How I Started Selling Subscriptions Online [Part Two] - My Social Media Promotion Of This New Subscription Business Model

This is the second instalment of my review series of how I marketed my brand new marketing subscription service called The Spark. If you missed part one which covers email marketing, head over to the blog once you’ve read this one.

For the launch of this new subscription service, I promoted the offer on the following social media channels:

Instagram (approx 3000 followers)
Facebook personal profile (approx 1200 friends)
Facebook group (approx 1100 members)
LinkedIn (approx 1500 connections)

From this initial launch I made a total of 54 sales of the subscription service. 23 sales were attributed to my email marketing campaign, leaving 31 sales that my email system didn’t link directly to a click from an email to the sales page to a conversion on the cart.

I cross-referenced sales with my email list and found that 41 of the 54 people who purchased were already on my email list. Therefore 13 sales came from contacts who were not email subscribers and can probably be attributed to social media (or a referral from a friend).

I use Kartra for my email marketing and sales pages and I use tags so I can filter subscribers by their actions. To see who purchased and if they were already subscribed to my email list, I could set up a filter like this:

***Screenshot of Kartra showing tagged purchasers who are also email subscribers***

How I used Facebook to launch the online subscription service

For a 6-day period between 26th July and 31st July I posted and talked about the offer daily on my social media channels. The frequency of posts varied depending on the channel. I get most engagement on Instagram as it’s where I’m most active, so I focussed my attention there first.

I experimented with posting about the service on my personal profile as I’ve recently been connecting with more of my ideal clients there and was curious to see what the visibility for sales posts on Facebook would be.

I had let my Facebook group go cold over this past year but I jumped back in and decided to share the offer there to see if it would gain any traction.

Here’s how I announced the new offer in my Facebook group:

***Screenshot of my offer announcement in my Facebook group***

This post got 1 like and a reach of 120.

The same post on my personal profile got 9 likes. Not a lot in either case but I noticed that as the launch progressed and I shared the same promotional posts in both the Facebook group and my personal profile, the posts on my profile got the most comments and positive engagement.

Keeping the momentum going with Facebook posts

During the launch I made sure to celebrate the sales I was making using text on coloured background on Facebook posts and I replied to every comment to add to the number of comments on each post.

***Screenshot of a Facebook post celebrating the sales I made***

Celebrating sales is important to communicate because anyone on the fence would love to see they are not the first person to buy the thing!

My Instagram marketing tactics to promote the online subscription service

Over on Instagram I went live four times during the six day launch period to talk about a topic related to the problem that The Spark subscription service solves. I would talk for up to 15 minutes about the problem and why my ideal clients needed to solve it, before adding in a call-to-action to purchase The Spark as the solution. I saved each live over to my grid as a reel and uploaded a cover photo for each one.

Here’s a screenshot of my Instagram grid showing the reels with cover photos mixed in with other posts discussing topics relevant to the subscription service offer:

***Screenshot of my Instagram grid showing the reels and posts promoting the offer***

Alongside going live and posting daily on my grid, I used Instagram stories daily to talk about The Spark and as I did over on Facebook, celebrate everyone who was signing up.

Here’s an example of a story I did to celebrate everyone already using the content prompts inside The Spark. This was to create FOMO and also showcase how instantly useful the service is to my ideal client:

***Screenshot of my Instagram stories promoting the subscription service offer***

My Instagram stories would average 100 views. Up to 200+ if I let them run out and posted a new story after 24 hours. I think this is super low for an audience of over 3000 followers but that’s typical for organic reach on social media.

How I used LinkedIn to promote the online subscription service

I’m not an expert on LinkedIn (but I do know how to post to boost engagement on LinkedIn) and despite having a profile on there for about 15 years, I’ve only been posting regularly about my business for the past 12 months or so.

I approached using LinkedIn to market this offer as an experiment as I was aware I didn’t have a solid LinkedIn marketing strategy nor had I been proactively growing and nurturing an audience there.

I did a total of five posts about the subscription service and I was pleased to see they had more reach (averaging at least 200 impressions) than Facebook posts and my Instagram stories BUT they didn’t get as many comments or likes as the equivalent posts on the other platforms.

My approach to LinkedIn posts is to stand out from the corporate crowd. This post with a selfie of me in my Britney t-shirt got over 750 impressions:

***Screenshot of my post on LinkedIn using a selfie to draw attention to my offer***

Adding in a ‘mic drop’ bonus event to boost interest in the subscription offer

On day two of the launch period, I began to tease that I would be running a special event for my audience to share behind the scenes in growing my business to 6-figures. I kept teasing that this was coming until I announced on day four of the launch that everyone subscribing to The Spark by the end of the month (48 hours to go) would receive a backstage pass to the online event. This is what’s known as a mic drop bonus!

I shared this across all of my social media channels for the remainder of the launch and it gave me something new to talk about and I felt a renewed sense of excitement amongst my audience about the offer.

***Screenshot of my Facebook post announcing the mic drop bonus event for everyone purchasing the service***

Ending the promotion period using social media to close sales in the final 24 hours

As with all launches, it isn’t over until it’s over! I gave the mic drop bonus and an early bird price point to encourage people to sign up to The Spark by midnight on 31st July. On the last day of the launch I made 23 sales - almost half of the total sales for that launch period.

I kept up the excitement about everyone joining and kept pushing the incentives to join before the bonus period ended. I posted across all my social media channels on the final day of the launch to make sure as many people as possible knew that the deadline to buy was approaching.

I also recorded a walkthrough video of the members area inside the subscription service so that anyone making their decision to purchase on that final day could see exactly what they would be getting.

Here’s how I promoted this on social media:

***Screenshot of the walkthrough video promotional post on Facebook***

Overall results of using social media to launch a new online subscription service

This six day launch used a combination of email marketing, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn to promote and generate sales of my online marketing subscription service, The Spark.

I know from my email marketing stats that 13 of the 54 total sales came from people who were not on my email list. Therefore I can probably attribute these sales to social media but they may have come from referrals. I need to survey my customers to find out where they heard about The Spark.

Analysing the reach and engagement of my social media posts shows that combining social media promotion with the email marketing increased awareness of the new service and encouraged sales. I know from my email marketing data that 41 of the 54 people who bought were already on my email list. I can see that those email subscribers were also interacting with my social media content which likely acted as reminders to purchase.

Instagram stories were particularly useful in reminding people of the deadline using the countdown timer widget. Facebook posts on my personal profile gave wildly varied results from crickets and hardly any engagement to lots of comments on a similar post.

LinkedIn seemingly had the highest consistent reach but comments and likes were low in number.

My conclusion of using social media to launch a new offer or service

I can estimate the sales results for this service from social media by cross-referencing my email marketing list data with the people purchasing. I can see that social media helped me to spread the word and build hype around the new subscription service.

I’m a big fan of email marketing and there’s no way I’d want to rely on social media alone to make sales! An engaged email list is worth more to my business than the equivalent number of social media followers.

Next time I promote The Spark, I’ll be using social media and email marketing together and I’ll take the best posts and tactics from this launch campaign and build on these to hopefully see more engagement next time.

My original sales goal for The Spark was 20 sales and after I hit this in the first 36 hours of this launch, I doubled it to 40. To end this initial promo period on 54 sales was a huge win for me! The launch was a success and I have so much data to take from it into future launches.

My key takeaways for using social media to launch and sell a new service are:

Post daily during the launch period
Go live on Instagram and save the lives as reels (is Instagram the best for marketing?)
Use the countdown timer widget on Instagram stories for the promo deadline
On Facebook and LinkedIn, post the link to the sales page in the comments instead of directly in the post
Use selfies to stand out on LinkedIn
Build hype before the launch by teasing what’s coming
Ask people who have already purchased what they think to the service and use screenshots of this social proof in your marketing
Post multiple times a day on Facebook

Useful links:

✨ If you’d like to check out The Spark subscription service and how it can support you with your content marketing and nurturing your email list click here >> Subscribe to The Spark.

📧 If you want to start, grow and nurture an email list so that you can make more sales >> Check out my signature email marketing programme, Electric Email.

💌 If you want to apply Instagram marketing tactics to your email marketing (YES this works well!), watch my FREE training >> How To Use EMAIL Like Instagram