One of the most popular subscription boxes is the book subscription box. With millions of people around the world that love to read, it’s no wonder why book subscription boxes are so popular. It could very well be the best subscription box business to build. With countless niches to use, the sky is the limit.
If you’re looking to start a subscription box business, the book category may just be the route to take. As for starting your own subscription box business, there’s a lot you have to consider. In this guide, we’ll discuss how to get a book subscription box off the ground and how to make it successful.
Start With A Great Subscription Box Idea
One of the cool things about book subscription boxes is the fact that there’s a ton of different niches, themes and categories for you to get creative. With so much leverage starting out, you really have a lot to work with.
Wow, where do we even begin with all the ideas?
- Business
- Cooking
- Comedy
- Garden
- Home
- Love
- Marketing
- Sales
- Sci-Fi
- Romance
When you think about your monthly book subscription box, sure, you’re going to ship books to your customers. However, what else could you ad that can differ your book box versus your competition. It could very well be the idea that puts your subscription box business first.
Need some inspiration? Subscription Box Ideas
What Will Your Book Subscription Box Look Like?
You’re going to have to think about a design to go with for your official subscription box.
Don’t worry, there’s a lot of ways to get inspiration.
It’s important to build community when you’re in the beginning process of getting your book subscription box business going. There’s a lot of people that are passionate about books, which is another reason why it makes a great subscription service.
You can start collecting feedback, start building your social media profiles prior to launching. Ask for people to chime in, get their opinions.
Establish Your Online Presence
Next, you want to start establishing your online presence.
Here’s what you need to focus on;
- Having A Functional Website
- Having Social Media Profiles
- Be Easy To Reach
Your Website – Look, don’t stay up day and night over a color. You can always change your website. Starting out, it needs to work. Make sure it’s functional and can take payments. Ecommerce fulfillment for your online orders is going to be extremely important moving forward. You need to have the ability to accurately take orders and fulfill them.
Social Media – You need to get on social media right away and start building your following. Feedback is vital to your success, be open, make a community. Think along the lines of a Facebook group where people can reach you easily.
Contact – Make sure people can reach you via the phone, contact page, email and through social media. Likewise, make sure your customers can access your business in many ways too.
Building Your Email List
One of the most important channels to your new business is going to be email marketing.
You’re going to need to get familiar with email marketing and how it can help you grow your subscription business.
Before you launch, you can launch an email campaign to gauge interest in your new business. Start collecting names and emails so you can see who has interest in your launch. You can do a free giveaway to help the message get around about your launch.
When you go live and launch, these will be among your first customers.
Pricing Your Subscription Box
One of the most important things that you’re going to need to do is properly price your book subscription box.
There’s a lot of different expenses when it comes to running a successful subscription box business.
- Product Cost
- Box Cost
- Packaging Cost
- Shipping Cost
Ideally, you want a healthy profit margin for your subscription box business. The more profit you can add, the better.
Launching Your Book Subscription Box
Once you’ve established your online presence, built a loyal following and have hyped everyone up about your launch, it’s going to be time to go live.
This is a fun time, enjoy it, you’ve worked hard!
When the orders start coming in, you’re going to be the one that’s responsible for shipping them out. This is why it’s vital to focus on your order fulfillment. Starting out, you can get away being unorganized. As you grow and take off, your fulfillment will mean everything to you.
Once you’re getting consistent orders, you can consider hiring a 3PL fulfillment company to handle all of your order fulfillment. Until then, you’ll have to rely on self-fulfilling your orders. As you’re first starting out, your fulfillment is still important. However, until you start picking up momentum and sales, you or your small team should be able to handle the self-fulfillment.
When your fulfillment process becomes strained and you start to grow your business, this is when you have to consider outsourcing fulfillment or building a bigger fulfillment team around you.
There’s Always A Lesson To Be Learned
There’s going to be a lot you don’t understand starting out. You’re going to make mistakes, just make sure you learn from them and don’t make the same mistake twice.
One of the most important things you can do for your subscription box book business is getting feedback from your customers. Make sure you’re giving them an opportunity to give you feedback, good and bad. By doing so, you’re going to make your subscription box business better daily.
Lastly, make sure you’re surrounding yourself with great people. If you’re dead serious about wanting to grow this business, you’re going to need a great team behind you. In areas where you think you’re weak, hire someone or partner with them. When you need help with your fulfillment, you’re more than welcome to give us a call.
How A Fulfillment Company Can Help Your Subscription Box Business Grow
While you may not realize it, hiring a fulfillment company has a wide range of benefits outside the normal “someone else doing your fulfillment.”
One of the big benefits Thill provides to clients is “expertise.”
At some point, we’ve seen it all, Thill Inc. has over 50+ years of fulfillment experience.
Having a team of experts by your side at the most important intervals of your growth is essential to long-term success.
At some point, every company owner needs to focus on the future growth of their business and you won’t have time to deal with fulfilling your own orders. You’ve heard the old saying, “time is money and money is time,” it’s very true. By outsourcing your fulfillment and shipping, it can free up time, money, staff, and resources.
If your subscription box business is quickly growing, it’s time to start considering outsourcing your fulfillment.
Fulfillment will always play a key role in your subscription box company, treat it with the importance it deserves.
