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
How To Build A Subscription Box That Changes Your Life
What if the key to transforming your struggling subscription box business lies in mastering the art of marketing it?
Join me, Gary Redmond, on this episode of Unbox the Inbox as I share my deeply personal and inspiring journey of building BusterBox from the ground up.
You’ll hear firsthand about the emotional and financial hurdles we faced during our first two years, and how a breakthrough in strategic marketing, particularly through email campaigns, turned everything around. Discover how perseverance and a focus on nurturing customer relationships were pivotal in driving our success.
Listen as I celebrate the milestones of our clients who took the bold step to pursue their subscription box ventures full-time by 2024.
Learn the essential frameworks and strategies that can turn your aspirations into tangible results, including optimizing your website, establishing an effective email system, driving traffic, and crafting compelling offers.
Reflect on your own business dreams and evaluate how these proven tactics can help you achieve them. Don't miss out on these valuable insights, and feel free to reach out with any questions or topics you'd like covered in future episodes!
- Please suggest any topic you would like me to cover by visiting unboxtheinbox.com
- Join my newsletter at garyredmond.com/newsletter
Welcome back to Unbox the 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, as always, 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 I want to share with you how to build a subscription business, a subscription box business, that can truly change your life. Okay, now I might not get too technical or tactical today. I just want to tell you a story and I want to give you some motivation and I want to just recenter you on the kind of things you need to be working on and the best way and the actual way that we found that built the business that allowed us to actually live free and have the life that we have now.
Speaker 1:Okay, I'm gonna tell you a story about a time when we couldn't get anyone to sign up for gusterbox. Okay, and it's. It might be hard for you to believe now, but took us almost two years of losing money, not getting paid and actually having to use our own savings just to keep the business afloat and that's a long time to to keep, could keep believing in a business that most people just told us to move on from, and they thought we were stupid and they thought it was never going to work, and but I guess you have to be a little bit delusional, but particularly in the beginning. Okay, but when we launched in April 2016, like it felt like it was a bit of a prison, to be honest, for two years and you we kind of got to a few hundred subscribers and you're kind of at that point where you're so busy with um, you know your few hundred subscribers and because you have to fill boxes, like you're big enough to be busy and to be run ragged, but you're not big enough to actually pay for yourself or hire staff or do anything, okay, and that's a hard place to get out of, okay. So I mean, obviously you're putting in effort, with late nights and constant stress, and you have so many little um things you have to do, like different roles and things like that, and you got very little reward for it, okay. So I just wanted to let you know if that's something you've been through before or you're going through right now.
Speaker 1:It's incredibly difficult, um, and I was. I was there, too, for a long time, okay, not like two weeks, okay, um, and it is. It's incredibly difficult to find a way to get people to sign up, or at least we found incredibly difficult, and we faced a lot of frustration and we wondered if we'd ever see any return on our investment of our time and our money. Okay, like, fast forward to now, though it's funny, because we're planning a trip to China to meet new suppliers for our products. Okay, and like, that's something that's crazy to think about. Like, even just like, five, six years ago, we were in such a state with the business on our knees, pretty much, um, and now we're able to fly over to china, and the best part about it, obviously, is our subscribers are paying for the entire trip.
Speaker 1:Okay, we've been getting paid for the business for the last from the business for the last five plus years, um, and we have, we've company cars and we've been able to pay ourselves. We've been able to have a nice life. We work from home. We don't have bosses or anything like that. In fact, we are bosses and we try to be really good too, because we know what it's like to work under a shitty one, but it's a complete turnaround. Okay, and it's not to brag, I don't you don't give a fuck about me or what my life is like, but it's. I just want to let you know this story because you might be experiencing somewhere on that journey yourself, but I want to let you know that there is light at the end of the tunnel and your life can change and it can be whatever you dreamed of with your subscription box business, like. It's been the vehicle for me to Like look, I'm not a millionaire, we make good money, but the most important thing for me is we're free, right, you don't have a boss and you can live your days the way you want. Of course, you work hard, but I guess it's up to us and it's our choice. You're not working for somebody else, okay, but it all started with a key realization, okay, and this might be something that I just wanted to hopefully give you a bit of an epiphany today, if possible but when we finally figured out the solution to our biggest problem, it's really what drove the change in the business.
Speaker 1:All these businesses, and subscription boxes mainly, are marketing businesses, because so many people think that the product is the main driver of growth, but it's not entirely true. Of course, a good product is crucial, but what really fuels the growth is actually the effective marketing of your box and the systems you put in place to drive sales. So if you have the best box in the world, it doesn't really matter if nobody ever hears about it or you're not able to translate the benefits of your box onto your website, into your copy, into your emails and actually get people to see it and try it out. So it's really about mastering the marketing and particularly in our case, email marketing was a game changer because obviously, ads are great for getting attention, but if you don't have a way to follow up with people, you're going to find it difficult to basically convince them to buy unless they're ready to buy the minute they land on your website. So you need a system to make offers to persuade them, to nurture them and basically remind them to come back and purchase. And that's where email marketing allows you to build a relationship to nurture them and basically remind them to come back and purchase. Okay, and that's where email marketing allows you to build a relationship with potential customers, keep your brand in their minds and eventually turn them into paying subscribers. Sometimes that happens on the same day that they visit your website. Sometimes it's the next day, sometimes it's two years later, but if you're not effectively capturing emails and sending follow-up sales emails, then you're missing out on a massive amount of sales. Okay, so if you've been putting off the whole marketing side of your business so you can keep up with other tasks, I understand that too, but at the end of the day, you can work on tasks. You can either work in your business or work on your business, okay. So I hope you can just take this episode as a reminder to really focus on doing the work that's going to get you subscribers. Okay, and I'm going to talk you through.
Speaker 1:I've talked about this many times before on this podcast, but the first thing I recommend anyone to do is to optimize your website to convert. Even before we focus on email, which I talked about, the most important thing is that if everybody has to go to your website in order to sign up for your box, that needs to be the place where you make your best possible pitch, and that includes high quality imagery, that includes benefit-driven sales copy, that includes social proof, that includes positive reviews, user-generated content and also some credibility, if possible. If you've been featured anywhere. It's all about building that trust and also making that offer that speaks to the benefits that people want. Okay, so I mentioned this last week in one of my emails.
Speaker 1:Like you don't really want to, you want to make it clear how the features of your product actually deliver a benefit to your customers. Okay, so if I say, okay, give me 30 quid a month, I'm going to send you five boxes, or a box of five dog products. That doesn't sound too appealing, whereas if I can get those on Amazon for 20, for 15 or 20, then it's not that appealing to me. But if I say we're the experts in making your dog happy, we send you theme products right to your door without you having to get up and lift a finger, and your dog is going to be, it's going to be the best time of the month that you'll ever experience and your dog will know how much you love them. Okay, so now we've driven into benefits and we've driven into feelings and emotion and actually taking it to the next level. Okay, so that's a very important part of your, of your website optimization is being able to actually clearly convey the benefits of your box, because nobody buys a box of stuff. They buy a benefit, or they buy convenience, or they buy happiness. They buy an experience, okay.
Speaker 1:So, without getting too off topic, if you have your website optimized and you have your email system set up, you're capturing emails and you're sending people back over to buy, we're obviously going to need one more thing, and that's going to be traffic. So driving traffic is actually easy. You just need to pay usually Facebook, instagram, meta, basically, or some other sort of advertising channel channel. Okay, why don't we do organic? Because it's simply too slow and it's unpredictable. If you want to get predictable traffic, facebook will show your website to as many people as you want, as long as you pay them. Okay. Now, why would we want to do that? Well, if we know that our website is optimized and our emails are optimized and we're capturing emails and we're sending people back to buy, well then we know we're going to get sales if our website converts and we're also going to get leads if we have an email system and those leads will eventually turn into sales. So then more traffic becomes an easy thing to purchase, because the traffic that you get actually gets you customers and you use that money to run more ads. Okay, actually get you customers and you use that money to run more ads? Okay, and so that is the system that we use. That's the marketing system that we discovered and that is what you need to have If you want to turn your business into a, into something that changes your life. Okay, because if you're spending, if your product is the best thing in the world, or you're spending all your time on your product or on your customer service, like that's totally fine, but they're not activities that are actually going to grow your box, okay.
Speaker 1:The final piece of the puzzle I want to talk about, which is the cherry on top of all your marketing. I don't really want to say the cherry on top, because it's that essential. It's almost like I can't think of an analogy, right, but it's not just the cherry on top, it's the most important thing, okay. So let's say, there's the star on top of the Christmas tree okay, it's not complete without it. Okay, so that's going to be your offer.
Speaker 1:No matter how good your marketing is, if your offer isn't compelling, you won't drive sales, and the offer is what makes people take action, because that's what's actually, by definition, offers are limited. And understanding your customers' pain points, understanding the benefits benefits, you're going to do all that. But the offer, if it's irresistible, it's going to make people want to take action now and and they don't want to miss out. Okay. So if you can make an offer, that's so good that people can pass it up, like you can have a semi-okay website. But if you're, if your offer is actually what's what's really really enticing to people, that's when it's going to drive the most conversions, because not only does it drop, like the offer is actually what's really really enticing to people, that's when it's going to drive the most conversions, because not only does it drive, the offer is the center of everything.
Speaker 1:So we put our offers into our emails, into our ads and, obviously, onto our website, because the offer drives clicks on the ads, drives clicks in the emails and it drives conversions when they get to the website and ultimately, it grows the business. So that is essentially a system that we've discovered for marketing our box. That's how we're able to go to China from using our business's money. That's how we all got paid from the business after struggling for two years and then eventually figuring it out over the next six. So picture the day that you can finally collect a great paycheck from your box, fire your boss and live your life free from the rat race.
Speaker 1:I have clients that have just quit their job this year, in 2024. So it's definitely possible and it's guys. It's so worth it when you get there, okay. So I want you guys to think about that this week and think about what you want from your subscription box business and, if you want, if you think you're able to get there using the strategy that I told you, okay, because reality, it's simple. It's not easy to execute, but it's simple If you follow. Follow the frameworks of optimizing the website, setting up an email system, driving traffic and having a great offer. Those are the main things. Like really nothing else is going to get you any results, believe it or not, okay, so, um, hope that's helpful. If you have any questions for me you'd like any any topic covered in the next episodes feel free to send me an email, garyatgaryrebmannet, or to post in the subscription box. Success Facebook group.
