Mike says he couldn’t give away a free first box like some other subscription services, but he found other ways to make subscribers stick around. One of the most memorable was a “Free Bacon for Life” campaign, where customers would receive a free package of bacon in every box.
“Where I see a lot of people fail in subscription businesses is they spend a lot of time on how to drive down acquisition costs, but not a lot of time on how to increase lifetime value,” Mike says. “Increasing lifetime value is by far the easier one to do.”
Use influencer marketing
Mike started using influencer marketing early on, but not on Instagram or TikTok like you might expect. He noticed a paleo diet blogger told his audience to eat grass-fed beef, but he didn’t tell them where to buy it from. The ButcherBox team got the cayman islands phone number list blogger to mention the Kickstarter campaign, which resulted in a bump in sign ups.
“Try to deconstruct things and don’t just use the playbook everyone else has, but really come up with your own,” Mike says.
Rely on third-parties so you can focus on your product
Mike fully admits that his company isn’t a shipping company or a tech company. It’s a meat company at its core and he believes that everything else should be outsourced.
“The way that we built this company and did it in a capital efficient way was to partner with third parties everywhere that we could,” Mike explains.
To this day, Butcher blockchain and ai successfully integration in crm Box partners with third-party farms, processing facilities, cutting facilities, distribution facilities, shipping, customer service, and tech. That’s a big reason the company uses Shopify for its online store.
“For us, moving with a agb directory company like Shopify enables us to kind of offload the things that we’re not best-in-class at so we can focus on the things that we are best-in-class at.”
Take a listen to Mike’s full interview on Shopify Masters to find out more about how you can build a company that’s profitable from the start.
