Boost Your Subscription Box with SMS: What Works & What Doesn’t

Liam gives the answers . It's as simple as that .

well for you . On today's episode I'm answering a question that got sent in during the week and it's around SMS marketing . Let me read out the question Hi , liam , do you use SMS marketing for BusterBox ? If so , what strategies have worked best for you ? Very good question . So we use SMS marketing for two things pretty much .

We use it to sell more products and we use it to recover failed payments . That's pretty much it

now . When it comes to using it to sell more products , we obviously use it to sell other products to our existing subscribers . Now , when it comes to SMS marketing , you do need to be careful with it . It's not the same as email .

If you're doing it right , you will obviously get a much higher open rate with SMS marketing , but you can't really send them as frequently as you can with email , and that's down to two reasons really . The first reason is you'll drive people absolutely crazy if you're blasting them with sms messages around the clock .

People will get annoyed with that , and the other reason is it actually costs money to do sms marketing , whereas email is pretty

much free . You don't have to pay to send out a email . So you have to be tactical with your SMS blasts .

Now we have found the best time to hit people with an SMS blast is usually when they get paid is usually when they get paid , and for the UK and Ireland , a lot of people get paid on the last Friday of the month , so that's usually when we hit them , because we'll get the highest return then .

And that's actually really important with SMS marketing too , especially as your company gets bigger and you collect more phone numbers , it can get really expensive really , really quickly . So you need to know basically you're going to get the return , otherwise you can end up burning money .

So my advice would be , when it comes to doing SMS marketing , only do proven offers or proven products that are already selling . Otherwise you can end up burning a lot of money . It's definitely not a channel for testing new products or testing

new offers . You should test those via email or Facebook ads or whatever and make sure that they're actually selling . Otherwise you could end up with a expensive mistake if you bring them straight to SMS and you have no validation that the market actually wants that . So that's something you really have and be on top of when it comes to this kind of marketing .

The other thing you need to be aware of as well is the same marketing principles apply to sms marketing as email marketing . It's all direct response if you want to actually make the channel work for you . It's all direct response . So that's offers , creating urgency and scarcity all that stuff that we've covered so many times on this podcast .

Obviously , you can't send really long messages with SMS , so it all needs to be shortened down , but the same marketing principles apply . Now I'm trying to think off the top of my head something that worked really well for us with sms . Oh yeah , we did a barking madness dog bed sale .

We were already selling a good amount of these beds , so we knew there was demand for it , and then we brought that offer to sms and we hit a lot of our high value customers and we gave them the opportunity to grab a new dog bed and save some money in the process , and that did really well for us and , obviously , for new subscription recruitment .

Like I said , if we're running an offer that has been working really well for the previous month and then we get to payday friday , a lot of the time we'll bring that offer to sms and it'll work well and we'll get um a good return on our investment and a decent amount of people will actually sign up .

Now we also use SMS Marketing to help us with failed payment recovery . We're currently testing Stunning and I believe they have free SMS payment recovery built in , but we actually haven't got around to testing that yet . But we actually haven't gotten around to testing that yet .

But what we do use are Subli automations which are connected directly to Twilio , and we have it set up that on the second subli failed payment attempt , a customer will automatically get a message from us asking them to update their cart .

And the reason we have it set up on the second failed payment is because if we had it set up on every single one of the failed payments , it could get expensive pretty fast and we found that it works pretty well to just have it on the second failed payment . So those are the times we found SMS marketing to be most effective in BusterBox .

Now for our sales messages we use a website called textmarketercouk

and for our domain messages we obviously use Twilio , because that can integrate directly to Subli and the messages are sent out automatically . Textmarketer , by the way , is mainly a UK based website , but I'm sure there's many different websites in the US which can be used to send messages .

Now , I hope you found this episode helpful and I hope that answers your question in detail . We'll be back next week at the exact same time , but before we go , could I ask a big favor ?

If you've been listening to this podcast for a while and you found value in the information I'm sharing , would you mind giving me a review on Apple , spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts ? It just helps me get this show out to more people .

If you have a question you want answered on the show , head over to subscriptionboxresourcescom , join the free Facebook group and post your question there . Chat to you next week . Bye , bye .