Your 2025 Plan for Success. 3-and-a-Half Tips for Fast Growth!

Unlock the secrets to transforming a stagnant subscription business into a thriving success story. You'll discover how we reignited growth in the final months of 2024 by sending bold, edgy emails that cut through the digital clutter, boosting sales and engagement.

With a fearless approach, we shifted from cautiously sending a few emails to bombarding our subscribers with personality-filled content that resonated.

Learn the art of crafting irresistible offers, understanding the nuanced needs of your audience, and creating urgency in your communications to drive significant business growth.

As we head into 2025, we discuss our strategic overhaul in customer acquisition and retention. Inspired by Alex Hormozi's concept of "do more, better, new," we ramped up our email campaigns and ad spend, successfully lowering customer acquisition costs and capturing a surge of new leads.

October emerged as a standout month, as we deftly maintained profitability while scaling operations. Discover how we enticed existing customers with lucrative prepaid subscription deals, ensuring guaranteed profit and boosting cash flow at crucial times.

This episode is packed with actionable insights to help you achieve similar growth in your own business endeavors.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Email Marketing Strategies for Growth
• 5:28 Growth Strategies Through Email and Ads

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

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 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 online business. So, firstly, I must apologize. I was not able to get a podcast done last week. I was away and I was not prepared enough. No other excuse. I just didn't get one done, so I apologize for that. We are back this week and I wanted to leave you this year. This will be the final podcast of 2024 and we'll return in January, but I wanted to leave you this year with the three biggest things that we did to drive growth in the last three months of the year and, to be honest, before the last three months of the year we didn't have a great year, which is the case for many businesses, and our sort of best result of the year was maintaining our revenue to a best of the best of our abilities, but it wasn't a massive growth year, and that's the full disclosure, and I'm sure it's the same for a lot of people and a lot of businesses and a lot of industries okay, because there's other macroeconomic factors that are outside of your control that affect your business and, no matter how good you are, sometimes what you used to do just didn't work, and it was kind of the same for us this year. So we did end up making a change towards the end of the year and that was around September time and the first thing that we did was fairly simple we started to just send way more emails. Okay, so we started to kind of get I guess the word is like pissed off or the two words In like August time.

Speaker 1: 1:37

We had kind of a bit of a tough year and we weren't really getting much growth and we just felt like our marketing maybe was getting a bit vanilla and a little bit sort of stale. So what we started to do was to try and just get a bit more edgy and a little bit more loud and just try and like come up with new angles for our, for our box, and new angles for for ways of selling it and and we stand, the primarily primary way we tested that was through email. We also started this kind of kicked up, kicked this off by putting up a post on our social media I believe it was in September of like these dog toys and the shapeless ex toys, which got a lot of a lot of reaction, both positive and negative, as you can imagine. But it was kind of like just we didn't really care anymore. Like we kind of got to the point where we just wanted to like get some sort of excitement or movement around the business, and it was actually quite good because it kind of led us to kind of see that you know, you're going to polarize people, but you're going to get attention. And we also started to do that with our emails as well, and we just tried to have a little bit more personality. But what we did and on top of making that post on social media, was just sending way more emails. Okay, and like using this personality in our emails and like the reason why I recommend you would do something like this. Obviously, we're going to go through three different steps and three different things that we did and things that I would recommend you do in 2025, but the thing around sending more emails is there's just so much noise in the industries right now, like in the online marketing game and in general, like there's just there's so much ai junk going on, there's an over, there's abundance of content, there's an abundance of, obviously, people and more and more desperate to make sales and for the various economic reasons, and we were always hesitant to send more emails.

Speaker 1: 3:20

We thought it would annoy our subscribers or, you know, make them unsubscribe or whatever, and and we thought it would have a like a diminishing returns. But when we started to do it actually didn't, we just discovered that, like, by sending a couple of emails a day, and you know, and that's my sound, a lot if you're not sending even one a day. But, um, what we used to do is used to have an email every second day and then we would have a resend to the people who didn't open it on the alternate day. So we might send Monday, wednesday, friday, and we'd resend to non-openers on Tuesday, thursday, saturday and then we'd leave them on Sunday. But when we knew our emails were already working and we had this new approach of kind of being a little bit more loud and a little bit more, um, sort of more personality in the, in the brand, and we just decided to to just try it and, uh, what we started to do then was to send an email every day, and by sending an email every day, we turns out we were getting more sales. And then we actually started to do an email, sometimes twice a day.

Speaker 1: 4:20

Okay, so what we would do is we'd send an email in the morning if that performed well and we might leave it. And or if it performed well, what we might do is we might resend the email with like a forward, so we'd like forward the email again and to the list, or like resend the email but make it look like a forward and say on the top hey, did you see my message earlier on? And if you don't hurry up, this is going to expire. And that would also really work. That was our resend within the same day to people who didn't open the first one, and sometimes to even people who did open the first one. But basically, obviously, a lot of the things I would have mentioned in this podcast before still apply. You need to have strong offers, you need to understand your customers and you need to write your emails in a way that's urgent and has a reason for people to act now. But the difference really is just so much other noise going on. You just have to shout louder nowadays and just be in more places at more times, and you just need to basically show up and make as many compelling offers as you can. So that's the first thing that we did differently is going from sending an email every second day to sending an email every day, and sometimes twice a day. So that's something that I would recommend that you do.

Speaker 1: 5:28

And the second thing and it's kind of a yin and yang between the emails so the second change that we made was when we started to see that these emails were still effective and our customer acquisition cost was dropping. We also knew our ads were working to a certain extent, but we were always afraid to spend more than a certain amount every month because we thought that either the customers weren't there or the customer acquisition cost would go up. What we realized when these emails were working and our cac was dropping, there was probably capacity to increase our spend. Okay, because as we were still spending the same amount and the customer acquisition increased, like we were comfortable spending what we were spending previously. So we thought, if we increase the budget, maybe we'd be able to get more volume. And sure enough, we've increased our budget by almost 50% in the last two or three months of the year and we've maintained the CAC customer acquisition costs that we are comfortable with.

Speaker 1: 6:24

The reason why this worked is because in the past, when we increased our spend, our costs went up because we didn't increase the email volume at the same time and we weren't following up with people. So this time we did it differently and as we increased our ad spend, we increased the volume of emails, which means more emails. Obviously, as I mentioned in the previous tip, was increasing conversions, but the other thing was increasing the ad spend also increased the lead generation Because we have the signup flow on the website. We're driving more people into our list by increasing the traffic on the website, and increasing the ad spend, which will increase the traffic on the website, also increases the email capture, which means you now have more people to follow up with. So you're not just increasing your email volume to the same amount of people, you're actually getting more people into the list as well. So it's kind of a yin and yang between we sent more emails and then, because we sent more emails, we could afford more ads, and because we could afford more ads, we could drive more traffic to the website and more leads to the list.

Speaker 1: 7:24

It's kind of something that reminds me of something that Alex Ramosi said in a couple of his books when you're trying to increase, you want to do more, better, new. I kind of didn't really know what that meant, but I understand now that we knew our emails were working and we knew our ads were working. But I guess, in a way, it was it's kind of like it wasn't a wasn't say lucky, but it was something that we just kind of discovered. It wasn't something that really um, what was massively planned, but we did more. So we did more emails, we spent more on ads, and he always says, like, do more, better, new. So before you try and do better or move to a new channel and which is something we've talked about, before moving to tiktok and stuff but, um, what we really realized that we could have just done more.

Speaker 1: 8:06

So if you're stuck at a subscriber number and maybe what you're doing is kind of working, but you're not really moving forward, these are the two things that I would recommend you do in 2025 to start to start moving faster, because in the end, we didn't do a whole lot differently, we just did more, okay, um. So yeah, we've now. We're now acquiring, we're now growing again, we're now acquiring more customers. In october and it was our best ever month for customer acquisition since the history of the company um, and yeah, we were able to maximize the value of every customer and drive more volume without losing profitability. So the third thing that I would recommend you do in 2025, and the third thing that we did differently was when you're driving this volume of new customers, particularly because we have a front-loaded offer where we're either giving a free box or we're giving a dog bed, so actually tip for 3B, which maybe I'll add to it at the end. But basically another thing that we did was when you drive people to do subscriptions and you're giving away offers, you can give yourself some short-term cashflow issues. Okay, because people are coming in if they're getting a discount on the first box or you have to send them a valuable free gift. The more customers you bring in, the more pressure on your cashflow to actually do that. So when you're spending more on ads particularly as well, it becomes a challenge to maintain that higher spend and that higher acquisition costs on the front end.

Speaker 1: 9:29

So what we did was we actually created irreversible offers for our current customers to switch from their monthly plans to prepaid plans. So what we did was we'd offer something like a free upgrade to our Stronger subscription. We'd give them credit on our in, in our online store or other reasons for them to make it worth their while to pay up front for their subscription for the next six or twelve months. The key thing here we drove most people onto the 12 month subscription because we know that if they pay for 12 months, there's guaranteed profit built into that subscription.

Speaker 1: 9:58

If someone only comes in and they're on month two or three and they and they prepay for six months, I'm sure it's better, but if, even if you've given them like a free gift or they've taken a free box, you're not going to be quite as profitable as you will be if you get them to convert to a 12-month subscription. So what we did essentially was we got and like you, don't need many people every month to do this. If you have people on monthly rolling subscriptions, we would maybe get 20 or 30 people in a month, but that would equate to thousands and thousands in revenue because they're essentially paying for the next 12 months up front. So it gave us that cash injection that we did and we were doing this around payday, which is another tip is do it when people actually have the money and give them a great deal to switch, because nobody really wants to give you £250 anytime soon. But if you tell them you're going to get a free upgrade or you're going to get a discount or a combination of both or a store credit, it makes it more worth it for them. And what do you do with that money? Number one you use it as a cash injection to keep your momentum going and make sure you don't have to turn off your ads if you run into cash flow issues. But number two, if you have some extra cash coming in, you can continue to reinvest that into ads and emails or in ads anyway, and grow the business okay.

Speaker 1: 11:05

The third, the 3b, or I guess I'll give you a bonus tip here was also we discovered that previously having a free gift offer would be great for sort of customer quality, but it would be a generally a higher customer acquisition cost and having a free box offer will be the reverse. So there will be high volume, low cac but like higher churn on the back end because people are not necessarily interested in paying for the box at full price. What we figured out was if we ran both of them at the same time, you actually have the best of both worlds. So you have the free box volume and certain people who want to go for the free box because there are people who go for a free box who will pay it's just less, let, it's just less people and than people who go for a full price offer, like a free bed. But by having both we kind of had the best of both worlds. So we had some people coming in on the free box offer, we had some people coming in on the. On the free gift offer and the free box. People obviously paid a shipping cost, which was five pounds, and the free bed. People came in and they paid full price but they got a free bed. So the quality of customer is different and the amount of money that they have at disposable is different.

Speaker 1: 12:13

But the blended approach allowed us to, number one, um, vary our emails, vary ads or whatever but also to get people who wanted to join in their own way. So that's the third or fourth I would say 3B sort of tip that I just thought of as I created this episode. So to quickly recap. Number one send more emails. That's your plan for 2025. Number two spend more on ads if you're spending on ads, or start spending on ads if you're, if you're getting a good conversion rate from your website and your emails. And number three convert customers to upfront subscriptions to improve your cash flow and reinvest in your business.

Speaker 1: 12:51

And 3b, or number four, is run more than one offer at once, if you can, or blend your offers so that you can actually basically keep things fresh, because these are the things that made a massive difference for us this year and we really only discovered in september. So this is the most up-to-date information and the best tip I can give you to get kicking off as strong as possible in 2025. And so, yeah, that's pretty much it for today's episode. Found it helpful. Please subscribe and share it with someone who could use these insights. If you have any questions, you want to discuss growing your business with me, and you can talk to me in the subscription box, success facebook group or email me at gary at garyredmondnet. And so yeah, thanks for listening. I'll see you in the next episode.