How to execute a month-long holiday sale event.
Learn the strategies master marketer Ezra Firestone is using this year for his 8-figure ecommerce brand.
The Unofficial Shopify Podcast
11/2/2021
Kurt Elster: On today’s episode of The Unofficial Shopify Podcast, we’re gonna talk through what you need to know to have your most successful holiday season yet. Hold on, actually, we’re gonna hear how Ezra Firestone, master marketer, the man himself, plans to have his most successful holiday season yet with his brand Boom! by Cindy Joseph. Having sold $1 million last holiday, I think about, I’d say-
Ezra Firestone: A little bit more.
Kurt Elster: A little bit more? He’s qualified to tell us. And you may recognize Ezra Firestone from this sound clip:
Ezra Firestone Sound Board Clip: Tech Nasty.
Kurt Elster: That’s him. That’s the man. That is where we got that sound clip.
Ezra Firestone: I had a whole rap. I don’t know if you ever played the whole rap for anybody, but-
Kurt Elster: I did. There’s one episode at the end where I play it. If I had it, I’d play it again for you.
Ezra Firestone: Cool. Well, I was going to look at my Black Friday through Cyber Monday exact dates last year. Okay, so I did $1.3 million in the Black Friday through Cyber Monday period last year, but I actually ran my sale November 12th, which was a Thursday, through November 16th, which was a Monday. I ran it two weeks early because of COVID and my knowing that the shipping infrastructure was damaged and under siege, and so I ran my sale two weeks early, so I did $1.3 last year. I’m shooting for a cool $2 million.
I also have what I call mini campaigns that we can talk about that I run all the way through the end of the year.
Kurt Elster: Excellent. Okay. I’m hooked, but before we get into that, let’s get a… For those people who don’t know, we need a quick Ezra Firestone intro, because you have multiple pillars within the Shopify community. There’s Zipify apps, Smart Marketer, your courses, and Boom! by Cindy Joseph, and of course, a tremendous social media that’s also a lot of fun.
Ezra Firestone: Is this on video? Because I just spilled water out of my mouth and if anybody-
Kurt Elster: No, it’s not on video. I’m recording audio only.
Ezra Firestone: Okay. Yeah, because I sound like he’s super cool, and this and that, and he been in the game forever, and he can’t drink water and record a podcast at the same time without spilling a ton of water on his frickin’ MX Master 3 Logitech mouse.
Kurt Elster: Logitech.
Ezra Firestone: Which is the dopest mouse in the game, dog.
Kurt Elster: My 10-year-old was like, “Hey, can I get a new mouse?” I said, “Sure, send me which one you want.” Not knowing that he would then send me a $125 Logitech MX. I was like, “Okay.”
Ezra Firestone: Damn. He knows what’s up. That’s because he’s Tech Nasty’s son, dude. He’s Tech Nasty Junior, baby.
Kurt Elster: Oh, my kids have become so spoiled, but like exclusively within gadgets.
Ezra Firestone: Yeah, so I’ll give you a little background. I started eCommerce in 2005. At the same time as the guys who now run Wayfair started, I started, except for they were like five or six years older than me, so they understood things like delegation, and finance, and systems, and process, and so while at the peak of my eCommerce, which was American drop shipping with exact match domains, and search engine optimization, and Google AdWords, I had 20 drop ship stores. They got up to like 900.
Yeah, so I got started really early, and before the iPhone, back when eCommerce was only 3.5% of sales, of total sales, and I’ve been in it ever since. And I’ve kind of grown up in this industry, and I was fortunate enough to be one of the first people to blog about eCommerce, and so therefore I became popular within the space. Not because I was anything particularly special. I mean, listen. I got good at it over time. But because I was the first one talking about it.
So, Shopify approached me in 2012 and said, “Hey, will you teach for our Shopify eCommerce University?” Because I was the only guy out there at the time. So, I ended up being the first educator for Shopify, and had a services agency for many years, and I’ve had many successes and many failures. In 2010, I started Boom! by Cindy Joseph, which is now a $40 million a year eCommerce brand. In 2014, I started Zipify apps, which will do about $8 million this year. And in 2012, I started Smart Marketer, which is an information publishing blog that teaches courses, runs events, does masterminds, all kinds of stuff, which is mostly… The courses are now mostly not taught by me because I’m busy running Boom!, and actually investments in a number of other software brands that you’d be familiar with, a number of other eCommerce brands that you’d be familiar with, and I own three or four other eCommerce brands that I’m not public with.
I just put down a deal for a brand that I just bought, it’s in the $10 million range. I got an Amazon brand that’s only doing a couple hundred grand a year. So, I’ve got a couple things going on. I believe strongly in eCommerce, and I think it will continue to be a fruitful business even with all the fucking shit we’re facing, pardon my language for any children listening, with iOS 14 and 15, how that relates to ads and email, with COVID and supply chain issues, with all that stuff. I still believe strongly in eCommerce and I’m a veteran at this point. I’ve been in the game 15 years, and I love it, and I love the opportunity to relate with other people, like the people who listen to your podcast, who are deep in this industry. Some of my best friends are deep in this industry and I feel grateful to have stumbled across it when I did and been smart enough to realize that this was something and stick with it.
Kurt Elster: So, you are very much bullish on eCommerce even at a point where if… Realistically, if you wanted to, you could exit, but you’re saying, “No. Not only am I staying in this, I am reinvesting.”
Ezra Firestone: Yeah. And I’m at this place too where I sold 70% of my biggest brand, Boom!, last November, and I got enough cash. It was over $50 million the deal was worth, so I got enough cash to not work anymore. I’m good. I own my land. I own my house. Hot damn. Yo, we did it. Started from the bottom, now we here. And I didn’t start with money, dude. I started working a full-time job to support my eCommerce hustle and built up over 15 years. I’ve been very fortunate, and I’ve also taken a lot of risky bets, and I’ve worked really hard, but yeah, so I’m good with money, which is a whole different thing. We could talk about that.
But yeah, I really like this, and I feel like the work I’m doing is contributing to making the lives better of all my team members. I got 131 employees and I’m doing good things in the world, and I believe that the goal is generate resource and use that resource towards causes that you find noble. Take care of yourself and your family. Take care of your community. Put that resource towards causes in the world that you feel passionate about, like perhaps protecting lands and waters, which is something I’m interested in. So, I’m not done, and eCommerce is my vehicle for wealth creation, and I believe strongly that it will continue to grow.
And you know, the good news is all these issues that we’re facing, guess what? Every other bum on the street with an eCom brand, or a software brand, or an agency, is also facing these issues, right? It’s not like your Facebook account got banned. Everybody’s fucking Facebook account got banned in a way, you know? So, the good news is the best product, the best marketing, the best storytelling will still win. Just be a little harder for a while. We got some headwinds ahead of us. Winter is coming and it’s kind of already here for any of you Game of Thrones nerds out there.
Kurt Elster: I loved all of that, but mostly, I’m feeling inspired by your world view on eCommerce. So, we got an update on Boom! there. You… What does Boom! sell?
Ezra Firestone: Yeah, we sell cosmetics and skincare. Pro-Age is our kind of ideology, right? Everyone else out there is anti-age, anti-wrinkle, what I think is ultimately anti-women, but we don’t have to get into that high level of it, but yeah, we sell cosmetics and skincare, and we do a pretty fucking good job of it, you know? And I believe in consumables. I really like products that are… I think an agency is a really good model because once you sign up, you’re gonna keep using it because you continue to have that need, so I like products that serve markets that continue to have need. Consumables are really good. I like products that are lightweight and easy to ship. I like products that have high gross margin, 80% plus. I like products where I can get an average order value of over 50 bucks. So, yeah, so I sell skincare and cosmetics.
Kurt Elster: Well, I think the other thing that helps there is the product is genuinely good. My wife just bought your mascara off Amazon, got it, and was like, “This is really good.” She liked it a lot.
Ezra Firestone: Yeah. Well, that’s… You know, the thing is that the best promise wins in the marketplace, so ultimately the product has nothing to do with the first sale, the promise does. Whoever makes the best promise or has the most compelling sales pitch, most compelling imagery, most compelling sales copy, most compelling customer testimonials. But the product then has to live up to the promise that you make. And if you don’t have a good product, there’s no amount of razzle and dazzle that will ever fix your problem because ultimately my viewpoint is that in eCommerce, you need by year three at least 40% of your revenue coming from repeat business.
Now, that’s a generalization. It doesn’t have to be that way for everyone. But ultimately, the businesses that I’m trying to build, because I’m only building businesses to sell them, by the way. I don’t believe in cashflow businesses as wealth creation vehicles. I believe in asset liquidation as a wealth creation vehicle, and so I’m building assets to sell. I can talk to you about that philosophy later.
But I think if you don’t have good product, and you don’t consistently make your product better, you will never get the kind of repeat business that’s gonna allow you to be successful in this game.
Kurt Elster: No, absolutely. And how… You’re on year 10? Year 11 with Boom!?
Ezra Firestone: With Boom!, year 11. And by the way, with Boom!, dude, from 2010 to 2014, we basically lost money. We grinded it out. I think by 2014, we did like $250K that year, but my co-founder was a little squirrely with the finances, and so we didn’t end up making any money. And then 2015, I ended up taking over completely, and we did $3 million that year. So, it took me like five years to get to my first million-dollar year with that brand.
Kurt Elster: Okay. And then in 2020, just in Q4, you did $1.3 million.
Ezra Firestone: No, in 2020, in those four days, Black Friday through Cyber Monday I did $1.3 million.
Kurt Elster: Whoa!
Ezra Firestone: Yeah. In Q4 in 2020, I did $10 million. I’ll take a look right now.
Kurt Elster: Wow.
Ezra Firestone: But from November 1st to December 31st, I did $10 million.
Kurt Elster: And in 2020, you want to do $2 million in those four days. Or 2021.
Ezra Firestone: I want to do $2 million in those four days.
Kurt Elster: This year.
Ezra Firestone: Yeah. In 2021.
Kurt Elster: Okay.
Ezra Firestone: And I have a much bigger audience this year, so I should be able to pull that off, and I’ve got some strategies that I’m using to hopefully get there that are more sophisticated than last year.
Kurt Elster: Strategy wise, looking at the landscape of eCommerce, what is different for you? What are the considerations for 2021 versus 2020? Because 2020, strange year. 2021, also weird.
Ezra Firestone: Yeah. I mean, considerations are different for me in what sense, from a marketing standpoint? Or from a product standpoint? Or from a brand standpoint? Or how is the strategy different? Is that the question?
Kurt Elster: I think overall, how is that holiday marketing strategy different specific to 2021. The world as it is today.
Ezra Firestone: Okay, so it’s very similar other than that I’ve done a lot more audience warming, and we can talk about exactly what I’ve done to do that, and my offers will be far more compelling than they were last year.
Kurt Elster: More compelling offers. Okay, let’s start there. Before the sale starts, I think you have to build the hype. It is difficult to sell to a cold audience. A warm audience, it is just significantly easier.
Ezra Firestone: Yeah. Well, last year, dude, our cold audience… So, we have a base strategy, which is we set up an opt-in page that says, “Hey, the sale is coming.” It’s got a little video on there, a little sub headline. We split test a couple opt-in pages. “Sign up to be the first to hear about it and get the best deals on our products.” And then we run image ads, and video ads, and .gif ads to all of our warm audiences. Buyers, subscribers, fans, page engagers. And we run it to cold audiences, too. The same cold audiences that we run conversion ads to all day long see these ads to opt in for the sale.
And last year, those cold audiences performed almost as good as the warm audiences to opt in.
Kurt Elster: Whoa.
Ezra Firestone: Yeah. And by the way, we ran the sale ads last year for each sub campaign, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, transition to holidays, last day for free shipping, blah, blah, blah, and the cold audiences performed super well last year. But that was COVID. People were shopping. It was like our cold audiences worked super well last year.
So, what we’re doing this year is we are spending a chunk of money. I think we’re at $2,500 a day right now, which by the way, we’re a big brand, so ignore that number, on video view campaigns. And those video view campaigns are designed just to get people to watch our long form and short form customer testimonial videos about our brand. And what’s interesting is since we’ve been doing this, our brand search on Google is up 40%, and our Amazon sales are up 30%.
Now, why is that? Well, there’s no clickthrough on these ads, right? And about 50% of these ads are being run off of Facebook, so they’re on Audience Network, Facebook’s property, so about 50% of people are consuming this content on Facebook and 50% are consuming it off, but it’s so cheap to get delivery. I had a million views of a 30-second video for two cents a view. Two cents to get someone to watch 30 seconds of my video. So, video views campaign are really cheap, and the beauty of it is Facebook has no first party data anymore. They can’t track when someone leaves Facebook. But they can track what’s happening on Facebook, so I can build these audiences, cold audiences and warm audiences, of people who’ve consumed at least 30 seconds of one of my long-form educational brand videos, and then those audiences are hot, and they’re ready to be run lead ads to, and opt-in ads to, to sign up for my sales, sale ads to, to buy my sale.
So, I’ve spent a lot of time over the last several months building up first party data on the Facebook platform, and you can still do this today, right now, leading up to your sale, through video view ads. Then, what I will do is my sale is gonna start November 12th. Let me just make sure that’s the correct date. I’m doing two weeks early again. Yep. November 12th for the early birds and then-
Kurt Elster: And this is the same date as last year.
Ezra Firestone: No, 11th is for the early birds. Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Okay.
Ezra Firestone: November 11th for the early birds and then 12th is kind of what I call Silver Friday, it’s sort of my Black Friday, my early Black Friday, and then I’ll have Saturday-Sunday, and then I’ll have my version of Cyber Monday. Now, I will still, of course, run a Black Friday Cyber Monday traditional campaign, and last year I did an extra like 400 grand over those days, but I’ll make most of my money on the 11th through the 15th, Thursday through Monday.
So, basically what I’ll do is I’m running all these video views, warming people up. Then, from October 28th, which is coming up in a couple days here, through November 11th, everybody who’s ever watched a video from me, everybody who’s on my email list, anyone who’s ever bought from me, anybody who’s ever engaged on my fan pages, anybody who’s in any of my audiences on YouTube, and I’ll spend about 25% of my budget on cold audiences, the same cold audiences that I run conversion ads to regularly all year long, will be seeing ads to sign up for the opt-in page for the sale.
Once you sign up for the sale, you’ll be getting early bird warmups. Hey, best sale of the year is coming. Hey, here’s some tips for how to get the most out of your holiday season. Here’s some affirmations. I’ll send out warmup content to build up the buzz and keep people engaged leading up to the actual sale opener. Then, the sale will open, and I’ll email three times to my early bird list on the 11th, I’ll email three times to the whole list on Black Friday, Cyber Monday. On Black Friday, I’ll email twice Saturday and Sunday, and I’ll email three times on Monday.
So, I’ll send a grip of emails and I’ll blast every one of my audiences with sale ads from the 11th through the 15th. I’ll just go HAM. I’ll be running on YouTube. I’ll be running on Google Display. Everywhere I can.
Then, from the 15th of November through the 24th, leading up to Thanksgiving, 15th through the 24th it’s back to just standard emailing my list content, running video view ads to build up audiences, all that. Just back to the regular content engagement, whatever. Not communicating. And of course, my content emails to my list will say, “PS, this sale’s going on,” and it will link to that floating Black Friday Cyber Monday sale page, so I’ll have some PSs, but I won’t be running ads for the sale.
Then, Black Friday through Cyber Monday, again, I’m going HAM, dude. I’m running conversion ads. I’m sending emails. I’m going HAM, hog wild. And by the way, each of those mini campaigns, so I’ve got early Black Friday, then I’ve got Black Friday Cyber Monday, then I’ve got the transition into the holidays, which is maybe like the first week of December, then I’ve got a little bit of stuff kind of mid-December, and then I’ve got the end of the year. I do about 700 grand between the 25th and the 31st of December because I say, “Last chance! New Year’s Sale. Last chance to save.” Works really, really well.
There are people who will get like 45 emails, because some emails go to unopened, but people get like 45 individual emails between November 11th and December 25th, and they won’t buy until it’s the absolute last chance. They’ll have gotten them, they’ll have opened some of them, but that last urgency will push them over the edge.
So, early Black Friday, Cyber Monday, there’s a special bundle that’s an extra discount. So, last year I did 15% off everything. My brand does not offer discounts, Kurt. We offer 10% max ever. So, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, we gave 15%, went really well. This year, you’ve got 15%, but we’ve got an extra special bundle of our most popular products that’s 20%. So, if you buy the bundle, which you’ll never be able to get any other time together, you’ll have to buy all of them separate, you get an extra discount. So, that’s happening the early Black Friday Cyber Monday. Then, over Black Friday Cyber Monday, we got a BOGO where any order over X amount gets a free hat. Then, the holiday transition, we’ve got a new product we’re launching. So, it’s like we go from actual Black Friday Cyber Monday, we got a week of content, and then usually we transition into some holiday theming, and talking about what to buy for gifting, and blah, blah, blah. This year, we’re saying, “Hey, it’s our first time ever launching a product at a discount. Go get it 15% off.” And we’re preordering it because our components didn’t come in on time, so we’re running a preorder. That works really well for our brand. We run preorders all the time. People don’t mind waiting a month.
So, each mini segment of the campaign has a special reason to buy for that segment. Whether it’s a special discount, or a special bundle, or a new product, or a BOGO, or a threshold discount, and in between each of those mini campaigns, there’s a ton of content, value add, engagement, non-salesy stuff.
Kurt Elster: Okay, so I’ve got death of ROAS has occurred. We’re beyond that. And so, we’re gonna focus on video view ads to drive impressions.
Ezra Firestone: Well, I’m still running conversion ads all year long and I’m still running conversion ads when I’m actually running the sale but leading up to the sale I’m using video views to build my own audiences of people who’ve consumed 30 seconds of one of my videos, who I then run the conversion sale ads to. Because Facebook cannot track off platform. They don’t know if you converted or not. But they can track what you do on platform. So, I’m giving Facebook first party data by saying, “Hey, I’m gonna run these video view ads to cold audiences and warm audiences, and you can see the people who are the most interested in the cold audiences because you see who watched most of the video,” then I’m gonna run my conversion ads to them.
So, I’m building my own first party dataset within Facebook. Does that make sense?
Kurt Elster: Oh, that’s really smart. That’s really brilliant. And you’re the first person to suggest this strategy and yet we’ve all been hand wringing about the death of ROAS for the last almost six months.
Ezra Firestone: I mean, Facebook ads are not as profitable as they once were. That’s for sure. And tracking is much harder than it once was. But this strategy has been really working for us. And so, it’s one thing you can do. Of course, we’re still running dynamic product ads, and DABA ads, top of funnel dynamic ads to broad audiences, and conversion ads, video ad direct to product page, and remarketing, and loyalty, and email lead gen. We’re doing all the normal shit we always do. And we’ve layered in a ton of amplification of video content with the video view objective and then remarketing to the consumers of said content.
Kurt Elster: Oh, it’s just a really brilliant way to do it, because you have worked around the issue that the Facebook algorithm was having by doing this. As you said, creating your own first party data with them.
From there, then we’re trying to stay top of mind. The whole thing is you get them to opt into a presale, or you get them to opt into this early bird sale? Because you run this sale November 12th through the 16th, and that’s the same as the Black Friday sale, just run two weeks earlier.
Ezra Firestone: For the two weeks before that, we’re running conversion campaigns, which are designed to generate an email opt-in to get people to sign up to be a part of the sale. And that’s being run to both cold and warm audiences. And then when you sign up, you’re getting warmup content, and then we’ll actually open the sale. But we’re only running that early bird buzz builder to get people to raise their hand and say, “I want to be a part of this sale,” for the two weeks before the initial opening.
After that, we got the initial opening, and then we’ve got 10 days before actual Black Friday Cyber Monday. Those 10 days before Black Friday Cyber Monday, we’re just running our normal ads, running our video views to build more first party data, emailing our normal list with content, with PSs about the sale. We’re not doing anymore early bird buzz building after the initial open and close.
Kurt Elster: And in that period between November 16th and Black Friday, are there mini campaigns? Or is it all just straight content emails?
Ezra Firestone: So, the next mini campaign is actually Black Friday Cyber Monday, so Thanksgiving, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, 16th to the 24th, which I believe is actually Thanksgiving, I’m not sure the date, is just straight blog content and traditional advertising. It’s not like trying to push the sale.
Kurt Elster: Okay. And then talk to me about the promotions themselves. So, you avoid discounts in general with a max of a 10% discount outside of Q4, and then you’ve got… During…
Ezra Firestone: Yeah, so then this year, I’ve got 15% off everything, site wide. I’ve got 20% off a special bundle, so that’s my first pitch, is get 15% off all your favorite stuff and 20% off this special bundle only available for the next four days. Then, the next thing I have is a BOGO and threshold discount, so it’s like spend X amount and get this free gift, so there’s a threshold and there’s a buy one get one happening.
Kurt Elster: And a free gift with purchase?
Ezra Firestone: Yeah. You have to buy the thing and then you get the… If you spend 75 bucks, which is kind of like the main average order value I’m trying to get you over, I give you a free hat. So, you have to reach this threshold, but if you do, you get a thing free.
Kurt Elster: And so, for your free gift with purchase threshold, you typically use AOV? Or around there?
Ezra Firestone: Oh, no. I wouldn’t say typically. I’m just saying in this particular instance.
Kurt Elster: Okay.
Ezra Firestone: I think what works even better than that is buy this product, get this thing, but I’m not doing that because I want a high average order value, and I’m mostly selling to people who bought from me once in the past, so I know that my loyal audience is willing to buy more, so I’m not doing, “Buy my mascara and get my lip gloss.” I could do that. That works better. But I’m pushing it and I’m doing a AOV threshold to get the BOGO.
Kurt Elster: Okay. Well, why do you say… You said the other one works better. I’m surprised by that. Like let people pick what they want and then try and push them to AOV.
Ezra Firestone: The reason the other one works better is it’s simpler. It’s just buy this thing and get this. It’s a lot easier to understand than, “Wait, so I gotta add how much to get…” It’s just not… Threshold discounting works, right? Buy 50%, get 10% off. Buy $75, get 20% off. Thresholding, threshold discounting with a progress bar in the cart, which is something that One Click Upsell actually just rolled out, is great. But we’re doing a threshold to get a free gift, which is a little different, and it doesn’t work as well as either thresholding in general, which is as your average order value increases, the discount rate increases. That’s traditional thresholding. Or simple buy mascara, get lip gloss free also works better than an AOV threshold for a free gift.
But an AOV threshold for a free gift also works. Just not as well as those other two. But I have a specific purpose over Black Friday Cyber Monday, which is anyone who didn’t buy previously over the first opening of the sale, I’m trying to get them then, and I’m trying to push them to a high AOV. And then the other thing, by the way, is anybody who buys once, and I told you this last year, gets an email automation seven days after their purchase that says, “Hey, you got 15% off. Thank you so much. If you buy a second time within the next 72 hours, we’ll give you 20% off.” So, we use a discount ladder and a deadline to convince people to buy a second time. We do about 10% to 15% of people who buy once will buy twice.
We send five emails over three days pushing a bigger discount than the first one you got. It works really well.
Kurt Elster: I love this idea. So, you say you’re getting 15% off site wide, and then you wait seven… They make a purchase, you wait seven days, and they get a discount, “Hey, take 20% off anything site wide,” because it’s a second purchase as a thank you.
Ezra Firestone: Yeah, and you only have three days to do it and then it’s gone, and it’s truly a dynamic code. And by the way, if you bought once, you’re excluded from all the rest of the promotion except for you will see the new product launch, because that’s brand new. Even if you bought once, you’re gonna want to see that. So, our holiday campaign, which is December 5th through 9th or whatever, where we’re launching a new product, if you bought once previous in the sale, we won’t exclude you from that. We’ll still tell you about it.
Kurt Elster: So, in all of these promotion emails with the exception of the new product launch, we’re segmenting out, we’re excluding people who have made a purchase recently.
Ezra Firestone: That’s right. That’s right.
Kurt Elster: As opposed to just hammer them with promo emails?
Ezra Firestone: Yeah. Well, because we want to talk to them specifically. We know they bought once during the sale already. We want to send them our content and keep them warm, and we only want to send them a sale email if it’s deliberate, like as an example, this 2X buyer automation, or the new product launch emails, where it’s something they wouldn’t have had a chance to buy yet, like that.
Kurt Elster: And talk to me, you’re doing the product presale launch, that’s a mini campaign that’s happening during December.
Ezra Firestone: That’s right. And that’ll be December, like I think Black Friday is November 26th, Cyber Monday is the 29th, so we’ll probably wait until about December 6th, which is a full week later, and then run our presale for that new product. We’ll send a couple emails, like 6 and 7, will be, “Something new’s coming. Oh my God. It’s gonna be awesome!” And then maybe 8 through 10, we’ll actually run the presale. Which, by the way, we don’t even use an app for. We just mark it. We just set our fulfillment situation to know that that’s a presale and we sell it as if it’s a normal product on the store, except for it says preorder, and then in the cart it says preorder, and on the invoice it says preorder. We give them the estimated ship date. Like that.
Kurt Elster: I have heard marketers in the past. A few have told me if you launch a new product in December, it doesn’t work as well. You’re shooting yourself in the foot. You disagree with this.
Ezra Firestone: Maybe it doesn’t work as well as it would because you don’t have the same buying frenzy because they’ve already bought generally over the holiday sale, but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t do it, right? So, for example, I’ve been working on this product for a year. The formula, it’s actually two, it’s a brow mousse, brow gel, it has two colors, it’s got this beautiful, frosted glass vial, it’s got this wonderful doe foot applicator, it’s a whole thing. Sorry, it’s a brush applicator, rather. I’ve been working on it for a year, maybe a little longer, and it’s ready to go.
And I’m trying to do four product launches a year, and this will be an evergreen seller for me. I’ll launch it, I’ll presale, I’ll actually get my inventory in and be able to ship it in January, and then the whole rest of the next year I’ll be running ads, building sales funnels, putting it on Amazon. I don’t see any reason not to do it. Maybe it won’t work. Maybe I won’t sell 25,000 units in my four day launch the way I did with my mascara. But whatever. If I can sell 15,000 units, I’m happy.
I don’t know that there’s a bad time to launch a product. I think the worst time to launch a product is when it’s ready and you wait because you think it’ll do better some other time.
Kurt Elster: Never.
Ezra Firestone: It’s like I’m a bird in the hand kind of guy. My shit is ready, dude. I worked fucking hard to get this thing out. I’m putting it out. I don’t care if it’s December. I got people who ride with me all year, who consume my content, who love the stuff I make. They’re gonna buy it because it’s good and it solves a problem. In fact, they’re the ones who told me I should make it, because I do my product dev research from past 2X buyers.
Kurt Elster: That’s clever. The customer feedback loop is tremendously important to these successful brands, like Boom!, that’s been running a decade and scaling consistently during that time.
Ezra Firestone: It’s everything, man. It’s also everything for Zipify, right? It’s like what do people want me to build. Who cares what I want to build? It’s all about what they want.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. ‘Lo and behold, if you talk to your customers, oh, suddenly you do well. Amazing how that is. So, tell me about… All right, let’s say I get on your list now, and I don’t place a purchase until December 31st. I want to know about frequency. How many emails do I potentially get from you? Like let’s get people this notion out of their head that if they… “Well, if I send too many emails, they’ll be annoyed.” That… I think it’s a free for all as soon as November 1st hits. Open season on your inbox.
Ezra Firestone: Well, I will tell you, I’m gonna actually open up my project charter from 2020. I’m gonna tell you the number of emails that you would have received if you had not bought starting from… When do you want to start? Early Black Friday sale?
Kurt Elster: You know what? No. I want November 1st. November 1st I think is when mentally… We got the people who buy in October. Fine. But I don’t think they’re the majority. November 1st is when you’re like, “It’s holiday season.”
Ezra Firestone: Four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 19, 20. You probably would have got about 40 emails. 45.
Kurt Elster: Okay. I don’t think that’s crazy.
Ezra Firestone: No. It’s basically like, you know, on the peak days I’m emailing three times a day. There’s maybe seven peak days. That’s like 21 emails. And then on some days, I’m emailing twice a day, and there’s a few days there, so maybe you’re at 30 emails, and then outside of that I’m emailing like two times a week, sometimes three. So, you end up with like 40, 45 emails. Maybe 15 content and 30 sale.
Kurt Elster: Okay. So, two to one promo to content, and when we’re doing three emails in a day, what do those send times look like? What’s that content look like?
Ezra Firestone: 7:00 AM, 4:00 PM, and 9:00 PM is my standard, and we’ll usually do like product callout to start, plus discount. Then we’ll do like testimonial callout, so it’s like an email that’s all about the products and why they’re beneficial and what’s on sale in a specific one, and then there’s one all about social proof, and why people love it, and what’s going on with that, so it’s kind of like benefit angle, social proof angle, and then generally like urgency angle. But we mix it up.
Kurt Elster: I like it.
Ezra Firestone: Or one of them might be like story-based angle, like look at how Jan uses mascara, and it’s like, “Well, I do this, this, and this. Here’s my six tips. Go buy mascara.” So, it might be like a person’s story. But we kind of mix up social proof, product benefit, and storytelling and urgency. Those are kind of our main components of emails.
Kurt Elster: So, when you talk about doing $2 million on just Black Friday, that is part of a larger strategy.
Ezra Firestone: Well, so $2 million, from Thanksgiving to Monday. So, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, so five days. So, I’m trying to do like 750 grand between Thursday and Friday, and then another $1.3 million between Saturday and Monday.
Kurt Elster: So, this full… This huge approach in which you make millions over a short period, less than a quarter, really comes down to the email strategy there is 40 emails. That’s what’s generating the sales.
Ezra Firestone: Well, I think it comes down to one-
Kurt Elster: I mean, I’m taking a sliver of it, but it’s not that hard. If someone wanted to implement this, it’s just not that crazy.
Ezra Firestone: Yeah, and you can go back and last year I think we literally went through, if you go back and listen to the one last year, we kind of like went through in much greater detail a very similar strategy. What exact emails, what exact days, the whole thing. But I think it’s like, “Hey,” you know, I’m not 10 years, 11 years in with this brand. Every year I’ve gotten more sophisticated. Every year my products have gotten better. Every year my community has grown. Every year my audiences have grown. Every year my product catalog has grown. Every year my discounting strategies have been more efficient, and effective, and relevant.
And so, I think there’s a lot that goes into it. I think no matter what size audience you have, if you… And by the way, my sales page is optimized for desktop, optimized for mobile, has urgency, has Johnson Box callouts of the specific offers, has… You know, it’s… I teach in Zipify how to do all that.
Kurt Elster: I’m sorry, what’s a Johnson Box? Did I hear that right?
Ezra Firestone: Yeah, Johnson Box. It’s kind of like a single item promo that’s featured on the page that’s a different color background than the rest of the page, kind of stands out, and on desktop and mobile. For desktop, I’ll have three products in a row, and I’ll have pretty big pictures, and I’ll have social proof stars, and I’ll have a little customer testimonial, and then I’ll have the retail amount and the sale amount, and then I’ll have a call to action to go view the product, and then I’ll have perceived actionability when you hover over it. It’ll switch the image and show a customer testimonial.
And on mobile, I have two columns with two items in each row instead of three items in each row, but on both desktop and mobile, in between those will be like the first thing you’ll see on the page is a single item Johnson Box. Then there’ll be like multiple items. Then there’ll be another single item Johnson Box. So, my pages are done very deliberately.
But what I’m saying is that regardless of the size of your audience and regardless of the effectiveness of your marketing, if you email and run ads extremely aggressively with a relevant discount offer and a well-optimized page, you’re gonna make more money than if you didn’t do that. And so, for me, I’ve got… I don’t know. A solid 350,000 engaged people on my list, which means they’ve opened or clicked in the last 120 days. I’ve got big audiences in Facebook. I’ve got 40,000 people who will be on my early bird list, who raised their hand and were interested in the sale.
I got some fucking advantages because I’ve been at it so long.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, that email list.
Ezra Firestone: You know, because I’ve been at it so long. Yes, but I do think that the idea is send more emails than you think you should, mix up story, social proof, urgency, product callout. Have relevant, compelling, good, discounted offers. And you did a podcast on this. Not just blanket discounts. Optimize your sales process really well and set up your ads properly and that’s… give yourself the best chance.
Kurt Elster: It’s easy to get stuck when you think about the whole thing and you’re, “Oh, shoot.” But when you break it down into those individual components and like the site is set up correctly, that happened long before November. And then we’ve got our Facebook ad strategy to drive awareness and build these warm audiences. And then the email campaigns, and the mini campaigns, and the content. The individual components, not hard to do. It’s when you look at the entire thing as a big picture that it’s easy to get overwhelmed.
But if you start breaking it down to its individual pieces, it’s quite accessible.
Ezra Firestone: I think it’s just like anything, man. You eat the elephant one bite at a time.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Break the glacier into ice cubes is my version of the same thing.
Ezra Firestone: There you go.
Kurt Elster: Okay. So, where do you think people get it wrong? My suspicion is they talk themselves out of sending enough emails, so they’re not top of mind at a time when their competitors and everyone else is very noisy. And I think they worry and then they over discount. So, it’s like they send out three emails total with a 50% off discount. And they go, “Ah, it didn’t work that well.” Where do you think people get it wrong, typically?
Ezra Firestone: I think that’s all… I think you’re spot on with all of that. I think that they didn’t do enough anticipation building or audience building leading up to the sale-
Kurt Elster: You gotta hype it.
Ezra Firestone: They don’t have mini campaigns. They basically just run Black Friday through Cyber Monday and they just never communicate about the sale again. And if you go… On the Zipify blog, I’ve got a 90-minute video that kind of goes into depth, shows you examples. You can email help@zipify.com and ask for the video tutorial of all this. It’s called the Black Friday Cyber Monday, or Black Friday Bonanza I think is what we called it. You can just say, “Hey, I heard on Kurt’s podcast, I was hanging with Tech Nasty, and I heard about the Black Friday Bonanza video, and I want access to it.” And you’ll see what it really means to have fleshed out sub-campaigns, how many emails are getting sent, what we’re doing with the ads, how the pages look. So, I think it really is an execution issue, and like you’re saying, a not aggressive enough issue.
Kurt Elster: I like it. You know what? I think we should wrap it up there. You have… I saw you have a holiday course, a holiday email course in Smart Marketer. Would you like to plug it?
Ezra Firestone: Oh. Yeah, you know, that’s out of date now.
Kurt Elster: Oh, really?
Ezra Firestone: I don’t know how that thing is… If that thing is still on the website, it shouldn’t be. It’s from like 2018. It was called the Black Friday Bootcamp and it was a great six-week training. We took people through soup to nuts, building everything out. We did look over your shoulder videos on it. But we haven’t been doing that because I’m not really the main teacher at Smart Marketer anymore. I come in and teach modules in courses, but Molly Pittman, John Grimshaw, Laura Palladino, Brett Curry, Ari Bagah, they’re doing a lot of the courses and then I’ll come in and be like, “All right, let me teach a module on landing page optimization and sales funnels.” But the Black Friday Bootcamp was kind of like a look over my shoulder and do it with me.
But yeah, we have great courses over there, just not one on holiday sales at the moment.
Kurt Elster: All right, instead, one of I think the powerful tools you could use to have a better holiday sale might be Zipify Pages to build these templates.
Ezra Firestone: Yeah, and One Click Upsell to increase your average order value. We’re now doing multiple prepurchase upsell offers and multiple post-purchase upsell offers, which is nobody is doing that yet. We’re the first people. So, basically what that means is like from the product page or from the shopping cart, when someone clicks check out, you can pop up a modal that says, “Hey, get this item for 12%, get this item for 15, get this item for 20,” so it can be different discounts. They can add multiple, or they can add just one. You can set thresholds to say, “Hey, you’re $20 away from free shipping. Add one more item to get free shipping.” So, you can do all kinds of cool stuff like that.
And then post purchase, of course you can do upsells, downsells, all that with one click. Shopify just fixed tracking, works with PayPal, works with Shop Pay. You can track the post-purchase upsell offers. And we now have this thing where basically you can say, “Hey,” like let’s say you’re a belt brand, and you’ve got multiple different belt styles, and you’re like, “Hey, you bought the leather belt. Choose between alligator skin, python, or synthetic,” and they can choose one of the three. Or you’re a watch brand. “Hey, get one of three more. Here’s a silver one, a gold one, and a leather one. Choose one of these and get 20% off.”
So, you can present a choice on the post-purchase offer page for many, and they can choose one, which is really slick and working well for a lot of brands. We have thank you page offers. We got all kinds of shit, man. So, One Click Upsell is actually… Just became Shopify Plus certified, so we’re one of 21 apps in the whole ecosystem that are certified for Shopify Plus merchants, which means you’ve got concierge 24-hour support, you’ve got load balancing, all kinds of wild stuff they make you do, and we’ve got I want to say like 11,000 users on that app. 1,900-plus merchants.
We’re definitely best in category, best in class. Landing Page Builder you could argue, you know. Shogun’s really good. PageFly is really good if you’re looking for just crazy flexibility. If you’re looking for direct response conversion focused, we’re the best, but I think our landing page builder, we’ve got things we’re the best at and things we’re not. I think for our Upsell app, we’re clearly the best.
Kurt Elster: Honest and brave of you to say. I always… I recommend Zipify Pages and I always say, “Hey, if you want opinionated templates, where it’s like this is a template known to sell, grab that.” That’s the one for you. And then I think with Zipify OCU, you’re absolutely right. Just the level of flexibility there and the upsell placements, really very powerful. And I just… I love cross-sells as a strategy in general because everything else about the store can remain the same and then you make more money. Like conversion rate’s the same, traffic’s the same, but then average order value goes up, and suddenly I’m making more money on every order. It’s pretty good.
Ezra Firestone: Hot dog, y’all. We out here. Tech Nasty.
Ezra Firestone Sound Board Clip: Tech Nasty!
Kurt Elster: All right, Ezra Firestone. Where can people go to learn more about you?
Ezra Firestone: You can find me on Twitter, @EzraFirestone. You can find me on Instagram, @EzraFirestone. I’m also on LinkedIn. I’m on YouTube, TheSmartMarketer. You can go to SmartMarketer.com, which is my blog, and you can check me out in the Shopify app store at Zipify Apps. I’m also a certified Shopify commerce coach. I just got my badge today. I’m trying to figure out where do you put these badges. I don’t know, but I got a fancy badge, which is kind of fun.
Kurt Elster: Congratulations. I will say follow Ezra on Instagram, where that’s really where you get the purest version of Ezra. That’s like the authentic Ezra.
Ezra Firestone: I think that’s true. Yeah, you get the behind the scenes into my life and shit, which is fun.
Kurt Elster: It’s a lot of fun. All right. Ezra Firestone, thank you so much. Here is to your best Black Friday ever.
Ezra Firestone: Thanks, man. Appreciate it.