by Most subscription box entrepreneurs are looking to sign up thousands of subscribers and turn their company’s into a massive success. From the very start, we knew we would have to sign up thousands of people to BusterBox if we were going to have a viable business that we could be proud of. Thankfully, we managed to achieve that goal after a lot of work. If you are still working on this goal I have some advice which will help you.
There are a couple of ways to get thousands of subscribers signed up to your box. The first way is to double down on a marketing channel which is working already and simply raise your budget and start marketing more aggressively. Another way to achieve this goal would be to extend your marketing efforts through another channel.
Introducing Instagram Ads
Depending on your niche. Instagram ads could be a goldmine for acquiring new customers to your subscription box business.
· Instagram currently has over 500 million daily users.
· More than one-third of Instagram users have used their mobile device to buy something online. E.G They are 70% more likely than people who are not on Instagram.
· More than half of the global Instagram users are aged 34 years or younger.
· 14% of global Instagram users are women between the ages of 18 and 24 years old.
If any of the above stats tie in with your ideal customer persona then you should highly consider educating yourself on Instagram ads and start testing them for your business.
How to run Instagram Ads?
I am now going to explain exactly how to set up a successful Instagram ad campaign so you can start acquiring a lot more subscribers to your business.
1. Campaign objectives
To set up your Instagram ad campaign you are going to go into your Facebook business manager as normal and create a campaign. When you are selecting your objective 9 times out of 10 you will always pick conversions. One of the biggest mistakes I regularly see from new marketers is they select the wrong objective. A lot of the time they run brand awareness campaigns by accident and end up wasting a lot of money. After you select the conversion objective you are going to select your pixel and make sure you are optimising your ads for purchases.
2. Placements
When setting up an Instagram ads campaign I like to keep it completely separate from Facebook. The reason behind this is because in my mind they are two completely separate platforms. This means different kinds of ads will convert better on each platform depending on user experience. When you are doing an Instagram exclusive campaign you will be able to select 3 different placements.
· Instagram Feed·
Instagram Explore·
Instagram Stories.
3. Targeting
This follows the exact same principle as Facebook for your cold traffic campaigns. If you are not targeting the right people it does not matter how good your product is or how you optimise your ads. You simply will not be able to sign anybody up. The best way to target the right people is by using a lookalike audience. This is an audience of people who are similar to customers that have already signed up to your box. The only downside to this is you will need a good amount of purchase data to create one of these audiences. I recommend at least 500 purchases. You will see it getting more accurate as you approach the 1000 mark. The good news is if you are collecting email addresses and getting good quality traffic you will be able to make lookalike audiences from either of them options. That can be a good solution until you reach the 500 purchases. If you are completely new and you have no data at all then you will have to do a good bit of testing to do. You will need to do some market research and come up with some customer personas to target. If you visit my blog you will find some information that will help you with this.
4. Structuring your campaign
When setting up your Instagram ads you are always going to structure them the same way. I have covered this topic in previous posts discussing Facebook and it is going to be the same again here. You will have two separate campaigns. One for cold traffic and another one for retargeting. Inside your cold traffic campaign, you will split it into multiple ad sets (The amount of ad sets your test will depend on your daily budget) I personally like to run 5 – 10 ad sets at any one time. Each ad set will be targeting a different section of our lookalike audiences. Each ad set will contain 4 different ads. The only variation on the ads will be selecting a different image or video. This way you are giving Instagram plenty of variations to test and the best possible chance for success.
5. Offer
If you are familiar with my posts you know I spend so much time talking about the offer. The reason why I bang on about it so much is because in my opinion, it is make or break for 90% of Subscription box marketing campaigns. When I am talking about a successful marketing campaign I mean a marketing campaign that has brought in serious volume. In my experience, the easiest way to drive serious volume is by having an unbelievable offer. It really doesn’t matter if we’re advertising on Facebook, Instagram, Direct Mail, Radio or TV. The offer needs to be so good a potential customer will feel like they seriously missed out if they don’t take it then and there. Most people hate the thought of signing up to a subscription because it means recurring payments each month. That is one of the reasons why we hear of company’s with such high CPAs in this industry. The offer simply isn’t enticing enough. If you spend your time studying all the successful subscription box company’s who have serious volume you will notice they all have one thing in common. They are masters at crafting unbelievable offers. The offer is one of the key principles of direct response marketing. If you would like to learn more about this look into Dan Kennedy and read some of his books and they will help you.
When crafting an offer, it is also important to know that it has to make sense financially for your company. To make sure of this you need to be tracking your metrics and cost per acquisition. The offer doesn’t always need to be discount based either. If you give away something cool of high perceived value that can make a big difference to conversions.
6. Images and videos
The same principles apply here as Facebook. We have found that videos still convert the best. The videos are easy to make. Simply have a customer or a friend opening one of your boxes and going through the products. They should say how happy they are that they have signed up and should sound genuinely excited. I have covered this in detail multiple times for more information how to make good videos search my blog at liammichaelbrennan.com. The main thing different compared to Facebook is the video or image will appear first. So make sure it grabs attention quickly and if possible explain what your ground breaking offer is in it. Instagram stories are a great way to get good exposure and cheap video views. The problem is peoples attention span is very low and they can click off it quickly. If you are testing this placement you need to grab attention ASAP for maximum impact.
7. Retargeting.
You will need a solid retargeting strategy to scale up. Cold traffic is great, but without any decent follow up you can expect your CPA to be high. When it comes to retargeting we don’t do platform or placement specific. This is the one time where we will run our ads with automatic placements selected. The reason we do this, is it is a lot cheaper to retarget somebody than it is to reach them through cold traffic and we want to reach them in as many places as possible. When it comes to retargeting though for most of our campaigns we will pull the plug after 14 days if they haven’t purchased. We do this so we aren’t wasting money advertising to people who will never buy from us. I explain this in more detail in previous posts so search this group if you are interested in setting up powerful retargeting campaigns.
I hope this guide helps you get more subscribers for your box. Obviously there is a lot more involved in crafting any form of winning advertising, but this should get you off to a good start. If you have any questions about Instagram advertising or anything subscription box related at all let me know.
