by This post will help you if you have been struggling with Facebook ads
One of the most important things you need to build a successful subscription box business is a scalable, repeatable and profitable marketing channel. When you have this in place you will know if you spend X amount of money you’re going to get X number of subscribers signed up to your box.
This will give you a massive advantage and allow you to plan your growth in advance. Once you have this up and running you will be able to use your other subscription metrics to figure out how much stock you will need in the future, how much cash you will need to get to your desired subscriber number and how profitable your company will be as you scale up.
One of the reasons why we were able to Bootstrap BusterBox to $2.5 million per year in sales was because we put a lot of focus into this data, and we have multiple marketing channels that scale.
One of the best marketing channels that scales for a lot of subscription box owners is Facebook ads. This is also the marketing channel that causes subscription box owners the most hassle. This is mainly down to the fact people don’t know what they’re doing and keep repeating the same mistakes.
After spending a lot of money on Facebook ads and helping countless other Subscription Box owners I noticed the same things keep coming up time and time again.
So I decided to write this article in the hope it will help as many people as possible get a profitable campaign up and running.
3 Mistakes to Avoid When It Comes to Facebook ads for Subscription Box Owners.
1.Afraid to put the foot down!!
This is very common and I think a lot of it comes down to mindset. When things are going good with your marketing campaigns and it looks like you have cracked something you need to be willing to put your foot down and push it to the limit. Facebook is a very volatile platform and things can change very quickly so you should make the most of any opportunity when it comes up.
If you know your lifetime value and you know your CPA is profitable and you have the resources then what are you waiting for? You should be looking to scale like crazy when the opportunity arrives. This is the only way you will grow your box to thousands of subscribers and build the business you dreamed off. If you are scared to ramp up when it looks like it is the smart thing to do don’t be surprised if you never reach the level you want in your business.
2. Moving too slow after a setback.
I see people make this mistake time and time again and I think a lot of it comes down to human nature. Not everything is going to work 100% of the time when it comes to Facebook ads or any kind of marketing and you need to accept that is just part of the game. If your latest campaign failed, you need to forget about it and push on. If you’re the type of person who dwells on something for weeks without taking any form of action you are going to struggle to get a campaign converting.
I will give you a couple of example to demonstrate my point.
Person 1. Launches a new Facebook ad campaign and is bitterly disappointed after 48 hours that they have 0 sales. Instead of reading any of the data and trying to make improvements they turn of their campaign and do nothing for 6 weeks but tell everybody in earshot Facebook ads are junk and don’t work.
Fast-forward 6 weeks later and this person still has the exact same number of subscribers. They decide to make another attempt with Facebook ads without learning from their mistakes and fail again. This time they vow to never bother with paid traffic again and 2 years later are still on the same number of subscribers’ barley scrapping by.
Person 2. Launches a new Facebook ad campaign and after 48 hours there are 0 sales. This person turns off their ads and spends the day analysing their CTR, CPMS, Site visitors and numerous other metrics. They then spend the next day learning everything they can about the platform and studying winning ads in their niche.
The next day they launch a brand-new campaign that gets 6 sales in 48 hours but the CPA is too expensive. Instead of giving up they are back analysing their metrics and identify the click through rate is very low. To fix this issue they film a brand-new video and change their images.
The next campaign is a bit better but still not performing 100%. This person doesn’t give up and over the next 2 weeks keeps making improvements. Eventually they break through and launch a winning campaign that signs up 30 people a day for a decent CPA.
2 Years later this person has a highly successful subscription box business with thousands of subscribers signed up.
The approach person 2 took is the exact same approach we take in BusterBox on a day by day basis. If something doesn’t work, we move on and try the next thing. We are testing around the clock and don’t dwell on things that happened the day before. I think speed and persistence is a massive asset when you use them correctly. Obviously you can’t bankrupt yourself while testing and need to do it within your means but this is honestly the best way to get something working.
3. Your Audience Is Too Narrow
It is great having a very well-defined audience but if your audience is too small you are going to run into trouble. A small audience may work OK at first with a low budget but you will start having problems when you try and scale.
Let me give you an example.
Say you have 50,000 people in your audience pool and you get a few subscribers signed up each day for $20. You get excited and want to scale things up so you change your budget to $200 per day. The audience is so small you quickly burn through it and start getting a very high frequency (The same people are seeing your ads over and over) This drives your costs up and the campaign is no longer profitable because there aren’t enough people in it to advertise to.
You should be aiming to have at least 250,000 people in any cold audience you target. This will give you a bit of leeway to spend a decent amount of money and hopefully get a decent amount of subscribers signed up. Retargeting is completely different and you can have much smaller audiences because those people are warmed up already.
I have written a lot of other helpful content around Facebook ads already which you can search for on this blog. These were just 3 things that have come up a lot recently, so I wanted to write this article as I think it will help people.
Facebook ads are challenging to get right but for a lot of subscription box owners it is going to be the best marketing channel to grow. Once you get it working it can also completely change your business so it is worth learning.
If you have any questions about Facebook ads or subscription boxes in general please post below 
