Ezra plans to have his biggest Black Friday ever. You can too.
In 2018, Ezra Firestone generated $700K over Black Friday, with $100k alone on Thanksgiving for his Shopify store BOOM by Cindy Joseph.
This year he plans do 30% more and he's going to tell us exactly how.
Master Marketer Ezra Firestone breaks down the exact Black Friday and holiday email campaigns he'll be running this year.
You'll learn:
The Unofficial Shopify Podcast
10/13/2020
Kurt Elster: One of our most downloaded episodes last year was Ezra Firestone’s Black Friday marketing blueprint, right? In it, he said he was gonna make a million dollars that year. That was 2019. It wasn’t an audacious goal, either, though. Through years of work, he had already done $700,000 on Black Friday in 2018 with 100 grand of that being on Thanksgiving. I thought that was pretty cool. And so, he’s back today. Ezra, the master marketer behind Smart Marketer, Zipify Apps, and direct-to-consumer cosmetic brand BOOM by Cindy Joseph has returned to tell us how 2019 went and how he’s gonna kill it in 2020.
And if you have not heard Ezra before, let me tell you. He holds nothing back. There’s no… He’s not like, “All right. Well, you know, you just go make the email.” He’s gonna layout the full strategy for us, I am sure. And he, on top of that, is a brilliant mind, all around nice guy. I like him a lot. We just spent like 20 minutes shooting the breeze, chopping it up before the show, and I’ve talked to him enough times to know if you suspect like, “I don’t know about this guy. Maybe he’s not authentic. Maybe he’s fake.” No. 100% Ezra is the real deal. What you get here, this is him.
Ezra, welcome. Thank you for coming back.
Ezra Firestone: Woo! Whooee. Here with tech nasty, the Shopify kid, Kurt Elster, ladies and gentlemen. Hey, man. Thanks for the intro.
Kurt Elster: I’m sorry. Did you refer to me as tech nasty?
Ezra Firestone: Tech nasty. Dude, you’re always getting crazy technical. You’re out here, you got new stream decks, you go the Rode this and that, you’re doing sound effects. And every time I’m… Oh, damn! Yeah-
Kurt Elster: I like my gadgets. That’s really what’s going on. I like my gadgets and I have a spending problem, so here we go.
Ezra Firestone: Yeah. It’s a lot of fun, man. It’s a lot of fun. Yeah. I duplicated your audio setup a couple years back and it’s been great, so thanks.
Kurt Elster: What’s really cool is you were my inspiration and then you’re like, “Hey, how do I… What mic is that? What processor? Channel strip?”
Ezra Firestone: Yeah. It’s good. It’s good stuff.
Kurt Elster: So, it’s cool.
Ezra Firestone: Well, hey, rising tides raise all ships. It’s nice to be able to help out friends in the industry and see people and like what they’re doing and get to know them, and actually like them, and collaborate, and I feel like that’s been our relationship. I feel like the time where we… Maybe we had met before this, but I really remember being like, “Man, I like this dude,” at Shopify Unite 2018. And I know we had crossed paths. I know we had done stuff. But that was like we got to have lunch or something or hang a little bit in a different way at that event.
Kurt Elster: Yes. Yeah. I think that was the first time… No. Yeah, 100%. That was the first time we met in person and you’re so, so distinct that from 100 yards away, or 100 feet away, I was like, “That… I know that’s Ezra.”
Ezra Firestone: I know that guy.
Kurt Elster: And like it was from the back. I’m like, “That’s him. That’s the guy.”
Ezra Firestone: Well, listen. You know, I love talking about Black Friday strategy. I mean, just to jump in, I know… Hey, we were broing down for 45 minutes before this call. We got on 3:45, so it was a long time, but I know that our listeners, thank you for being here, listeners, we do this show, or I’m happy to be on Kurt’s show in order to do my best to share with you what’s working in my eCommerce business and give you as much value as I can. Black Friday is one of my favorite things to talk about, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, because Q4 in eCommerce is like for at least a good portion of brands the quarter. It’s where the rubber meets the road. It’s where it all goes down. You kind of build your audiences all year long in order to be able to have-
Kurt Elster: Well, that’s why we call it Black Friday, right? It’s when-
Ezra Firestone: Get back into the black.
Kurt Elster: Yes. Your accounting, you went from red to black in your books.
Ezra Firestone: Yeah. Well, let’s hope that didn’t happen for you, because if you’re just going into the black because of the Black Friday sale, we got problems and we gotta talk about in another episode where we go deeper, but yeah. It’s a big event for us and last year we did have this super big goal of, “Hey, we want to do a million dollars over the Black Friday-Cyber Monday.” Which for us, includes Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Small Business Saturday… I don’t know if that’s actually Small Business Saturday, Super Sunday, I don’t know if it’s Super Sunday, and then Cyber Monday.
Kurt Elster: Just making up names for it now.
Ezra Firestone: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: I celebrate Sleezy Sunday and then Cyber Monday.
Ezra Firestone: Cyber Monday, Sleezy Sunday. You know, we did… We achieved that goal. We did $1.16 million. $1,163,347.96 between just Black Friday through… We didn’t do Thanksgiving last year. Through Cyber Monday. With $571,000 on Black Friday.
And if you have not heard last year’s episode, I walked you through the actual step-by-step strategy of exactly what I was gonna do to achieve that and it worked. And so, and by the way, this year’s strategy is similar. It’s a little different. COVID and there’s some other things we’re mixing in, but like… It’s quite similar, so if you’re interested, you can go back to that episode where we got super granular on the strategy. I’m sure we’ll talk about it here, too, but we did well, and it was great, and we’re happy.
Kurt Elster: I’ll put a link to that episode in the show notes for this one so people can find it quickly.
Ezra Firestone: Sweet.
Kurt Elster: So, 2019, you laid out an amazing plan for us. However, a certain pandemic occurred in between then and now. So, one of the… The wild card question is is 2020 different? How is it different? And then what do we do differently as marketers? Like what’s going on here? What’s your take on this?
Ezra Firestone: The brands that market during a recession or downturn or pandemic, which by… I mean, pandemic, yes, but we have not seen an eCommerce downturn. We’ve seen an eCommerce uptick as I’m sure you’ve talked about on several episodes.
Kurt Elster: Seen an eCommerce boom.
Ezra Firestone: Hey. I don’t know if we’ll ever see this again in our life, frankly, this kind of growth rate on eCommerce that we saw with COVID. And we are having the best year ever, that we’ve ever had. We’re over 50% up over last year’s revenue.
Kurt Elster: Whoa.
Ezra Firestone: When COVID hit, though, yeah, so we’re crushing it, and we’re getting the best return on ad spend. We’re the best we’ve ever done from a paid marketing and we’re a paid marketing company. We’re direct to consumer, paid amplification base company. Doing the best we’ve ever done, and we had some struggle. The way COVID hit us was it shut down our supply chain and it shut down our fulfillment centers, and we almost ran out of product because we didn’t have enough on hand.
And so, we saw some inefficiencies in our supply chain where, “Hey, we only have one supplier for each product. Hey, you know, we only carry two to three months of each product on hand.” So, we learned about some inefficiencies in our operating that we had to shore up over March and April and in a little bit to May when things were the most hectic, but since middle of May everything’s been smooth. All of our supply chain’s been back online and we’ve been going heavy in the advertising market and literally only last week, like usually we expect some seasonality in the ads market, and we expect some… We expect there to be some algorithm updates and it to get hard. And all year long, from January, straight through COVID, all the way until almost last week, we basically were having the best numbers ever, and only in the last two weeks have we started to struggle and see that Q4, end of Q3, Q4 seasonality. The election year coming in, which people claim doesn’t have an effect on the ad market. That’s not been my experience in every election year. Some of these other elements.
So, now we’re really starting to see a little bit higher cost per thousand impressions, a little bit higher cost per click, a little bit more banner blindness. It’s been a little harder and you expect that in Q4, so that’s kind of like where things are this year. But even with all the drama and all the madness, we’re having our best year ever, and I can talk to you about the strategies behind that, but I think we’re here to talk about holiday, but just on a high level… Man, we’re at like… I don’t know. $22 million for the year already, which is more than we did last year altogether.
Kurt Elster: Whoa. Do your hands hurt from counting all that money?
Ezra Firestone: Hey, man. There’s a lot… I mean, yes, it’s been a very profitable year and it’s wonderful, and you know that top line numbers don’t mean anything. It’s all about EBITDA, seller discretionary earnings, what you bring home, and we do very well in that department, but we also-
Kurt Elster: Well, and I think the other, when you hear those huge sums, it’s easy to go like, “Oh, wow. That guy’s rolling in dough.” And the reality is like many tech CEOs probably would say they view themselves as… One of our mutual friends told me this line recently and I thought it was funny. He said, “I mean, I’m an asset rich, cash poor tech CEO,” was how he described himself. I was like-
Ezra Firestone: I don’t have that issue, because I have a whole mini series where I talk about money and the reason that most businesses go out of business is mismanagement of finances, and how you should shoot to have at least two years of your living expenses in a bank account, i.e. what you spend on your life, what you get after taxes that you pay for food, and insurance, and rent, and entertainment, and kids, and all that, in case you get sick. I have a whole viewpoint on money, so I am… I do have a lot of-
Kurt Elster: Oh, where.. I didn’t know this. Where do I find this series? Because I want to put it in the show notes.
Ezra Firestone: We can link to it, but it really is like everything I learned from literally starting poor, starting from nothing, building up to… No investment capital. Doing it all myself with a full-time job to now, like my brands will bring in over $35 million this year. I got 100 team members. I’m literally just some guy. I’m not like any… You can do this. But I made every mistake. I didn’t pay the taxes, I didn’t pay the quarterlies, I didn’t understand-
Kurt Elster: Oh, I made that mistake early on. That one’s not fun.
Ezra Firestone: Yeah. It’s not. And you don’t know it if you don’t have anyone coaching you on the way, and when I got started, it was 15 years ago and there just wasn’t this information available like there is today for business owners, and so I made all these mistakes, and yeah, over time I have acquired a lot of money, which is wonderful, but I’m using it in good ways. So, anyways, I don’t know what I’m talking about now. Black Friday-
Kurt Elster: Well, no shame there. Okay, so with… You ran through kind of what 2020 had done for you, or done to you, and the outcome was it made you look at your production and fulfillment processes in a different way, or your supply chain, rather, and it was interesting the way you phrased it. I talked to a guy who manufactures in the automotive industry this morning and he had a similar high level view, and he said it really fundamentally is going to change the industry, and ultimately what happened was when we were ramping up to do all our manufacturing for the rest of the year in Q1, in March, we ended up effectively losing like four to six weeks of manufacturing time. And that kind of ended up being true… I would imagine that assessment is true across many industries, where it functionally looks like hey, you just lost… Six weeks of manufacturing time just went out the window.
But then you couple that with an eCommerce boom and now suddenly okay, you’ve got a glut in the supply chain and inventory, where nobody can get anything. But it sounds like you sorted it out and came out better because of it.
Ezra Firestone: Yes.
Kurt Elster: For Black Friday, what does… How does 2020 change things?
Ezra Firestone: Okay, let’s talk a little bit about just the structure of our thesis on Black Friday. I’m a guy who has literally run a Black Friday-Cyber Monday sale for my own direct-to-consumer eCommerce retailer every year, dating back to 2007, and I split test, and I analyze, and I have a data science background. Mediocre. I’m not the best data scientist in the world, but I learned the skill of data science and now I have a data scientist on the team, but like I’m into optimization at every level.
And so, at a high level, the strategy is obviously you’re building up audiences all year round, right? Because you’re going out and acquiring customers, and then hopefully you are using content to keep those folks engaged, and amplifying content to those folks so that they’re seeing your stuff in between the time you’re running sale events, and all the good social content marketing stuff we know to do as eCommerce business owners who have brands that tell stories.
For Black Friday Cyber Monday, what we do is we spend at least two weeks before the sale event building up an early bird list. Building up anticipation. Building up buzz for a coming launch. Because what we found was that when we just launched a sale, it worked way less well than when we spent several weeks getting people excited about this sale event, telling them it’s coming, telling them what’s gonna be on sale, because just seeing that and getting the opportunity to raise their hand and say, “I’m interested,” and seeing the paraphernalia, it wasn’t that much extra in spend to get that message out in front of them, to send emails to our list, to put out content that’s saying, “This is the stuff that’s going on sale. Here’s how you use it. This is why we’re excited.” All that. Literally doubled the value of our sale events, because it’s like… It’s the reason why Apple does these events. It’s the reason why Facebook does these events.
Because when you do the work to promote that an experience is gonna happen and then you give people that experience, it just works better. So, we made a big mistake last year, which was we promoted it as the biggest sale we’ve ever done, the biggest sale of the year, and we only gave a 10% discount, because we only ever give 10% discounts, and we… And you can get 10% off via exit intent on our site, and we always run our sales at 10%, like we just don’t discount that heavy. We’ve never had a problem with this.
Well, last year, I think just the fact that we promoted it as the biggest sale ever, the fact that we’re now huge, we’ve been doing this for five years, we’ve got over a million customers, there’s just… It flew until it didn’t, and then last year we got this negative… This crazy… Even though it was literally the best sale day of our life, Black Friday, $571,000 in sales, we got just hundreds and hundreds of negative comments of like, “I’m so disappointed and this is a terrible discount.” And yada, yada. To the point where we had to like anyone who bought at 10%, we did some quick stuff and we give them an email that gave them 25 more percent off. We had to basically do some damage control because we didn’t give a big enough discount.
So, first thing is 15% this year, which is bigger than any discount we give all year round, makes Black Friday-Cyber Monday extra special. So, the discounting that we will offer, and we’re gonna do some other stuff, is going to be actually the biggest one you can get all year. Then, to talk to through the structure of what we do from there, and feel free to jump in and stop me at any point, Kurt, but I’m just talking through our structure here, is we email a lot more than you would think, than anyone would, and we have these things that are called mini campaigns.
Well, rather than you might do if you don’t know about eCommerce email marketing and the heaviness with which you can promote a sale if you’ve done the work to build up good buyer… build good relationships with your buyers. So, we do these mini events where it’s like, “Hey, we have Black Friday, then we have a couple days, then we have Cyber Monday, then we have a couple days, then we have this transition to kind of like welcome to the holidays, then we have a couple days, then we have this transition to like hey, last chance to buy it with regular shipping or free shipping and get it in time for Christmas, and then we have the two-day, last chance for two-day shipping.” And then we have the last week of the year, “Hey, last chance to shop in 2019 and save.” We do a discount, 24th to the 31st.
So, we have all these mini events, these peak days. On each of those peak days, we email three times. 7:00 AM, 5:00 PM, 10:00 PM. And that significantly increases the impact of the closing of that particular peak, and I’m gonna give you the peak structure for this campaign. So, that’s kind of like the email side of it, is we have these sub campaigns, and I’ll tell you what they are this year. And it’s basically sales content, deadline content, product description content, social proof content, and educational fun stories that relate to either people are using the products or their life experiences, and we mix all that up.
Now, in addition to that, the strategy also includes advertising, and the ads and emails and now SMS, because we got a big SMS list now, which we’ll talk about in a second. All the ads, emails, and SMS, which are the three main ways we’re communicating with our audience, go to a landing page, an interstitial landing page that we build in our landing page builder, Zipify Pages. We’re always testing it. And on that landing page, we’re doing all kinds of conversion stuff, we’re running split tests, we’re doing… We’re testing carousels, versus one column on mobile, versus two column on mobile, versus featured bundle at the top, et cetera, right?
We’re doing all kinds of stuff. That landing page then goes to individual product offer pages and those individual product offer pages go then to the shopping cart, where the user will see a pre-purchase upsell that then goes to checkout. If they accept or deny, they checkout, they see a post-purchase upsell, a post-purchase downsell, then the thank you page. Now, if you visit, and people may need to go back, because it’s when you’re talking about this and you’re not seeing the assets, it’s kind of hard if you don’t have it all in your head, but if you visit the holiday interstitial offer page and don’t buy, we trigger email flows. We trigger SMSs. We retarget you with ads, right?
So, that’s all the direct response sales process stuff that’s happening during the communications of the emails and the ads, right? There’s that kind of direct response sales process that’s happening.
Kurt Elster: All right. Zooming out-
Ezra Firestone: Yeah. I have more, but we can zoom out.
Kurt Elster: More! Oh my gosh! All right, to put it in perspective, how many total emails are we running here?
Ezra Firestone: I mean, probably 50 to 60 if you’re not including the early bird warmups. Probably 50 to 60 if you include re-mailing unopens, which we do, and I’ll give you the actual email list from last year. I can give you a list of every email we sent last year. The whole structure of it, which you can put out to your audience.
Kurt Elster: Whoa!
Ezra Firestone: I want to tell you about some of the high level things we’re doing this year, Kurt, because I think it’ll help with understanding the strategy. I just went real deep into tick tacky on site stuff, but let me just zoom out and share with you that before every holiday we do a really fun photo shoot where we shoot models, and we shoot our products, and we theme it, and so that all the ads, and the landing pages, and the emails, and the images in the emails, and the images in the SMS, and our social grid, it’s all themed, and every sub campaign has its own particular visual theme, and that really helps differentiate it and not just feel like a super long sale, but actually these individual events that feel different to the consumer so you don’t get banner blindness, you don’t get tiredness. We invest in graphic design.
You don’t need to do a photo shoot. You can have your designer create subthemed campaigns. And I want to say that you might think I mailed too much, but the sale on December 24th to December 31st, which is that last end of the year sale, everybody who gets that has seen every email up to that point, and we generated an extra $300,000 in that closing week from people who had seen all the way until then, but because of the scarcity of the scale was actually going away, decided to actually take an action. So, it works better than you think.
Couple other things we do from strategy at a high level. If you buy once, we wait seven days and we put you on what’s called the 2X buyer sequence, and it says, “Hey, thank you so much for buying once. The first discount you got was 15%. We’re gonna give you an extra 5% off, so 20%, and only three days to use this coupon if you want to buy a second product. Oh, by the way, here’s the products you haven’t bought.” And we do five emails over two days with a deadline to try to get people to buy a second time who’ve bought once during the sale, and we’re able to convert between 10 and 15% of people to buy a second time who bought once with that discount ladder strategy.
This year, and then you can ask me questions. This is my last zoom out. This year, we are re-releasing during holiday to make it feel exciting, instead of just saying, “Black Friday, Cyber Monday, welcome to the holidays, last chance to get shipping for free and get it in time for the holidays, last chance to get two-day shipping.” Instead of just being sale, sale, sale, and then some content interspersed, we are re-releasing a product that we launched that we sold 14,000 units in three days. Sorry, it was 14,000 units in four days, or the best product launch we’d ever done in history by like 5X, and it’s our mascara, so we’re re-releasing that as part of this.
One of the transitions is gonna be celebrating our 10-year anniversary. One of the transitions is gonna be makeup tutorials of how to use our best products. So, like we’re… We’ve got swag this year, hats, and sweatshirts, we’ll use that. So, we’re gonna be kind of like… Yes, we’re gonna be having the sale the whole time, yes, we’re gonna be doing content the whole time, but we’re gonna be featuring different things, and it’ll be just more dynamic than it was last year.
Kurt Elster: Cool.
Ezra Firestone: And we are starting two weeks early. Early bird starts October 26th, runs to Friday the 13th. Friday the 13th, we’re doing early Black Friday and Silver Saturday, because we’re silver hair brand, and then, so we’re gonna essentially because of shipping and the chaos with all that move our Black Friday sale up by two weeks, and then build up to that, build up to it, run it, close it, content, content, content, then reopen again for actual Black Friday-Cyber Monday.
Kurt Elster: So, October 26th through November 13th, are we doing what is essentially a dry run of our Black Friday sale? Or is that the hype campaign?
Ezra Firestone: We’re doing a full Black Friday sale. We’re doing early bird. Build up the anticipation. Release. It’s available. So that in case UPS, USPS, FedEx, DHL are as backed up as they are now-
Kurt Elster: This is the fear.
Ezra Firestone: Yeah. You have to be. You have to move it back two weeks. I mean, I think, my viewpoint is that when I look at what’s happening with the carriers in my experience, because we ship a thousand packages a day, we don’t feel safe just launching it on Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and kind of hoping for the best. We want to take advantage of… We’re essentially having a two month sale. We’re starting early bird October 26th. We are opening the sale on the 13th and the sale will be open the whole time. We’ll do… We won’t be promoting it heavy the whole time, but we’re running ads the whole time. We’ll be sending emails every couple days until the end of the year. It’s a six week sale event. Usually, it’s a four week sale event. Black Friday through December 31st.
So, we’ve added two weeks.
Kurt Elster: What would you say to… I’m sure there’s merchants listening to this and saying, “That’s too much promotion. That’s too many emails.” What would you say to that?
Ezra Firestone: Well, you know, maybe… I’m in a spot where I put out three pieces of content a week at one of six categories. Makeup demonstrations, ambassador videos of brand ambassadors talking about their life and what they like about the brand, articles that talk about the experience of being someone in my audience, what it’s like to go through menopause, what it’s like to have undereye circles, what it’s like to grow your hair out silver. Sustainability content about what we’re doing for the Earth. I am putting out so much content that if you’re on my list, you can choose what you want. You’re already getting three, maybe four emails, five emails a week if you’re getting unopen emails from me.
So, I am running a media company as well as an eCommerce brand. And it hasn’t always been that way, but I have built up over the years-
Kurt Elster: It’s brilliant.
Ezra Firestone: I disagree, I’ve set the expectation you’re gonna get a lot of email and see a lot of ads. You never… If you visit my brand, and I think every brand should do this, there will never be a time you’re on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Google, Display Network, where you will not see my ads. You’ll see content. You’ll see products. You’ll see articles. You will see… I will be trying to reach you at all times. Page post-engagement campaigns just to get my posts in front of you. You’re never gonna not see me ever again.
Kurt Elster: You as the marketer, you as the co-founder, you should believe in your product, in which case if you believe in it, it should be your duty to try and sell it. You should view it as I’m doing the customer the favor of like trying to stay top of mind and reach out.
Ezra Firestone: Here’s what I think you should do if you don’t want to go HAM the way I am, or you have not set that expectation with your customers, choose your peak days. Hey, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, at the very least Green Monday, which is the last Monday, usually December 12th, that you can get shipping up to… You can buy it with normal shipping and get it by December 24th. And also, I would do like a shipping cutoff and a deadline threshold, like a deadline’s gonna go away, or sorry, discount’s gonna go away. And you should mail twice a day on each of those days at a minimum. Do that and you’ll make far more money than if you didn’t. Pick your peak days, mail twice a day, run ads to people who are in your warm audiences, retarget the people who don’t visit your sales page.
How hard is it to build an automation that says, “Hey, thanks for buying once. If you buy again, I’ll give you a bigger discount. You got three days to use it.” Do that, too. There’s some little things you can do that will swing the big doors. Little hinges swing big doors.
Kurt Elster: So, yeah, last year you talked about you did a follow-up email automation where anyone who purchased then got another, an email that said, “Hey, thanks for your purchase. If you’d like to make a second, here is a discount or code for that and it expires in 72 hours.”
Ezra Firestone: Yeah. It’s a five email sequence over three days.
Kurt Elster: Whoa!
Ezra Firestone: Two emails day one, one email, two emails day three. So two, one, two. And it’s like, “Hey, get this bigger discount. Hey, this bigger discount’s going away. Hey, last day to use it.” And tells you all the good stuff you get.
Kurt Elster: And the theme through all of this you said is hype, but also the thing we’re hearing is creating urgency. Everything is time boxed, where it’s like, “Okay, here’s the offer. It’s going to expire.” And then let’s say we’re sending five emails, well, four of five are reminding them that it’s going to expire.
Ezra Firestone: Yeah. I mean, look. But I’m also mixing in so much story, and so much content, and so many articles, like I’ll send you the 2019. You’ll be able to look at the actual emails we sent. But yeah, it’s like announcing the sale, and then saying last chance for Black Friday. Announcing Cyber Monday, last chance for Cyber Monday. Content, content, content. Hey, welcome to the holidays. Hey, last chance to get in times for… So, we’re mixing in deadlines and urgency, but we’re not stuffing it down your throat, but it’s definitely present.
Kurt Elster: All right, so we mix the content. It’s not just a pure promo email. It’s the content that they’re already used to with a holiday spin on it.
Ezra Firestone: So, some emails are straight promo, but some of them are straight content with PS’s about the sale event. Which, when you look at the email, I’ll even pull it up here. I’ll pull up the… Yeah. I’ll send you a link to this and you’ll get to see every email, what subsection of the list it went to, what was in it, what was the point of it, and it’s a good mix between content, sales, product descriptors, social proof, deadlines and urgency, that kind of stuff.
Kurt Elster: Do you… You had mentioned re-mailing. So, you resend an email to someone who did not open or click. Is that… Talk to me about that. To me, I did it in years past, but it feels like a risky proposition just because so many email clients now… We can’t see if they opened it, because they default to not loading images.
Ezra Firestone: Yeah. We don’t do it as much as we used to, but we still do it, and it does work really well. Keep in mind, we’re mailing subsegments. We’re mailing the early bird list separate from the main list, and we do these things where if you haven’t engaged or clicked in 120 days, we put you on a sunset flow that says, “Hey, we’re gonna kick you out of here if you don’t engage or click.” And we get them to reengage or we scrub our list. We are doing all kinds of list cleaning stuff all the time to keep our… We use Email on Acid to check every email before it goes out to make sure it’s not clipping, to make sure it’s not gonna get marked as spam, to make sure it’s gonna get inboxed. We do a lot to reach the inbox.
And we have not found a negative from remailing unopens. In fact, we’ve only found that it helps. And we don’t do it with every email, but we probably do it with at least one email a week, so if we send… Every third email, if it’s important enough, we remail the unopeneds with a different subject line, and it just helps.
Kurt Elster: Email on Acid was the name of the tool?
Ezra Firestone: Yeah. It’s kind of like Litmus. It basically allows you to send it a preview email and it’ll tell you, it’ll show it to you in every phone, every browser, it’ll show it to you, whether or not it’s gonna get clipped. It’ll show you. It’ll tell you whether or not you’re likely to reach the inbox, what you gotta change. It’s phenomenal.
Kurt Elster: It’s interesting you bring that tool up, because I use Litmus. I started using Litmus this year.
Ezra Firestone: This is better.
Kurt Elster: And so, I’ll check this one out. But really, I was so wrong on… I had my subject lines too long and my quick previews too short. And I did not realize it really until I started using one of these preview tools.
Ezra Firestone: They’re so good.
Kurt Elster: And that makes… It’s gonna make a big difference on your open rate.
Ezra Firestone: Yeah. And you should be going HAM on ads. You should really be running ads heavy. And you know, Black Friday, Cyber Monday timeframe doesn’t tend to be a customer acquisition timeframe unless you’re a gifting company. It’s mostly about monetizing your warm audiences, right?
Kurt Elster: Exactly.
Ezra Firestone: And so, you gotta remember that.
Kurt Elster: Well, and this year too, a lot of stores aren’t gonna be open on Black Friday. You better believe they’re gonna be driving that traffic to their website. And if they’re doing that, how are they gonna do it? Well, with PPC ads. So, suddenly… It was never a good idea to try and acquire traffic, cold traffic for the holidays and expect that to convert. But now more than ever, that’s an exceptionally bad idea. So, remarketing to those warm audiences is gonna be a gold mine. So, you need to be as part of that hype, as part of that early bird strategy, you’re also stacking your remarketing audiences, I would imagine.
Ezra Firestone: Yeah. And let me give you some… Exactly, and so what we do is we kind of cut our top line awareness budgets. We don’t turn them off. We kind of cut them in half during the holiday season. And we focus on website visitors, email subscribers, past buyers, people who’ve engaged with our Instagram page, Facebook page, or YouTube page, and we also run to people who’ve watched our videos on social, right? Video view audiences, because we’re only running video ads, so we get millions of people who watch our videos but maybe don’t click to the site.
And then we also do lookalikes of those folks and run to them as well, but at lower budgets, so that is cold audiences.
Kurt Elster: And you had mentioned along with the ads, you also do SMS. Talk to me a little bit about the SMS strategy here.
Ezra Firestone: Well, thanks for bringing it up, Kurt. I’ve got a new SMS app launching that I told you about. It’s called Kinnekt. K-I-N-N-E-K-T, like Kin, we’re family, we connect, and then it’s got the play on words of connection and connect, but it’s Kinnekt. And it’s a really wonderful application that allows you to do behaviorally dynamic communication via SMS, where you can do, you know, your standard cart abandonment, your standard dynamic post-purchase upsell, cross sell, where it’s like, “Hey, you bought X, but not Y, here’s Y at a discount.” It allows you to chat with your customers when they type in, when you SMS them, you can respond to them in there. It allows you to broadcast your customers via SMS, allows you to put popups on your site where someone comes and a popup happens and it’s like, “Hey, do you want to get a discount? Press this button and we’ll text you our discount.” And they press the button and it opens up their iMessage, they text us, we reply with the discount, now they’re subscribed.
It does a lot of really fun direct response marketing stuff that is really cool that I don’t have time to go into, but we’re using that and it’s a very prominent revenue channel for us, and also we’ve found that surprisingly our customers are very willing… 65% of our customers are willing to engage with us via SMS, so we’re really excited. On the post-purchase survey, we say, “Hey,” you know, we send out a survey post purchase.
Kurt Elster: That really pokes holes in the idea like, “Well, SMS is annoying and only brands for teenagers use SMS.” Clearly not the case.
Ezra Firestone: Dude. These are women who are in their fifties, and it’s just becoming more palatable I guess to text people, but it’s really… I’m really loving what’s available there and what you can do there as an eCom brand, and you’d be super surprised how many people are willing to have their customer support conversation in text. How handy it is for customers to be able to do a refund, or ask a question, just right from their iMessage. People like it.
And how effective it is at what I call last mile eCommerce. Hey, you abandoned the shopping cart. Hey, you’re on the product page, get a discount right now by clicking this button to text us and we’ll text it back. Hey, you bought this, but you didn’t buy this. Buy this other thing. Hey, I’ve got a problem with my order, I’m messaging you guys because you texted me. It is… People are loving it and it’s way more than I would have expected, which is why I built this app. So, that’s kind of the ways we’re using it and I’m happy to give Unofficial Shopify Podcasters beta access if they’re interested. No pressure. I’m not here to promote my stuff-
Kurt Elster: How do they get ahold of you for that if they want the beta?
Ezra Firestone: You can email me. Ezra at SmartMarketer.com. Or Help at Zipify.com. H-E-L-P at Zipify.com. Hey, I heard that Ezra offered me a beta on Kurt’s podcast. I want to get access to it. And we will make it happen.
Kurt Elster: Sweet. I got the scoop. Cool. Tell me about segmentation. It came up several times. You’re like, “Yeah, we send 50, 60 emails, but they’re highly targeted.” They’re segmented. Or same with when you were doing resending on emails, resending unopened emails. Talk to me about that segmentation strategy.
Ezra Firestone: So, the first and last email of the opening campaign and closing campaigns, so Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the end of the holiday, that goes to our whole list, and our whole list is anybody who has been taken, who’s not in the 120 days unengaged. We have this 120… Sorry, 120 days engaged. You have to have opened or clicked in the last 120 days or we mark you as unengaged, right? If you haven’t opened or clicked in the last 120 days, we basically don’t ever email you except for like once or twice a month, because you’re unengaged and you’re bringing our metrics down, and you’re gonna make it harder for us to get delivered to the inbox. But on big sale events, to open and close them we mail to the full list, which is everybody who’s the 120 day engaged and everybody who’s on the unengaged but not suppressed list. Because we got like 200,000 people who are unengaged but not suppressed. I.E. they didn’t unsubscribe, but they haven’t engaged in 120 days. Those people, we’re running ads to. We’ve got an automation going to them. We’re trying to get them to reengage.
But we still mail to them on our big sales. And it does work. They do respond to sale events. So, some people just only ever want to know when you have a sale. They don’t want the rest of your stuff. We email our early bird list separate than the rest of the list, because they showed interest and we’re with them a little differently.
Included in the 120 days engaged is anybody who’s actively browsed on the site, right? Maybe they didn’t engage with email, but they were browsing the site. We’re tracking that metric and they’re included, so if they’re on our email list and they haven’t engaged with an email for 120 days, but they have browsed the site, we are including them. And yeah, those are kind of the main segmentation portions, and we have a course where we teach how to determine if it should be 75 days, 90 days, 120 days for your brand. How to look at the metrics in Klaviyo and say, “Hey, this is where people are falling off. Start the sunset flow automation here, because this is where the biggest drop is happening.” So, we show you how to run all that.
Kurt Elster: Oh, what’s the name of that course? I’ll link to it.
Ezra Firestone: It’s called Smart Email Marketing 2.0. And it’s on sale right now. It’s a discount. And I’ve got a free mini course that teaches a little bit about that, but yeah, there’s a lot you can do with email. We’re getting pretty granular here. I think too granular for most people.
Kurt Elster: Oh no. All right, so talk to me about merchandising. You said you’re doing a product launch during your holiday promos. Is that an exclusive? Like, “Hey, it’s gonna sell out. It’s only available during the holidays.” What are your thoughts there?
Ezra Firestone: Yeah. We’ve found that product launches work and you should be aiming the launch between one and four products a year as a brand, because once someone buys one thing from you, they are willing to buy other stuff from you and it helps you grow your bottom line, it helps you increase that repeat business rate, and one of the questions we ask in our post-purchase survey is like, “What other products do you want us to make?”
So, we get every customer telling us that, and we always open and close, so we open, we sell through, and then we go out of stock for a month and we make sure we time it and that we buy… We know how much we sell during open and close periods, so we actually do run out, so it’s authentic. And then we go and restock, and so we find back in stock emails work really well. Hey, we’re back. This thing, we launched it, it went out of stock, and now we’re back. And also, reformulations, modification to packaging and special kits, those are ways to make the products that you have now sexy, so, “Hey, we reformulated this product and made it better based on feedback you gave us. Hey, we change the packaging to make it biodegradable. Hey, we bundled these two products together in a special kit and now there’s a discount on that.”
We’re doing all those things this holiday sale. We’ve got a reformulation, we’ve got a new packaging launch, we’ve got a product that was out of stock coming back, and we’ve got a special bundle that we don’t have any other time of the year, that we have this year, so we have all four of those elements.
Kurt Elster: I love this concept. I love this idea. I think it is such a missed opportunity for most merchants. Especially for folks who have a consumable good. But if you can come up with any reason to say, for the customer to go, “Oh, all right. Great. I can rebuy this thing I already love.” Absolutely do it. And that’s what you’re able to do when you’re like, “Okay, here’s 2.0, a bundle, reformulation, pumpkin spice edition, whatever.”
Ezra Firestone: If your products are staying static, you’re not doing a good job I think. I find out from my… Especially if you’re in lotions and potions, which is what I’m in.
Kurt Elster: Lotions and potions.
Ezra Firestone: Yeah. I mean, you hear feedback, “Hey, I don’t like the way this smells. Hey, this is too granularly. Hey, this packaging’s not working for this reason.” We’re always iterating, making the products better, and re-releasing them. Fixing the packaging. I mean, some products stay static forever, but making the packaging better, making the formula better, and releasing version 2.0 Some people just change fragrances. That’s Moiz Ali at Native Deodorant. They just release a bunch of new fragrances all the time. Smells for your armpits.
You know what I’m saying? And that’s how they do it.
Kurt Elster: I’m glad you defined it for me and people only listening to the audio version, complete with the apply deodorant motion. Fabulous. I would love to know, and I’m sure our listeners would as well, what does your tool stack look like? Merchants always want to know, “Man, what apps are you using?”
Ezra Firestone: So, here I am logged in, so I have of course Zipify Pages, Landing Page Builder, Product Builder, Homepage Builder, /products editor, Blog Builder for Shopify that I’m using for my blog, my homepage, my Shopify product pages, my holiday interstitial pages, my presale pages. I of course have One-Click Upsell by Zipify, which is a pre-purchase and post-purchase one-click upsell application that allows you to do a lot of average order value maximization. We’re going native to Shopify in about 30 to 60 days. Oh, damn!
I got Zendesk. I got Zapier. I got Stamped.io. I got Rewind. I got Privy. I got PostPilots. I got Meta Fields Editor. I got Klaviyo. I got Kinnekt SMS App by Zipify. I had Justuno, I got rid of it. I had Blue.io. I got rid of it. I had the Free Shipping Bar, I got rid of it. I got Fraud Filter. I got Flexify Facebook Product Feed. I got a Countdown Timer. Got rid of that. I got the Bulk Discount Code Generator, which I use for a bunch of fun things. I got a fulfillment application that talks to my fulfillment network that I built.
I got Avalara Sales Tax. I got Aircall which connects to Zendesk for phone. And I got Bold Custom Pricing Wholesale.
Kurt Elster: Wow. That’s… You literally just rattled off every single app in that store, didn’t you?
Ezra Firestone: Yeah. Every app we’re using.
Kurt Elster: I’m adding that to the show notes. Every single app in Ezra’s store. How exciting is that?
Ezra Firestone: I mean, it’s not a lot, right? It’s not a lot, because Zipify pages does so much. One Click Upsell does so much. Privy does so much. Klaviyo does so much. You know, it’s like there’s a lot of apps in there that are doing a lot, you know?
Kurt Elster: All right, talk to me about timing. I heard you mention, “Hey, we’re doing… When we do a mini campaign and we do the 3X emails on the big days, it’s like 7:00 AM, 10:00 AM, 5:00 PM.”
Ezra Firestone: Yeah. Yeah. That’s what we do for when we email three times, like the open to Black Friday, the open and close to Cyber Monday, but mainly we’re mailing 7:15 AM local time. We find that works the best for us. And then for most emails, go out between 7:15 and 9:00 local time, and then when we’re emailing twice and three times in a day, it’s 5:00 PM and 9:00 PM local time.
Kurt Elster: Okay, and then you use the option to try and localize it to the customer.
Ezra Firestone: Well, Klaviyo allows you to do that. It gives you a little setting that says, “Hey, localize this to that person’s area.”
Kurt Elster: We have answered all of my questions. If I’m a merchant and I have to do just one thing or make just one change to my marketing plan, what is it? What is the core, critical key piece people shouldn’t miss?
Ezra Firestone: You gotta use Zipify Pages One Click Upsell and Connect app, and then aside from that-
Kurt Elster: After that.
Ezra Firestone: After that, listen. Here’s what I see people not doing. I see people not promoting hard enough. They’re not spending enough on ads. Listen. If your frequency on a sale day is not a five to eight, meaning each individual person in your warm audience didn’t see your ad on social five to eight times, your budgets weren’t high enough. I’m sorry. You must be willing to smash because everybody else is smashing at that time, too. And it’s like you built up all this good will. You have really wonderful products. And then you just don’t go out and sound the alarm bells loud enough.
So, email more. Email three times a day on the open and close of your sale events. Spend double what you think you should spend on ads. And make sure that you have deadlines, social proof, product educational content, and you know, good design. I mean, it’s like it’s really not that difficult, you know?
Kurt Elster: Yes. I think it really… It’s just it’s hard and daunting when you look at everything all at once for the first time. After you do the one-
Ezra Firestone: I just rattled off what we’re doing four months of work for 10 people to achieve all the stuff I said, but I used to do it all by myself when I didn’t have a team, and it was just smaller scale, and the other thing is people are not optimizing their offer pages well enough. You know this, Kurt.
Kurt Elster: Oh, for sure. That was… Actually, that’s what we should close on, is walk me through what a good landing page looks like. What should I be doing? If I’m sending 50 to 60 emails, they gotta go somewhere. What does that page look like?
Ezra Firestone: I mean, it depends a lot on the price point and the number of products, but let me give you just a couple things, which is hey, you know, anywhere between 50 and 75% of your traffic’s gonna be on a mobile phone. Anywhere between 10 and 30% of your traffic’s gonna be on a tablet. And anywhere between 10 and 30% of your traffic’s gonna be on a desktop. So, you must really be optimizing for those three platforms, and if you have not actually built three separate pages that work differently, or a page that really works for each of those, and you’re not serving up images that are the right size for mobile so that they load quickly, and your iPad doesn’t look all wonky, because it’s just a squished version of your desktop, you have to really think about that.
And what we’re finding is that sticky CTAs work really well, right? A CTA that’s at the top that stays with you as you scroll. Not so much for a multi-product sales page, but a single item sales page, where it’s an individual item. If you’re doing a single item offer. We’re finding that if you have multiple products, two columns of products on mobile instead of one works better. We’re finding that on tablet, a carousel of products outperforms two columns of products. We’re finding on desktop if you got multiple products, four items across outperforms two or three or a carousel.
You know, you definitely want to mix in videos in your collection pages, videos that are customer testimonials, or .GIFs of the products, so it’s not just product, product, checkout, product, but it’s also like video content they can consume, because-
Kurt Elster: That right there. That is such a major key. So, we have a couple clients that have let us do this, where we built a custom collection template to support it, where it’s like, “All right.” It goes normally a collection grid would be like 16 products. So, we do like product one, two, three, then the fourth slot instead of a product is a video, and we just did this for Asutra, which Venus Williams is the chief brand officer, so for them it’s like product, product, Venus Williams telling you why this product is great, then the product.
If I have an asset like that, how am I not gonna put it on every single page I can, right? And so, you’re already using video on your homepage. You’re using it in your ads. Maybe you’re using it on your product page. Why is it not on the collection page too and make it part of the grid? That’s such a missed opportunity for so many people.
Ezra Firestone: I agree. Yeah. I think you can do a lot with your collection pages. And you know, go look at Zipify. All we do is optimize landing pages. And see some of the stuff we’re teaching over there. We give you all kinds of stuff to do, between… We have what we call a… I coined the term. Conversion asset stacking. So, my theory is that like your page is literally just a combination of conversion assets that are stacked together in a particular way to achieve a result for you, which is a conversion, and a result for your customer, which is a solution to their problem. And a conversion asset is a video, an image, a piece of text, a unique selling proposition in image format, a product page, long form copy. It’s like all these assets.
And I go through all the assets. Live chat. I lay out all the different conversion assets and then you stack those together to create an offer page that has FAQ and all kinds of stuff that people are looking for that you can put together in a particular way to increase your conversion. And the more conversion assets you have, generally the better you convert, because people are then able to find what resonates with them. And I give little formulas for how to write sales copy and stuff, but-
Kurt Elster: I think that’s one of the core advantages of Zipify as a page builder, especially over other options, is that it’s opinionated. It is like, “This is team Ezra’s idea of this is what will be successful.” And it’s based on actual experience.
Ezra Firestone: Yeah. And you can free form build in it. Sure. But you also can work off our templates and I really am not just trying to ram, talk about Zipify all crazy, but I’m just saying if you’re interested in-
Kurt Elster: Well, you’re proud of it. Why shouldn’t you?
Ezra Firestone: I am proud of it, but my main point is if you’re interested in the subject matter, I have more content on it over there that you can check out. And then hey, check out the tool if you like that, too. That would be wonderful for me. But you know, also no pressure if you’re using something else.
Kurt Elster: Okay. I mean, there is just a ton of value packed into this. Anything I’ve missed?
Ezra Firestone: You know, I think the chaos of Q4 gets to people, and it’s like you gotta also remember at this time of year to take it easy on yourself as the CEO, if you’re the CEO of the brand. I’m assuming a lot of owner founders listen to this. Make sure that you’re breathing. Make sure that you’re moving your body. Make sure that you’re eating well. Make sure you’re getting enough rest. Make sure that you’re setting container around your work life so that it’s not just bleeding into every part of your life, and you’re ignoring your personal relationships, and you’re ignoring how you feel in your body, and you’re ignoring your hobbies, and it’s easy to get wrapped up in the chaos this time of year and then come out of it super burned out.
And I see that happening to a lot of entrepreneurs and it’s like, “Hey, go easy on yourself and have a good time through this.” And remember that you’re doing this, yes, to make money, but also to enjoy yourself. You know? And so, if you can avoid it, try not to work 12 hour days four weeks in a row for the next… Until the holidays.
Kurt Elster: 100%. Now more than ever in 2020, self care is so important. It’s often overlooked and the unfortunate hustle and grind mentality that you see promoted on Instagram thinks that for some reason getting eight hours of sleep is a bad thing. I beg to differ. And I have always appreciated that your content has a… Especially like on Instagram, you have such a clear focus on wellness and self care, and I’ll link to your Instagram, as well, which I greatly enjoy.
Ezra, where can people go to learn more about you?
Ezra Firestone: You can go to @EzraFirestone on Instagram. You can go to SmartMarketer.com where I have courses and education. You go to Zipify.com to check out my Shopify apps. And yeah, I’m also on Facebook and YouTube. If you’re on YouTube, you can Google me. I’m on there. If you’re on Facebook, you can search me. I’m on there. I’m on LinkedIn, but I don’t go on there. I’m on Twitter. I’m trying to catch up to you on Twitter. I’m starting to learn about tweeting. I’m a video and audio guy, so I don’t really tweet.
Kurt Elster: 2020. Ezra, with his multimillion dollar business, is like, “I just found out about Twitter.”
Ezra Firestone: I’m trying to get on there. You’re on there. You’re on there hard body, dude. You’re DTC twitter all day. You’re #DTCTwitter. You’re the Shopify ecosystem. You got the scoops on there. You’re retweeting app companies. You’re in it.
Kurt Elster: I am. And I’m always like, “Yeah, I did it.” And then I’m like, “Why? Why am I putting the time into Twitter? Stop this madness.”
Ezra Firestone: Twitter is good. I like Twitter.
Kurt Elster: It is good. And that’s why I’ve not been able to get away from it, whereas like LinkedIn, I’m like, “This thing needs to get burned down.”
Ezra Firestone: Twitter has interesting and valuable content. LinkedIn is just spam requests.
Kurt Elster: Oh yeah. You know, the trick to that, first I disconnected from literally two thirds of people on LinkedIn, and then I set it you have to know my email address to add me. And once I did that, LinkedIn became much more tolerable.
Ezra Firestone: You have to know your email address.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. It’s a privacy setting that’s buried in there.
Ezra Firestone: Very clever.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. And then that works. The only requests I get are from actual people who I would want to connect with.
Ezra Firestone: And if you’re out there and you don’t have Kurt’s email address, he doesn’t want to connect with you.
Kurt Elster: Not on LinkedIn, anyway. Follow me on Twitter. Or you know, if you want my email address, you just have to sign up for my newsletter. That’s the hack to get in touch with me that the people who… Anyone who desperately wants to reach me does everything except that. Oh, well.
Okay. Ezra, this has been phenomenally good. I love it. I think you’re great and brilliant as always. Man, I don’t… What should we close on?
Ezra Firestone: Well, I think love ‘em, be enthusiastic, and break a leg.
Kurt Elster: That’s perfect. I hope everyone has their best Black Friday ever. Ezra threw a lot at you, but he’s also been doing this a long time, so I think ultimately shoot for what makes sense to you. Don’t get overwhelmed by it. Pick a few things to try that are new for you.
Ezra Firestone: I am some guy, okay? Filter what I said through your own life experience and take what you like and leave what you don’t. Just because I’m doing this doesn’t mean it’s the right way to do it. Hey, it’s working for me, and I’m really loving the strategy that I’ve developed with my team over the years, and I’m happy if any of it works for you. But like take the parts you like, leave the parts you don’t.
Kurt Elster: That’s just such a sane and sensible strategy that so many people overlook when exposed to the firehose of content produced by Shopify info marketers like myself.
Ezra Firestone: Yeah. For sure.
Kurt Elster: Wonderful. All right, Ezra. Let’s make sure everybody… I think Ezra wants you to checkout Zipify Pages was what I got out of this.
Ezra Firestone: And Kinnekt. I want you to check out my new SMS app, too, and One Click Upsell’s going native, and you know, I’ve made an effort, Kurt, to be more promotional of my apps, because usually I come on these shows and really I try not to be that guy. But I also started thinking about it like, “Well, why not?” Why not?
Kurt Elster: Yeah. It’s not like I’m paying you to be here. You gotta get something out of it.
Ezra Firestone: Yeah. I just felt like why not, and then people can try it, and if they like it, sweet. So, thank you so much for letting me be that level of promotional. I appreciate it.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. No. Anybody else, I would have been hassling, but you, I didn’t think twice about it. So, wonderful.
Ezra Firestone: Great.
Kurt Elster: All right, I got nothing. I really… I have completely botched my own outro. I hope everyone has a great Black Friday.
Ezra Firestone: You want an outro? Because I said I’m so promotional, you can just do it and say, “And so, we’ll see you later.”
Kurt Elster: Perfect. We’ll see you later.