In the future, Meeker and the BarkBox team plan on expanding the products and services they offer. Because retention rates for other packages are so high, it’s not worth the time for a small team. “We actually don’t put a lot of emphasis on reaching out to them and trying to move them into a different plan because it’s such a small group,” Meeker says. Only three percent of customers purchase the monthly package, which is the most expensive, and if they don’t renew, they aren’t chased down. Customers can purchase monthly, quarterly or half-year subscriptions, with the half-year plan being the best value. That includes focusing their energy on certain groups of subscribers too. When their retargeting service wasn’t bringing them the results they wanted (“We were spending hundreds of dollars per customer,” Meeker says), they opted to switch to SharpSpring Ads’s services, which has been “super, super successful,” he says. On the other hand, they focus their energy where it matters. “So it’s to add more value there, to give people one more way of discovering the brand and interacting with it.” “But you really can’t do much with it unless you’re a subscriber,” Meeker says. The team recently launched a BarkBox mobile app, which allows customers to review and reorder products, as well as check the status of their boxes. “They actually translate really well into new people discovering it and purchasing, and so now we’re a little more systematic about identifying people who do that.” The Internet is filled with home videos of happy customers gleefully describing the contents of this month’s BarkBox while their dogs nose through the toys and treats. “One thing we kinda stumbled into is people love to do these unboxings and put it on YouTube,” Meeker says. Sometimes they’re surprised at what works. “We actually have one woman who has now earned over 24 years of free BarkBox,” he says. Customers earn a free box for every new subscriber they refer. “And when we find channels that work, we go very heavy on those.”įor example, deal sites like Groupon and Fab have proved to be effective for bringing in big groups of customers to BarkBox over a short period of time, and the company’s referral program is popular too. “Our approach there over 2012 has been to try as many things as we can as fast as we can and see what works,” Meeker says. They all fall into this profile for sure.”īecause BarkBox knows its customer base–women with disposable incomes, they tend to be 25-to 35-year-old professionals with no children, or 45- to 55-year old empty nesters–its founders have been able to tailor the business to their audience’s wants and needs, and interact with them in as many ways as possible. We see that with the people we interact with on Facebook, commenting on everything we post, and people who write in or call in to support with questions. “We talk a lot about how our customers are dog parents,” Meeker says. We’ve taken a lot of time to be thoughtful about our brand and create a narrative around it.”Īt the heart of BarkBox is the idea that a dog is a member of the family. “We call it customer acquisition or brand building, so we’ve put a lot of emphasis on both. “We don’t call anything marketing,” Meeker says. And we really thought 10,000 was not possible.” But they’ve doubled that, and now they’re concentrating on building a fun, edgy, irreverent and sometimes inappropriate brand, he says. “The story we were telling the investors was that our goal for the year was to end with 8,000 customers, and the stretch goal was 10,000. “We had a stretch goal and we raised the money in June of this year,” Meeker says. In fact, one of their biggest problems has been underestimating growth. And, event better, Meeker says the company has managed to retain them at a steady rate of 93 to 95 percent for the first year. In a little under a year, the company has amassed more than 20,000 customers, Meeker says. “We just wanted to help dog parents who are obsessed with their dogs discover the newest toys and treats and bones for their dogs and provide it to them on a monthly basis,” Meeker says. Meeker co-founded BarkBox with Henrik Werdelin and Carly Strife, both veterans of the startup scene, and the service launched in early 2012. He let other dog-lovers in on it too–thousands of others, in fact. Starting BarkBox–a subscription-based service that delivers boxes of goodies to dogs and their owners once a month–was Meeker’s solution. BarkBox founders Henrik Werdelin, Carly Strife, and Matt Meeker.
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