If you read our Marketplace Announcement post back in early May, you know why we built a subscription marketplace and boldly made it our homepage!
At Cratejoy, we’re 100% vested in our seller’s growth and we’ve taken a very holistic approach to ensuring that you have the best chance at succeeding. Our homepage doesn’t sell Cratejoy’s services – it sells yours. It’s our goal to both provide you with the best tools to run a subscription business AND to actually help you get customers.
From the beginning, the goal behind the subscription marketplace was to build a powerful customer acquisition machine for Cratejoy sellers. In just over two months we’ve made some serious progress and the marketplace is finally starting to become a decent driver of new subscriber growth for our sellers.
In the first 60 days of the Marketplace these are the results we’ve seen so far:
- Over 400 subscriptions are now listed in the marketplace.
- Our editors have published over 200 thorough reviews for Cratejoy subscriptions and over 1,200 photos (We do this free of charge).
- Over 425 new subscribers have been generated from the marketplace for Cratejoy sellers.
- We’ve driven over 50,000 potential customers (visitors) from the marketplace to Cratejoy stores.
How are we doing this?
- Lots of organic, unique content that drives traffic to your subscription. We’re matching your subscriptions with writers who are passionate about your niche who can write an unbiased, quality, honest review about your box.
- We’re spending money on advertising and driving potential customers to your listing in the marketplace.
- We’ve partnered with major affiliates and are paying them upfront commission per conversion to get you customers! That’s right – we’re literally spending out of pocket to add new subscribers to Cratejoy sellers.
- Two marketplace newsletters that go out to consumers each week (one displays trending, new reviews, etc. The other features brand new Cratejoy subscriptions).
This has just been phase 1 of the marketplace. Here’s a taste of what’s to come:
- Stats are coming! Soon you’ll actually be able to see the work we’re doing for you! New customers that came as a result of your marketplace listing will be marked as such in your seller dashboard. We’ll also be displaying the number of visitors to your listing, conversion rates, etc.
- Self-management of your listing. Soon you’ll be able to manage your listing in the marketplace direct from your Cratejoy seller portal.
- Marketplace checkout to increase conversions. This is in testing right now. We’re integrating checkout right into your listing to eliminate the amount of steps involved for a customer to complete their purchase. Our initial testing indicates this will boost marketplace sales by 50%.
Expanding the marketplace affiliate program.
This is likely the first time you’re hearing about this, but we’ve recently been testing out a marketplace-wide affiliate program and are currently paying a handful of affiliates to drive paying customers to your listing (we pay per conversion). This has been very attractive to affiliates because it allows them to promote many different subscription businesses with one convenient tracking link and reporting dashboard.
This is great for Cratejoy sellers because:
- You get affiliate relationships with dozens of new bloggers who are referring traffic to you just by being listed on the marketplace.
- You don’t have to do the technical integration and debugging of a large range of affiliate programs to adhere to every bloggers unique requirements.
- We negotiate great rates with affiliates so that you don’t have to work with each one individually.
- Cratejoy is handling all the commission payments to affiliates (up-front payment to affiliates for new subscribers driven to you). Another thing you don’t have to worry about!
Customer acquisition costs are coming.
We are planning on expanding our affiliate partnerships for the marketplace, quickly growing the amount of qualified visitors we send to your listing, and doing the legwork to help you grow your business faster. However, in order to do this we’ll eventually need to stop eating the cost on our end. Your listing in the marketplace will continue to be free, but in the future expect that we’ll be charging a fee for new paying customers you get from the marketplace (essentially just a very reasonable, performance based customer acquisition cost). Remember, there will only be a fee when you actually get a new paying customer from the marketplace.
More to come!
We’re growing the marketplace fast – conversion optimizing and enhancing your listings, increasing discoverability, browsing features and more! You’ll also start to see more and more control over your listing, more customer acquisition tools and mostly importantly, new subscribers coming from Cratejoy!
