas. Okay, and they help us with the implementation of our ideas. So the agency we use is brilliant for for creatives, for tech, all that sort of stuff, and we they've all the tech, the design skills and the tech skills that the three of us do not have, but we still come up with the ideas. We still drive the marketing team.
Speaker 1:Okay, because if you think that hiring an agency is the answer to generating thousands of customers, if you have no idea how to generate customers yourself, then you're heading for a big disappointment. Okay, I'm going to tell my student about this and you guys know this about me by now. Like I'm, I'm always blunt, I'm always honest, okay, and I've basically said, like you need to keep the agency honest. Okay, these people will take your money and then they will implement a few ads and a few emails that work for other clients in other industries and if it doesn't work for you, they'll take five grand a month off you and trot our hands up after six months and go sorry. So you need to be able to.
Speaker 1:You need to know this stuff, okay, you need to know what offers are likely to work. You need to do the the research and test these things yourself, because no agency will ever care about your business as much as you do. They'll set up the ads to your site, check them every day or two. They might offer some suggestions to increase conversions, like changing the colors and making the text bigger, but really what actually drives changes in conversions on our website is new offers, and mainly new offers, pretty much because the website itself is doesn't really change too much. But you need to be coming up with the ideas, taking out the test and monitor the results with the agency.
Speaker 1:Another thing is you need to be monitoring the results yourself. You need to see, okay, what was the click-through rate on those ads. And if the click-through rate was high but the website didn't convert, then the problem is not the ad, it's the website conversion rate. Okay. And if you're capturing emails and you've got a high email capture rate but your emails are not being opened, then it's the subject lines. Or if the emails are being opened but they have a low click-through rate, then the email design or the offer is not driving clicks okay. So you need to understand and that's the founder level knowledge that you learn from someone like me who works with you as a coach, because that's what you need to know in order to even outsource any of the any of the like creative or tech side of things. Okay, they can help you do at the agency, but the selling remains your responsibility, and when you're responsible for it, then it gets serious.
Speaker 1:Okay, so, learning how to and knowing how to and the selling part is up to you. Okay, so you may have heard me say this a million times, but, like, the framework we always use is obviously optimizing the website to convert, which will be getting clear, high quality imagery of your box, explaining clearly what you sell and why it's valuable. Show positive reviews and social proof prominently, come up with an unbelievable offer and offer a guarantee. If you do all those things on your website, you're much more likely to generate a high enough conversion rate to begin to start generating traffic through emails and ads. Another thing you should do is you should have an email capture on your website, so we have a, a signup flow, which I always recommend, and you're going to capture email addresses from people who visit your website, which is going to grow your list as a by-product of your sales, and you're going to send. You're going to create an automation to remind people to go back and buy, and you're going to send two to three emails a week to your entire list for free extra sales okay.
Speaker 1:The final thing is only after you've done the first two steps. You want to drive traffic via ads? Okay, so you want to research what your competitors are doing on the Facebook ad library, create ads similar to what the best companies in your niche are doing, write attention grabbing hooks to grab people's attention and then center your ads around the unbelievable offer Okay, so the offer drives the click on the website, on the ads and on the emails. Okay, the better the offer, the more conversions you're gonna get. So that is the kind of things that you need to know and hopefully a light bulb is going off in your head to remember paying agencies are. That's not a bash on agencies, it's just you need to understand how to direct them and how to use their resources effectively by understanding your customers, the marketing process, and also how to monitor and make changes based on the feedback from your, from your, from your metrics and from what the market says. Okay, so you'll be happy to know. After the call, the student was a lot clearer on what's her responsibility and what the agency responsibilities are, and she was armed with the knowledge to go back and be able to direct them and tell them what to do, and now she's seen much better results for all of her marketing and she can work on the founder problems. Okay, with clarity and focus, while the agency supports the effort with creatives and tech okay.
Speaker 1:So have you ever used let me know on the Facebook group Subscription Box Success? Have you ever used an agency? Okay, let me know on the Facebook group Subscription Box Success. Have you ever used an agency? Okay, has it gone well? Has it not gone well? Do you know why? And maybe has this podcast kind of opened your eyes? So that's pretty much it for this week, guys. I hope this episode was helpful for you. As always, please, if you have any topics you'd like me to cover or like any comments or critiques of the podcast, just let me know at unboxtheinboxcom, which will redirect you to the Facebook group. I'll see you next week.
