Beauty Box – Therabox

Subscription Box Strategy for a Black Friday Impact at Any Time of the Year

TheraBox is a self-care subscription box that is therapist-curated, and they make a truly outstanding box each month. Like many brands, they generate much more revenue during holiday promotion times like Black Friday, December, and Mother’s Day. But we were able to find a strategy that led to a Black Friday-like impact throughout the year.

Our Strategy

Offer
The promotion was simple: a FREE product for every order over $25, which are almost always long-term subscription boxes. Before this, they ran promos of 15% off entire subscription orders. This FREE product giveaway costs them less money than losing 15% on an entire subscription, but the audience perceives it as a much better deal.

Targeting
We launched this promotion with a heavy emphasis on retargeting. Normally we allocate a budget of 75% cold/25% retargeting, but here it was almost 50/50, especially since they had a lot of warm traffic from so many marketing channels.

Ad Creative
Our ad creative consisted of the top-performing images put into a carousel or slideshow along with images of the free product.
Ad Headlines:
We featured the main benefit in the headline, which began with the mother of all power words: “FREE.”

Ad Body Copy
We added aggressive scarcity appeals, and this definitely played a huge role. Instead of offering the same product for free for the entire promotional period, we presented a different product each day. Scarcity appeals like “TODAY ONLY” motivated viewers to take action.

Results

• 9.29 ROAS
• $12k revenue
• $1.3K ad spend
• $3.48 CPA
• 376 orders in about 10 days

29% CONVERSION RATE (376 orders from 1,287 unique landing page views). In addition, this revenue is just for the first month’s payment on long-term monthly subscriptions, so the customer lifetime value can easily be more than 10x this first month’s number.

Beyond the Metrics

Subscription boxes have an advantage in this promotion because they lead to a high customer lifetime value due to repeat business. This allows the company to afford a bigger up-front discount/giveaway.

This strategy was much more effective than the 15% off promotion because customers perceive the offer of a FREE item upfront as a better deal than 15% off, and the brand loses less money by giving away a free item than by offering the discount.