The people who go directly to a landing page or your homepage and make an immediate purchase are your unicorns. They’re the low hanging fruit. But if you can speed up or increase sales from people who don’t buy on the first visit, that will really make an impact on your subscription box company’s bottom line.
For subscription box companies, many if not most of your buyers will not buy on the first visit. If you can nurture those prospects and walk them through their buyer’s journey, you will greatly increase your revenue.
Marketing automation and lead scoring are the tools you need in place to execute these revenue-boosting strategies. Here’s how they can be used for your subscription box marketing efforts.
Step 1 – Get Your Ideal Prospect To Interact With You
You’ll need some sort of incentive, not a coupon or discount, but some helpful, education content that you can offer in exchange for someone’s email address. Forget about closing the sale at this stage, we’re just going to help the prospect.
Your prospect treats their contact information as currency. If they give you their email address, they know you are going to email them so you have to give them something that they find very valuable.
This content can be fully branded and can include offers, but it should not be like a sales flyer at the supermarket. It needs to help answer questions and solve problems for your prospect with editorial integrity. This content matches the first stage of the buyer’s journey, the awareness stage.
Once you have gotten the prospect’s email address you can put them into marketing automations and start lead scoring.
Step 2 – Lead Scoring & Marketing Automation
Lead scoring is a process where you assign points to certain actions a person takes around your emails and website. So if someone goes to a landing page to see a price and they do that three times, you can trigger an email or an on-site message with a special offer.
You can build a complex scoring system that adds various points based on actions that the prospect takes. The concept is that certain actions are more likely to lead to a sale, so those actions get a higher score.
You can test a variety of lead scoring strategies to see how effective they are. One way to start is to identify actions that mirror your most popular paths to conversion. Check your Google Analytics for the Multi-Channel reports to see your site’s current most popular paths. This can guide your lead scoring and you could even test ways to shorten these paths.
Your lead scoring, just like your marketing automation will be unique and should be tested on a regular basis. We like to see at least one test per quarter in each area.
Your marketing automations can take a variety of forms. We like to break more complex automations into smaller goal based automations that can be connected to each other.
If you want to do a fairly typical buyer’s journey automation for a subscription box, you can start with an awareness effort series of emails based on more content around the problem you box solves for prospects. For example, if you have a box of indestructible toys for dogs you could have some content that talks about destructive dogs and how to train that behavior out of a dog, plus a very soft mention about how you do offer a destructive dog box.
Or you could have case studies that could have testimonials by people who have purchased the destructive box and were happy.
Then you could have some special offers with maybe a first month free or another offer. Or an offer to share a discount with one friend. There are many ways to go and you should test many different efforts and see which work best for your subscription box company.
The best thing about the marketing automations is that you can set them up, let them run and evaluate. Plus you can automate many different things. The limits are only which ideas you can come up with to test.
If you’d like help figuring out how to best use marketing automation and lead scoring for your subscription box company, reach out to us at Peak Inbound Marketing (973) 770-4668.
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