Episode 63: Ecommerce, Marketing, and Subscriptions with Dave Beasley, Former Head of Consumer Marketing, Allstate Roadside

Mar 25

In the latest episode of Subscriptions Scaled, we speak with Dave Beasley, former Head of Consumer Marketing at Allstate Roadside.

Allstate Roadside provides fast, trackable, and reliable roadside services, including tows, jump starts, help with flat tires, and lock-out assistance.

The episode discusses everything related to ecommerce, marketing, and subscriptions, including churn models, acquisition costs, and the recent subscription explosion.

Dave Beasley

Dave has been working with subscription businesses and many different brands for a number of years. He begins the episode by introducing more about himself and the brands he’s worked with.

What Dave loves most about business, products, and marketing is what he calls a ‘Rubik’s cube of managing a subscription business.’ Dave says that one day it hit him that he doesn’t care what company or product he’s working for. What he finds most enjoyable about his work is the challenge of constantly trying to perfectly thread the needle of all the moving parts that make up a subscription business.

Dave’s career epiphany was that whatever he does, wherever he does it, and whoever he does it for, working out how to manage the subscription is what he wants to spend his time on. This took him some years to realize.

He calls this a constant challenge or opportunity. Dave compares his work to a puzzle that he’s always trying to optimize.

For example, Dave asks himself: how to drive a tenth of a percent better conversion? How can he lower his churn? These are the things that keep him up at night.

Direct Mail

A lot of the conversation surrounds the challenges of working in ecommerce and digital marketing.

Dave talks about some of the channels he’s used for marketing and how he’s seen the sector evolve. Unlike many, he’s still a big fan of direct mail, which has seen more success since the beginning of Covid-19.

Dave likes channels that work. To an extent, the best channel is the channel that works.

One of Dave’s biggest customer bases with Allstate was via AARP. AARP is America's largest nonprofit organization, dedicated to helping Americans aged 50 and older choose how they live as they age. The company has 30 million customers and 20 million households listed.

In 2021, direct mail was still the single most significant channel for driving new customer acquisition for AARP. Dave explains that as a smart marketer, you don’t just decide that certain channels aren’t cool if they’re still working.

Many companies' direct mail response rates went up during Covid-19. For many people during the pandemic, going to the mailbox and checking what had arrived was a highlight. With most people working remotely at home, reading through the mail became something interesting to do.

Allstate Roadside saw direct mail rates go up 20%–25%.

Digital Marketing

People of Dave’s generation grew up in a pre-digital world. As such, they’re used to direct mail, print, and press releases.

However, Dave understands that anyone of his age or longevity in marketing must be a digital marketer for success. At Allstate Roadside, the company was getting 80%–85% of its new customers through direct mail and outbound telemarketing five years ago.

Within three or four years, the team flipped the model so that 90% of the business was coming in via digital.

Dave shares that he shudders whenever someone says that they’re a digital marketer. He would rather them say that they’re a marketer primarily using digital channels for the business. When people say that they’re just digital marketers, he thinks it sounds like they aren’t complete marketers.

Dave says that most people in the subscription business immediately gravitate towards the digital model. However, while he believes you should focus on digital marketing, he notes other ways to get in front of people.

The Insurance Industry

Dave also talks about insurance as a sector. He explains that it's a black sheep in the subscription business as it involves selling a product that people hope not to use.

With a subscription, you need to be continuously delivering value. However, when selling an insurance subscription, you and the customer hope they never need to use the service.

Dave explains that this model comes with its own challenges, as you’re asking people to pay money for a service they don’t want. Nobody else will pay a subscription box service $100 a year and hope that the mail doesn’t deliver it.

Other topics discussed in the episode include churn models, acquisition costs, and the recent subscription explosion.

The Biggest Challenges for Subscription Brands

At the end of the episode, Dave answers what he thinks are the biggest challenges for subscription brands.

He explains that it’s challenging to come up with a compelling, tangible, differentiating message first of all and then figure out how to cut through all the clutter with that message. Even if you’re lucky enough to have a relevant message and it’s a good message, it’s still hard.

Finding the channels that you can deliver to effectively is challenging and expensive. Again, Dave compares it to threading a needle through all the moving parts.

Everybody says they have a great content marketing plan and everyone’s using social media. Everybody has the same playbook because almost everybody has to as there are limited options. That’s why it’s so challenging for marketers, as everyone’s essentially trying the same formulas.

Some people are better than others at marketing subscriptions, and there’s always some luck involved. Some have better sources, while others have better products.

But to some extent, everyone has the same cookbook. The cookbook is the same but the number of people coming into the kitchen is increasing, so it’s incredibly hard to be successful. Not impossible, Dave says, just difficult.

It’s challenging to figure out how to cut through and stand out from the clutter.

This is why marketers need to keep learning. There are so many ideas and different perspectives in the subscription industry and marketing that people can learn from others. “You need to keep adding to the cookbook,” Dave believes.

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