Tag: brand strategy

SaaS Branding

5 Subscription Services and Why They’re So Successful

on June 10, 2021

These days you can get a subscription service for just about anything. But, not all of them stand the test of time or are worth the consumer’s money, and they’re quick to realize it. There are, however, many that are not only successful, but they’re also positively exploding. Let’s take a look at what they are and why they’re doing so well. 

Beauty and Grooming Subscriptions

If you’re into beauty products, you may not be into actually shopping in-store for these items. Whether you’ve been matched so off-color that you walked out looking like a clown, or you just can’t stomach the strong perfume smells of these types of stores, services like Ipsy or Birchbox are godsent. If you’re more particular about your products like you only use vegan cruelty-free – you guessed it, there’s a box for that. These types of services have even upped their game in some instances and branched out to include health & wellness, apparel, and home decor in their subscriptions like FabFitFun. With a reasonable sign-on price and often promotions for first-time subscribers, these brands’ sales are soaring. Bonus, they all make cancellation a breeze. 

Coffee and Drink Subscriptions 

Maybe you’re the type that wants the perfect pour over coffee every time. Or you need your coffee to be of a single origin. There are subscriptions for that. If you’re a wannabe wine aficionado, there are subscriptions that not only introduce you but educate you on what you’re drinking. Once you figure out your favorites, your subscriptions can be easily tailored to your interests. There are even subscriptions for single-serve bottles of wine, as the subscription Usual. You can customize your monthly shipments from as little as six bottles to as many as 24. One such subscription that’s a splurge but so worth it is the Fat Cork. At $199 a month, the party never stops with a quarterly shipment of Champagne.

Book Subscriptions

Even though a book to read the next day is just a click away nowadays, or the fact that you can read so much of what you want for free online anyway, book subscriptions not only exist, but they’re thriving. If you wish to go the route of The Book of the Month or you’re shopping for children who can’t even read yet, there are subscriptions for them. Books are an appealing subscription for so many people because it does the filtering for you. You tell these subscriptions what interests you and what doesn’t, then voila! You get arrivals that keep you well-read, have things to contribute conversationally, and it’s all worry-free—saving you even more time to curl up with a good book. 

Toy & Game Subscriptions

Maybe you picked up a puzzle addiction during a lockdown or perhaps you just want to make sure your children are getting more time away from their screens, especially since they’ve been schooling virtually all year. Either way, there are subscriptions for those too. The best part is, like most things nowadays, they’re so easy to customize. You can control if the child’s subscription will be more Montessori style or if you want them building things from kits. As far as your more adult toys, you can customize that too. And if you’re looking for a subscription to actual “adult” toys from an adult toy store, those exist too. These are successful for a myriad of reasons, the least of which isn’t the fact that even though we’re all constantly connected to technology, it feels rewarded to be offline and just enjoy games as we did in our youth.

Food Subscriptions

Everyone’s a foodie these days, am I right? Seriously, joking aside – what’s the one thing that brings us all together? The love of food! Not only do food subscriptions make a fabulous gift for nearly every adult in your life, but they’re an excellent present for yourself as well. You can literally get any type of food subscription too. Whether you’re shopping for someone who eats Whole Foods Plant-Based to a straight-up monthly cheese box for yourself (no judgment here), they exist. This market exploded and will continue to do so because, let’s face it, we all need it, and the more options, the better. Having it delivered straight to your door? The best.

Digital BrandingSaaS Branding

A STEP-BY-STEP Guide to creating a SWOT Analysis for your brand strategy

on October 10, 2018

When you set out to build your brand strategy – it’s always best to be number 1 in a new market – then number 2 or number 3 in an already crowded market. But, how do you build a great foundation for your venture?

The answer? A SWOT Analysis.

WHAT IS A SWOT ANALYSIS?

A SWOT analysis of your brand strategy would give you an idea about the strengths (S), weaknesses (W), Opportunities (O), and threats (T) of your brand’s ability to dominate the market.

SWOT ANALYSIS EXAMPLE

Let’s take real-life scenarios. A good friend of the writer named Sameer was starting a business where he would buy journals from India and sell it to the United States through an e-commerce store.

After a lot of research, he found a journal he liked and took his first step towards his goal. Upon the advice of the writer, he followed this step-by-step SWOT analysis for his product.

1 – Evaluate the Strength of your Idea

Sameer first did a quick Google research for the following keywords.

1 – Journals USA Buy

2 – Journals California Buy

3 – Self-improvement Journals USA Buy

4 – Gratitude Journals California Buy

He found some common denominators in the competitor’s websites.

Firstly, he found that there was virtually no copy under any of the products.

Secondly, he found that each of these websites had multiple journals for sale.

So, he found where his strengths lay;

  • He would sell just one journal on his website.
  • He would focus on a benefit-driven copy for his website.

2 – Swallow your Pride and Admit your Weakness

Next, Sameer needed to closely look at his weaknesses.

His biggest weakness was his marketing budget. If he were to take the Ad words route based on the projections, it would cost him close to $25 dollars to acquire a sale.

With a marketing budget of $500, he couldn’t risk running out of capital. So, he decided to explore alternate forms of advertising instead of Ad words.

 

3 – Look for Opportunities in Lesser Crowded Areas

Sameer had been hearing a lot about Instagram shoutouts.

Upon some quick research on Instagram hashtags, he found that the yoga handle has closed to 2 million posts.

Now, coincidentally Sameer practiced Yoga as well. So he decided to put his $500 dollars into marketing his business through shoutouts.

He found the best handles related to yoga and spirituality wrote a quick starter e-book on yoga which he used as a low tripwire offer of about $7 and then created an upsell page with the journal with a tagline “Journal like a Yogi”.

 

4 – Search for threats that can effectively shut you down

Sameer’s biggest threat now was the long lead time that comes with going through the funnel approach.

Upon his first couple of shoutout tests, he found that he got a 2% conversion on each shoutout expenditure.

So, at about $50 per shoutout – he would get close to 5 sales of his e-book. But no one was buying his journal.

He was $200 short and had just about $300 left before he ran out of his capital.

After looking at the analytics on his Upsell page – he found that a majority of the users bounced off within the first 10 seconds.

After a lot of dwelling, he decided to test a down sell page.

So after a user purchased his e-book he would then send them to the Upsell page for his journal.

Once a user clicks away from the page – he sent them to a down sell page where he gave the customer $20 off their first purchase.

After sending about 5000 people to his website – he saw that his tripwire e-book sales remained the same but this time he managed to sell one journal which helped break even on his shoutout expenditure.

This was a promising enough start for Sameer to continue on with this venture.

 

CONCLUSION

A SWOT analysis is just a tool you use to fine tune your business strategy. Do not make the mistake of spiraling down the analysis rabbit hole. An action is the greatest key to finding out if your theories are based on sound results or not.

Result driven advertising should help you here. Closely monitor what effect each one of your USP’s or offers has on your customer. Evaluate your cost per lead and lead time and then go about fine tuning it until you can fully automate the process.

Once you have found a good marketing strategy you need to scale up your operations and the best way for you to do that is to use a CRM software for marketing.

Kapture CRM is a cloud-based marketing SaaS provider that helps you automate a lot of the key tasks in your business.

Kapture CRM customizes its offerings according to the needs of your industry. The cloud-based platform can be used over a mobile application as well that is integrated over both iOS and Android platforms as well. Currently, Kapture powers 500+ brands in 12 countries.