Growing Your Subscriptions
Lesson 20 from: A Crafter's Guide to Starting a Subscription BusinessMei Pak
Growing Your Subscriptions
Lesson 20 from: A Crafter's Guide to Starting a Subscription BusinessMei Pak
Lesson Info
20. Growing Your Subscriptions
Lessons
Introduction
09:53 2Why Sell Subscription Products?
02:53 3Great Subscription Ideas
10:59 4Positioning Your Subscription Product
06:09 5Pricing Your Subscription Product
25:48 6Interview with Stacey Trock of FreshStitches
34:29 7Subscription Models: Which One is Best for You?
23:52 8How to Manage Your Subscriptions
06:14Shipping Tools and Apps
23:06 10Finding Your Ideal Customer
05:54 11Why Marketing is Necessary
06:45 12Copywriting for Your Subscription Product
19:03 13Photography for Your Subscription Product
03:49 14Promoting Your Subscription on Social Media & Blogs
32:47 15Interview with Maureen Vasquez of Pipsticks
23:57 16How to Handle Unsubscribers
09:19 17The Unboxing Experience
06:18 18Frequently Asked Questions
08:09 19Common Challenges for Subscription Businesses
08:52 20Growing Your Subscriptions
10:21 21Interview with Wendi Gratz of Shiny Happy World
24:50Lesson Info
Growing Your Subscriptions
Let's talk about growing your subscription so how do we scale this up? You know, we talked about how subscriptions are a great way for you to get that consistent income, right? So there's no reason? Well there I guess there are a couple of reasons but it's a great reason to keep growing this subscription so some ways that you can do this is to scale up your blogger outreach you can just really focus in on that, and if that was all you did, you're going to get you're going to grow your business really quickly if you got into a cz many bloggers and web sites and magazines as you could with this process, you know you could hire pr agency that's going to cost a lot of money and they're not necessarily going to give you a really great results. Um, that's kind of experience and having right now with mine, but you can also hire this out to a virtual assistant to help you do and in that way she acts more, isn't it not really an employee? But you know she's on your team she's someone that you c...
an train to do the research to the disease to do the emailing to do the following up so having someone dedicated to do just blogger outreach could potentially be a path that you want to take, you could also looking to investing in advertising and re marketing so I know instagram recently launched their instagram ads, which I've yet to try out, but I'm really excited tio to check it out, but a great place is facebook ads on dh I think in a in an upcoming workshop on keep them coming back the secret to re repeat sales, I'm going to show you a walk through on how to actually do the facebook at facebook re marketing ends it's really easy, but potentially this is one way for you to get those people who have checked out your product listing for your subscription and reach out to them again, you know, potentially offer them a discount on their first cycle or you know what have you you don't have to offer them a discount. You could just say you could just, you know, be that top of mind, just reminding them that this thing exists so they can come check it out again. Another great thing for you to do if you aren't already doing and this is kind of just general advice on just business in general is collect, ask people for feedback, ask people to give you their testimonials or reviews on your subscription, and then just put it everywhere you know, put it in your product listing put on social media. I don't know about you but whenever I buy stuff online and I buy everything on line I mean I buy dog biscuits online and I buy two faced online is just amazon makes it all so easy but I always check reviews first and it's just I think a lot of people are starting to do that more and more now so if you can get some great reviews on your subscription you're going to get a lot more you're going to build that trust and people are going to be a lot more comfortable with with converting into that fail at some point once you've reached that phase of growth, you may want to get past that paypal um method of how we're doing things s o a lot of artists a lot of makers as I mentioned we all start off with paypal and for the most part I would have been happy just staying on papal but once I moved over to shopify, that option of using a paid app was there it was pretty affordable with twenty dollars a month and a one percent commission on the subscribe on these subscription payments but it comes with all of these really cool features that kind of really make my life easier so I I was happy to do that andi what was nice with that is there is the option for you to transfer your paypal subscribers to this new system and I think we actually in our upcoming interview with wendy, I'm not sure if she will talk about this all just briefly mention it, but she also is moving from a wordpress website to shop a fine. She actually just launched her show fi store, which is really exciting. It looks really good, but she started off with paypal, and she wants to move people over to her new system for collecting payments, right? And what she's doing, which is a really great idea, is she's incentivizing people with a free pattern. So when the creates sewing, embroidery and mating patterns, I believe s o her clubs are all based on her patterns on how to do sewing, plus she's and soft toys and things like that. But I think it's, a really great idea to just, you know, send an email to your your current subscribers and just tell them I'm changing ally, moving over to new system, and if you would still love to stay on with me, you know, it's a little bit of a trouble for your customers and it's, a little bit of a road bump in that whole, polished and smooth and seamless customer service experience, but really offering them that incentive of an extra free pattern for the people who do sign back over, I think, will really make I think, you know, I'd be surprised if not if everyone doesn't go over and if the people who don't transfer over, they probably are dropping out for other reasons, but for the most part, I think she's going to get a lot of people transferring over to her new to a new system. So do we have any questions from the audience about, you know, typical problems and challenges? And how would you deal with let's say you've done everything you can to provide good customer service and recourse if things go wrong? But what about people that are just plain vindictive or want to see their stuff in print and do really bad reviews like, how would you handle that? So for those people who are really kind of just out there to get you for no really good reason, who's just they're really having a bad day and they're taking it on you. I tend to did not I don't want to take it from them. I normally would just sent the moment I get the moment I sniff out that this is the kind of person they are, I would just send them a refund, I would apologize for the experience, but I would stop, you know, I would just stop emailing them on dh for those negative reviews, I think it's up to you if you feel like if you feel like there it was valid feedback then you know it's up to you to keep it up there for other customers to see but if it's just totally like that's completely untrue, I would remove it if you have the power to remove it um just because you know, just because they had a bad day doesn't mean that they ought to take it out on you, right? So that's normally what I've done with some of those customers I had one person ones that she was really sweet at first and then just suddenly she just came on mean, she was like, completely like just blaming me for all the failures in her life and it was it was just really weird and and she was picking on my assistant and I was like, ok, you can pick on me but don't pick on my assistant you know, if you want a refund, I'm going to give you a refund but don't you know don't don't pick on my people s o in those situations just if you can identify right off the bat that they're just just yeah, just just send them a refund and just stop don't you don't have to deal with them do we have any, um actually huckabee so she said I don't have kids currently but was thinking of making them but only as a subscription not in my shop maybe I could offer a gift card to purchase digital patterns in exchange yeah yeah okay so that makes a lot more sense now so she normally sells patterns but she wants to expand into making kits as a subscription but so what if what if someone asks for an exchange but she normally doesn't sell kids actually another thing you could do I do like the idea of giving them a gift card tio just other patterns that they could buy what you could do is just have them on in your subscription just one more cycle longer for free um and that could be a good way to just wondered is there a time when you notice that that you should look in your email for the the thing they didn't know the male getting lost? Is there a season that where you find like your packages get lost it all? Not really it happens so rarely that I'm not really I'm not actively checking in on that um I do believe that in ships station they do with the tracking number they will have a little icon that will say like oh it's delivered or it's not delivered or it's in transit so it might be an easier way for you to just have a quick glance at what has arrived in what hasn't but normally what I do is I just wait for that person to email me on whether they have or haven't received their product and then I would just take it from there yeah, but I haven't seen like any particular season with that happening. Yeah, I think I think, you know, I see it happening a lot more over the over the christmas, even just because I'm shipping so much more out that chances of it happening increase um, but otherwise I've had pretty I just normally wait for them toe to write to me. Yeah, and the other question because you said you have a kind of built in because you use the papal, the price went, shipping changes price, but you can't change the price on your paper is their margin that you use so that you're not affected yeah, yeah, yeah, so I guess I'm grateful and I'm thankful in that way that when paypal increases their shipping charges domestically, it's only like a couple of few a few cents like maybe ten or twenty cents I know internationally it normally takes a bigger hit, but I normally just it's all part of my pricing. You know, when we talked about multiplying your costs by two and then multiplying again by two if you if you follow that guide, you really have a lot of buffer to just just take it, andi, even with my shipping, I charge for dollars dollars domestically. But I really because my jewelry is so light. It's normally, like three ounces. Onda shipping normally only ends up being two dollars, and then the other two dollars goes into, like packaging and paying my assistant to ship the products for me. But there is a little bit of a buffer in there.
Class Materials
Bonus Materials with Purchase
Ratings and Reviews
a Creativelive Student
Great course, especially the interview with Stacey (part 6).
Nuvea
Mei gives lots of practical information and resources in this course.