How We Market Subscription Boxes on Cratejoy

Getting new customers is one of the most important and challenging aspects of any business. We found it’s the number one concern for subscription box entrepreneurs after launching their box.

Since launching Cratejoy, we’ve also learned a lot about subscription box marketing ourselves. In fact, in the last three months we’ve doubled the amount of sales and traffic to Cratejoy. Several sellers have noticed the increase in sales and asked about our marketing efforts, so here’s an inside look at some of the campaigns and techniques that have been especially successful for us.

Facebook and Instagram Marketing

Facebook and Instagram have been great platforms for subscription box marketing. They scale well and have introduced Cratejoy and its sellers to a broad audience.

All of our Facebook and Instagram Cratejoy ads are produced in-house.

Rachael Hyde, who’s been interning with the Cratejoy marketing team this year, produces terrific short videos.

There are two primary ways to bring in sales with Facebook and Instagram marketing. One method is “prospecting,” which attempts to reach new customers who may not be familiar with Cratejoy or subscription boxes. For this, we target ads based on specific demographics or interests. For example, several weeks before Mother’s Day, we may start showing ads to men aged 25-55 who are married and have children. Or, for a fandom collection, we might target and audience that has an interest in “Harry Potter.”

Acquiring new customers can be expensive! We experiment often with new campaigns, and the cost to get a new customer generally ranges between $20-$200. When we find a campaign that performs well (both in terms of conversions and cost), we scale it up as far as we can push it or until sellers in the campaign start to sell out.

The other method of Facebook marketing is “retargeting”. If a customer visits a specific listing page but decides not to check out, we display an ad specifically for that listing in Facebook in the hopes the customer will decide to complete the purchase later. This type of ad tends to perform really well, at an average cost of $10-12 per conversion.

A lot of small businesses don’t have the bandwidth, budget, or experience to run these types of campaigns when they’re first starting off (or would prefer to concentrate on other parts of their business), which is one reason Cratejoy is such a great resource to help build customer growth.

YouTube Influencers

Cratejoy partners with YouTube influencers to produce and distribute unboxing videos on an ongoing basis. These influencers tend to have audiences within a specific niche (jewelry, books, cooking, etc.) and love to share new and interesting subscription boxes with their fans. This is one of my personal favorites:

These influencers promote at least 100 products every month to a combined following of millions of consumers. Camille Dollins and Erin Kerr, both on our marketing team, are always looking for new influencers and managing current influencers. Every week they send out new boxes to review, coordinate and answer questions from the influencers, and measure the effectiveness of the campaigns.

Our team won’t be able to find an influencer for every box (some niches don’t have audiences or are difficult to find influencers for), but we do our best to place all our boxes with qualified promoters and help get those videos seen.

Box Review Sites and Bloggers

Cratejoy has partnered with the most influential box review sites and also works with bloggers in niche verticals. These sites have a combined reach of over a million readers and review at least 200 boxes from the Cratejoy team each month. We manage the relationship with all these partners and pay 100% of the commissions on sales.

Email Marketing

Over 150,000 subscription box lovers have signed up to Cratejoy’s email list, and that number continues to grow nearly 30% every month. Our marketing team designs and writes about three emails a week, featuring subscription boxes on Cratejoy with specific themes.

Email marketing works really well for Cratejoy as a whole. Many Cratejoy customers purchase multiple different boxes, and the emails help with new discovery.

Recent examples of Cratejoy emails:

• Get Lost in a Good Book
• Doodle or Die
• Snuggle Up with a Warm Drink

We also make automated personalized recommendations to registered customers based on their previous purchase history and recently viewed listings.

If you’re marketing a subscription box on your own, you might try sponsoring an email newsletter with a blogger or website that already has an established email list.

Content Marketing

Cratejoy’s Box Insider is our blog, where we promote over 50 boxes every month to hundreds of thousands of readers.

A dedicated team, led by our content marketer Cheyenne Smith, writes content on an ongoing basis around relevant themes such as Fandom, Harry Potter, Holidays and so on. We promote this content in various ways, including boosted Facebook posts, syndication, and emails. These posts also bring in a lot of organic search traffic.

Constant Experimentation

The marketing team is constantly experimenting with new channels. We’ve tried Google ads without much success. Pinterest seems like a great platform but hasn’t attracted sales volume. Retargeted displays ads do fine, but we haven’t had success with prospecting. Reddit ads got a lot of clicks, but not a lot of sales. Podcasts, magazine ads, mailers, and events are all channels we’ve looked at but haven’t run major tests with.

The point is, we’re constantly trying new marketing ideas and testing our assumptions.

What This Means for Your Subscription Box

If you’re marketing your own subscription box, we’d recommend trying out some of the channels that have worked for us like Facebook ads, YouTube influencers, bloggers, and content marketing. When you find a channel that works well for your business, focus in and scale that as far as it will go.

We’d also love to have you list with Cratejoy, so we can promote your box too!