Twitter Facebook LinkedIn Flipboard 1 The tremendous growth prospects of the subscription box economy are well-documented. And I’ve shared insights on creating a profitable subscription box business on an external platform (read it here). For this article, we shall review seven crucial growth hacking ideas that can help you charge up your subscription box business in 2021. This post will give you tons of resources, from tips and tricks to keep your users engaged to best practices to get the word out on your offering. And you can use the insights to snag a portion of the $426 million subscription box market share for yourself. Let’s get started. #1: Create a Pre-Launch Email List Although many people think that email is dead, as voice tech and Social Media marketing continue to gain prominence, the numbers tell a different story. A 2019 survey found that over 70% of marketers believe email marketing generates “excellent” returns as a marketing channel — a higher satisfaction rate than paid search. Here is more data. Statista records that in 2019, global email users amounted to 3.9 billion users. That figure will grow to 4.3 billion users in 2023, representing half of the world’s population. But not just that, the record shows that over 347.3 billion emails will be sent daily by 2022. The returns on investment in email marketing are equally massive. Analysts say that for every $1 spent on email marketing, you can expect an average return of $42. Email marketing is one crucial growth hacking strategy to charge up your subscription business in 2021. However, you need a robust email list to give your subscription box business a chance of getting in front of potential users. For every 100 emails you send, 10 will not make it to the receiver’s inbox automatically. So the larger your mailing list, the greater your chances of capturing the attention you seek. In the next point, we share some insights on how we are growing our mailing list organically. #2: Master the Art of Storytelling Storytelling is one of the essential skills for businesses to master nowadays. With the fierce competition in today’s digital economy coupled with a hysteric spike in technological innovation and mind-numbing addiction to Social Media, consumers’ attention span has gotten even shorter. Information overload is commonplace, and the chances that anyone will notice your brand is minuscule. No matter how fantastic your subscription box business is, if you don’t know how to get potential users’ attention, you might as well bury your store under a rock. More especially if you don’t have an extensive budget to run ads and buy Google search traffic. At Chargeflow.io, we are cognizant of these challenges. Our strategy is to employ proven hacks and best practices that get our product in front of potential users. As an innovative brand aiming to shake up an already competitive industry, we’ve studied our market for years. We listen to the market, crunch mountains of data, and unleash our storytelling prowess through excellent resources that give savvy e-commerce entrepreneurs tons of value and uncommon insights. And, of course, they subscribe to our newsletter for more of such exclusive, actionable strategies. You, too, can do the same for your subscription box business. The world is hungry for great content. One article, video, or podcast can travel throughout the continents to bring your tribe customers to your store. And it’s common logic. Stories are the oldest form of knowledge transfer. It’s how we all learned complex concepts right from infancy. Look around you. The best story, not necessarily the best product, will always win. As our world gets continually fragmented and taxing, the demand for great content gets even higher. More so, you cannot possibly depend on paid media to get consumer’s eyeballs at your offering; a blog, podcast, YouTube channel gives you a cheaper growth hacking alternative. Another vital thing about creating an internal content platform is that you have ownership and control over the messaging and delivery. #3: Establish Credibility with New Brand Partnerships A partnership is always the right move, especially when you want to do more with less. A mutually-beneficial partnership gives you greater leverage than many other forms of customer acquisition and distribution pipeline development efforts. Great partnerships create a win-win trifecta: for you, your partner, and the customer. What do the other parties stand to gain from collaborating with you? Is there a mutual interest? Can you sustain each other’s interest in the long-term? Research your market and whittle down brand partnership prospects. Every business has a unique asset it brings to the table. Ensure you know your strengths before you start the discussion. On your own, as a business, you can achieve many wonderful results. But with purposeful brand partnerships, you can easily hack your subscription box business to greater credibility and success. Mutually beneficial partnerships give you great leverage #4: Get extremely Good with SEO Another crucial growth hacking tactic for your subscription box business is through informed usage of SEO and affiliate marketing. We’ve already established that even if you built the best subscription box business in the world, you wouldn’t be of much use to anybody if no one knows what you are offering. The market always wins. It’s like dancing in the dark. You can be the best dancer that ever lived, but how will you be celebrated if no one sees your moves? Thankfully, search engine optimization helps you bring traffic to your store. The following are some practical SEO tools you can use to give your subscription box business some positive spin. Technical SEO Tools: Screaming Frog, DeepCrawl, GTmetrix, Pingdom, WebPagetest, Lighthouse, Structured Data Testing Tool, Google Analytics, PageSpeed Insights, Google Search Console. SEO Browser Extensions: SimilarWeb, Keyword Surfer, Keywords Everywhere, SEOquake, META SEO inspector, MozBar, Ahrefs SEO Toolbar, SEO Minion, Ubersuggest, Google PageSpeed Insights, Structured Data Testing Tool. WordPress Plugins: Yoast, Rank Math. Outreach Tools and Content Idea: HARO, Prowly, Muck Rack, Ahrefs, SEMrush, Moz, Majestic, AnswerThePublic, Exploding Topics, BuzzSumo, SparkToro, Ubersuggest, Google Trends, Keyword Planner. You don’t have to use all of those tools. Go through the list, isolate the ones that seem helpful to you, and start getting the hang of things. The right SEO tools will be exceptionally helpful in ensuring those looking for your subscription box can quickly see it. That’s how we write several explosive articles that rank on the first page of Google search. That’s how you got to find this post. #5: Leverage Affiliate Marketing and Build a Social Media Community Affiliate marketing is as old as e-commerce. It’s a marketing technique through which an affiliate earns a commission for marketing another person’s or company’s products. The affiliate promotes the product/service they wish to sell and earns a determined percentage of the profit from each sale they make. The vendor tracks sales through affiliate links from their website to that of the advertiser. Affiliate marketing can be a tremendous growth hacking strategy for your subscription box business. And before you roll your eyes, here are some numbers: 81% of brands leverage the power of affiliate marketing, a statistic that will continue to increase as affiliate marketing spending rises every year in the United States, according to eMarketer. Another report shows a 10.1% increase in affiliate marketing spending in the United States each year. And in 2020, businesses spent about $6.8 billion in affiliate marketing. More so, affiliate marketing worldwide spends increasing at a 27% Compound Annual Growth Rate. That said, building your Social Media community will equally help you quickly create a tribe of brand evangelists for your subscription box company. Social Media done well is exceedingly rewarding, and brands like FabFitFun know that much. Social Media marketing is rewarding Nevertheless, you must understand that Social Media is like electricity. You can cook a man’s dinner with electricity, and you can also cook the man. That leads us to the next growth hacking idea to charge up your subscription box business in 2021. #6: Fast Follow the Pros, but Learn to Listen to Your Heart Success leaves clues. Business is business, and money is money anywhere in the world. The principles of building an exponential brand are precise. You can learn the best practices and create your unique formula. In the words of Luke Freiler, CEO and co-founder of Centercode, the best leaders don’t blindly emulate the most successful people around them. They know that wearing a black turtleneck every day won’t turn them into Steve Jobs. Instead, they look at the components of success and apply them to their circumstances. You have to be a good student of the market in understanding the unspoken rules and hidden patterns. Unpacking that insight further, Anna Wintour, editor-in-chief at Vogue, notes that there’s always a time when you know you have to break the rules. You are leading; you’re not following. And that’s an important lesson to remember. Your heart and instincts drive you. You should listen to the information, but your decision has to come from your heart. If you start to question and look at what people are doing to your left or your right, you will begin to lose that clarity of vision. Double down on the metrics that matter, understand how your business will keep making money, and continue to refine your process. To close this section, I present to you Garry Vee: how you make money is more important than how much you make. #7: Automate Your Disputes Mitigation Processes Every e-commerce vendor knows the devastating impact of payment disputes and friendly fraud. Analysts placed the cost of friendly fraud to businesses in 2020 at upwards of $50 billion. That figure does not include the broader, ancillary chargeback costs such as false positives, margin compression, and higher processing fees. When you ramp up the numbers to account for the stated indices, you are looking at a $150 billion annual problem. Thanks to the pandemic, and subsequent disruptions in global trade, you might as well add an upside of 20% to the number. Anticipating these risks and integrating a requisite dispute mitigation tool such as Chargeflow.io is one sure way of growth hacking your subscription box business and ensuring that you are not pouring your revenue into a rabbit hole. Chargeflow.io is the world’s first AI-powered chargebacks and disputes automation tool. Chargeflow.io helps you not only minimize the risk of getting chargebacks, fraud, and disputes but also helps you fight them when they occur. This post was first published here. Twitter Tweet Facebook Share Email This article was written for Business 2 Community by Tom-Chris Emewulu.Learn how to publish your content on B2C Author: Tom-Chris Emewulu Follow @tomchrisemewulu Tom-Chris Emewulu is the Founder and President of Stars From All Nations, an education company that unlocks African youth's potential through EPIC events and an immersive career accelerator called ReadyForWork.Africa. A business strategist and trainer, Tom-Chris enjoys helping entrepreneurs and rising professionals to be successful and has consulted … View full profile ›More by this author:Everything You Need to Know About eCommerce Chargeback and How to Stop ItChargeback Ratio: What Is It and How Do You Calculate It?Crypto Exchange Chargebacks: Everything You Need to Know to Fight Chargebacks Effectively