How To Run A Holiday Bonus Box Promotion

I’ve always loved running the occasional Bonus Box sale – it’s a great way to offer something new and exciting to your customers, while also adding a nice bump in revenue (potentially higher margin revenue).

For those of you who are new to the concept, bonus boxes are one-time (non-recurring) boxes usually themed around a specific occasion or holiday. The fact that bonus boxes are non-recurring and limited edition make them very approachable to your existing customers. This built in interest from existing customers often results in bonus box sales being very high converting. In some cases you can increase your gross revenue in an individual month by as much as 40% without adding a single new customer.

You can create a bonus box promotion for a variety of different occasions. I often like releasing new bonus boxes to celebrate seasonal changes (summer, spring or winter themed bonus boxes). Other excuses I’ve used to release a bonus box include our businesses 1 Year Anniversary and a New Year’s ‘Detox’ Bonus Box, BUT every year, the highest performing Bonus Box has always been the Holiday edition!

Below I’ve laid out some steps and strategy ideas for running a successful Bonus Box sale this holiday season.

Creating the Bonus Box Product/Experience

The first step is fleshing out what your bonus box product will actually be. Determine how you can choose products that allow you to stay true to your niche while also maintaining a holiday theme (fortunately, there’s plenty of scents, flavors and colors that people attribute to the holidays). For bonus boxes I also suggest setting a higher price than your normal subscription (usually about $10 more). Approximately half of that increased cost should go towards making the bonus box feel a little “beefier” with a couple extra premium products. We’ve found that unconverted leads will also occasionally buy a bonus box to experience your service before subscribing, and the slightly more premium bonus boxes usually do a good job at enticing them into joining your recurring subscription.

Tip: Consider the product experience inside the box. You may want to do a special tissue paper, a special packing list, or other inserts!

Plan Your Product Sourcing

Generally, the most optimal time to start taking holiday bonus box sales is the beginning of November. After the first two weeks of sales, you should be able to estimate fairly accurately how many you’ll sell in the remaining few weeks. It’s at this time (mid-November) that we suggest placing your orders with vendors (giving them about 3 weeks to manufacture and deliver your product). Keep in mind that you’ll be doing this alongside your normal monthly product sourcing, so give yourself plenty of time!

For shipping, I recommend aiming to ship by December 15th allowing at least 6 or 7 business days for your packages to be delivered before the holidays. This puts your products in customers’ hands a few days before the official holidays, and even allows for re-shipments if anything goes wrong in the first batch.

Create a Landing Page

The first step is determining how you can create a one-time, non-recurring product. If you’re using Cratejoy this is fairly easy because they have have a ‘product type’ called “One-Time Products.” You’ll then want to setup a dedicated landing page for this sale. I usually like to have fun with these landing pages–add holidays elements, sneak peeks/teasers and even some mockups of the box with the teaser items inside.

Promote Your Bonus Box

As mentioned, bonus boxes are best used for increasing ‘share of wallet’ with your current subscriber base. Remember that bonus boxes do not create recurring revenue, be cautious if you spend advertising dollars promoting this sale, you’ll want to limit your customer acquisition cost to allow you to still maintain a net profit on each sale.

The first thing we always do after releasing the bonus box is email our customer base directly. Put together a nice holiday themed email featuring your ‘limited edition holiday bonus box’. You should also consider promoting the fact that you’re only making 100-200 (or a small limited amount) of them available. Plan on sending this email out about 3 times leading up until the last day, but I don’t recommend sending it more than that.