How to Run a Holiday Sale Any Time of the Year

Carrie: We’re live.

Ezra: Hey! Ezra here! Smart Marketer Live October 3, 2016. Director: Carrie Firestone. Camera person and tech person: Aunt Charles. I’m talking about some birthday realizations. This thing’s kinda cool, right? I love this thing. Let me just do it one more time. I’ve always wanted to do that, and now I’m doing it. I’m gonna just check on my phone that we are indeed live. So I’m gonna refresh, and we will find out. Oh, we are! How about that? Oops, that was loud. Check this out, you guys, I’m gonna show you in just a second. Boom! There we are, live on the phone, and there it is. That’s kind of cool. If you’ve got comments, questions, you can send them in while we’re going.

So I had a birthday recently, yesterday, actually, was my birthday. I’m 30 years old. I’m in my 30s, I’m excited about that. Traditionally, in my life, I’ve not really wanted to celebrate my birthday. I’m gonna tell you actually what we’re gonna cover in this show, and then I’m gonna tell you about my birthday and our new Facebook campaign results. So today we’re gonna talk about some realizations I had yesterday on my birthday. You’re gonna get to see a little footage of me when I was a kid, and then we’re gonna go into a specific campaign that we ran in our business related to birthdays, the results of it, the landing pages, the Facebook ads, everything. So I’m gonna show you all that.

So, yesterday was my birthday, and traditionally in my life, I have not wanted birthday attention. My viewpoint has kind of been like, hey, if you want to celebrate me, do it for the other 364 days out of the year. And so I’ve kind of been shy about wanting attention on my birthday or being comfortable in the spotlight of attention. When I looked at it, there’s a couple of things that I realized. Number one, it’s like a fear of getting older, for sure. Number two, it’s just like being uncomfortable receiving. This year, yesterday, and the day before, we had some friends up and they sang me a birthday song that I’m gonna play for you, that one of my friends, a guitarist, he kind of made up the song and they did a song for me.

It was just really nice to be celebrated. A bunch of people, you know, said happy birthday on Facebook. And so, it’s a nice…what I came to, is that it’s a nice thing to let people celebrate you. If people like you, if they think that you add value to their life, if they want to appreciate you, it’s a nice thing to receive that. It feels good to receive it. I had been sort of unwilling to have birthday parties. I had a birthday party this year. It was really fun, and I will be having birthday parties in the future.

The first thing that I’m going to do, before I show you the Facebook campaign results and this new sort of campaign that we set up in relationship to an anniversary of one of our businesses, is I’m going to roll for you…it’s only 90 seconds. I’m also gonna show you a landing page that’s really cool in just a minute. But I’m gonna roll for you the song that my friends played for me yesterday, and I cut that to another birthday gift I was given. So I was given a birthday gift at one point of a bunch of footage of me as a kid and sort of me doing judo and things like that. So I’ve put the song that my friends recorded for me yesterday to a little bit of that footage. I’m gonna roll it now, and I’ll meet you back here in 90 seconds.

That video gets me. Ben Lieberman played the guitar. Emily Reuben rapped, and their friend, we’ll tag in this post – I can’t remember her name – actually wrote the chorus for Carrie when it was Carrie’s birthday. They wrote the, “Happy Birthday, Carrie.” So she wrote that chorus. So I’ll tag her. Thank you guys for that song. So it felt really good to be sang to. I enjoyed it. Now, let’s move on. Thanks for sharing a few moments of my childhood with me. What I want to talk about…so that was…it’s my birthday. I can see that I’m getting a lot of “happy birthdays” in here. Thank you guys so much. It feels good to be another year older.

Anyways, moving on to business stuff, how about that? Boom!. My company, Boom!, had a birthday recently. We turned six years old. I want to switch back and forth to the behind the scenes too so you can see. Real quickly, I’m gonna switch and show you behind the scenes of this setup, because I know that you’re interested in how we’re producing this show via Facebook Live. We did, and that’s…Aunt Charles’ hand. Aunt Charles is sticking her hand in the rig. You can’t see Carrie. She’s off in the corner here. But I mean, you can come out if you want, but you don’t have to come out. Okay. I’m gonna do a Facebook Live to actually show you how we have this set up so that you can produce content in the same way. Back to the main camera. That’s coming up in a future Smart Marketer live show. And I’ll start announcing these a few days ahead of time so that you’ll know when they’re coming.

Now, we ran a campaign recently. And, you know, look, I talk a lot about engaging your customers and prospects with content. Don’t just try to sell people stuff. Engage in a conversation, build a relationship, build some intimacy, and then softly offer the things that you have that you think might be valuable to people. That’s a great strategy. That’s my whole business strategy. However, it also makes sense to, from time to time, make a straight up direct offer to your subscriber base, to directly say to your subscribers, “Hey, I have this thing that I think you might be interested in.” And we do this once every two months. We email our subscribers, we post on our Facebook fan page and we run ads to people who visited our website and also who are one of our Facebook fans to make an offer to them.

It’s actually a good thing to do. And the most recent offer that we made, performed really well. I want to show it to you and I want to show you the associated landing pages with it. If you look at my computer here, I’ll just scroll over, you can see that on July 7, 2016, we sent an email, and this email got opened by 42,000 people. Eleven thousand people clicked on it, and it resulted in $156,000 in revenue. Now, what this email looked like was this right here. This is what the email looked like. Now, you can see that the email itself said, “Hey, Boom is turning six years old.” That’s right, we’re growing up, and the Pro-age revolution is as well.

Have a little bit of copy and then it had some calls to action to shop our sale, as well as a notification that the coupon code which had a discount. So we’re incentivizing them to do business with us on our birthday because we’re turning six years old, by offering a discount and we say it’s only available for four days. Now if you click this link in this email, you are taken over to a landing page – I’ll just zoom out just a tiny bit here – with a little bit of copy, a call to action, a sales video that you can click on. And then we’ve also embedded the sales video here, a little bit of what I call long form left/right design which is where you’ve got an image or a video and then some body copy, and then body copy and an image so it goes left and right.

Then if you were to click any of these images, it anchors you down to the product blocks, and we’ve got some product blocks. Now, I’m gonna show you the results of this campaign. Every single email that we sent, the actual ads that we set up. So we set up some Facebook ads to supplement the email that we sent.

I think that if you have a business, I don’t care if you’ve only got 40 subscribers, 20 subscribers. Now, if you look at Boom! by Cindy Joseph, which is one of my e-commerce businesses, we have hundreds of thousands of subscribers. If you look at Smart Marketer, which is the brand that you’re engaging with right now, we’ve only got, 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 subscribers and we got Facebook fans and stuff. It doesn’t matter the size of your business, what matters is that you do this campaign.

Before I show you the actual results of this campaign, I want to… Go back to this landing page here. We built this landing page which you see on my screen right now, using our new landing page builder. So what I’m going to do is run a little video for you that talks about the landing page builder, what it does, why we released it, because I’m really proud of it and I want you to know about it, and then I’ll get into actually showing you the results of the Facebook campaign, as well as how to build this landing page for yourself.

Announcer: Looking for a quick and easy way to create high converting landing pages and sales funnels for your Shopify store? Well, first, what is a landing page? Well, it’s any specific page that you send traffic to, to prompt a specific result. Let’s say a newsletter sign up, or a holiday sales page, or any goal that you might have. And if you create a series of pages that share a common goal, let’s say a landing page, a sales page, and a post-checkout thank you page, then you have a sales funnel. Landing pages are perfect for growing your business by boosting leads and sales.

But right now there’s a big problem. To create a landing page for your store, you can either hire a designer and a developer to create one for you, and that takes time and money, or you can use a landing page builder which is faster and less expensive. But the problem is, none of the landing page builders on the market integrate with your Shopify store. So you have to deal with confusing plugins and sub-domains and skewed analytics, which is extra cost and extra hassle. Well now, there’s a solution. Introducing Zipify Pages. Zipify Pages is an e-commerce landing page and sales funnel builder that seamlessly integrates with your Shopify store.

Start by choosing a template from our ever-growing template library. These page templates come directly from our eight-figure e-commerce stores that are built on Shopify. We test what works, and we put our best templates into Zipify Pages. After selecting a template, it’s easy to customize it to fit your store by using out drag and drop editor. You can choose from our collection of conversion elements, or blocks as we like to call them, like featured products, countdown timers, social proof sections, and more. Once you have the page just the way you like it, click “Publish.” It’s as easy as that. You now have an amazing new page published right to your Shopify store. Your page will look great on any device. It’s 100% mobile responsive, and all of the data is under one domain. So tracking leads and sales and Facebook is easy, simple, and accurate. High-quality landing pages and sales funnels as soon as you need them. Zipify Pages, check it out today.

Ezra: So that’s Zipify Pages. It’s a landing page builder that allows you to build the exact same landing pages and campaigns that we use in our business. Let me show you what actually happened, the results of this campaign and then how you can replicate it for your business. If we look over at the Facebook advertising, what you can see is that for the week that…we emailed it on the seventh, but we started running ads here on the sixth. And we ran advertising to re-targeting, which are people who visited our website. We ran it to our Facebook fans. We ran advertising to people who visited the sale but didn’t buy. We also ran to Instagram. People are fans on Instagram and people who are in our re-targeting list on Instagram. I’m gonna show you exactly who are in these lists so you can replicate all these campaigns.

But first, let me show you the advertisements that we used. Actually, first I’d like to show you the results, right. You can see that to our fans, we spent $6,000 to make $61,000. Now, you should know about Facebook that those numbers aren’t 100% accurate, right? They’re give or take 10 or 15%, because Facebook’s tracking is not 100%. It’s pretty close. They’ll tell you exactly how much you spent. They’re very good about telling you how much you spent, but they don’t always tell you exactly how much you made back. The tracking with Shopify is off 10% or 15% in either direction. Coming back to the screen here, you can see that the re-targeting list, we spent six to make 61.

Our fans, we spent six to make 43. For people who visited the web page but did not purchase…so this is people who we emailed or who saw it with this ad and didn’t purchase, we re-targeted again. I’m gonna show you that as well. Let’s take a look at the advertisement itself. We actually had only one ad that we used, and this is what it looked like here. The ad just said, “Hey, Boom is turning six years old. Get 10% off our store. Use coupon code “boom is six.” Only available for three days.” And we had the same type of branding, we had the same logo. You’ll notice that we used custom logos for our sales. We had a call to action button and then we had a little bit of a headline and then some content related to the sale.

You can see a bunch of people reacted to it. And this link, if we actually look at the permalink, we can see where it linked to. So this link actually linked over to the landing page, right? Here is the landing page again that we’ve built using Zipify Pages. Now, when we look at how this campaign performed, it’s pretty interesting to look at. What’s interesting about it is, when you’re running a campaign…and remember, I said I recommend running these once every two months. So once every two months you should make a direct offer to your subscriber base, to your Facebook fans, to the people in your community. What you should be doing in between the time that you’re making a direct offer to them, is engaging them with content. Kind of like this show.

This show is a piece of content for people who are interested in growing their businesses, that relates to the products I have. I’m not trying to sell you anything on this show. I’m just trying to add value, but I also mention products that I have, such as Zipify Pages, right? This strategy of engaging in a conversation, putting out regular content, articles, videos that relate to your brand, and then every now and again, making a direct offer. It’s really a good way of doing it. So we make a direct offer every two months. Let me show you more of the stats on this offer. Basically, if we look at day one that we ran this campaign, which was July 6, and we look at how much it cost us to make a sale, you can see that to our Facebook fans, it cost us $5.60 to get someone to make a purchase from our store. And the people who are on our re-targeting list, it cost us $4.

Now, what happens with these sales, the reason you don’t want to run them all the time, is they tire out. What you’ll see is, as we go – so we’ll look at the seventh – the costs start to rise a little bit, right? Six dollars, six.. I will still happily pay $6 to make a sale. I’ll happily pay six bucks. But what’s gonna happen over the course of the week is you’ll see that the costs begin to rise up to double. Looks like I’m sweating pretty good here. I gotta get these little… They make these armpit pad things you can wear under your shirt. If you wear really thin shirts…which look good, right? Thin shirts are fashionable, right? They’re svelte or whatever you want to call them on your body. Carrie doesn’t like the word svelte, it turns out.

Ezra: She does like the word svelte. Are these not svelte? Come on.

Carrie: You’re svelte.

Ezra: I’m svelte. I guess I don’t know the definition of the word svelte. But anyways, I need to get some of those pads. Anyways, as we go back to the screen here, you can see that on this day, we started to run the re-targeting. Now let’s take a look at that real quick. So it’s the second day. Now, the re-targeting, you’ll notice, if we look at it…I wonder if we ran the exact same ad. Oh no, look, we changed the copy a little bit. We said, “The Boom sale is ending soon. Don’t miss out,” and we had a different piece of creative. So, just to show you who this went to, this went to different people. I’m gonna actually go ahead and show you the targeting here by clicking on this link and then previewing it. Let’s see if I can figure it out. Let’s see a little bit more.

So it went to a custom audience of people who visited our sale but didn’t buy. Which means they visited this landing page but did not purchase. So we had a re-targeting advertisement that was running on every day after the first day. Now, going back and looking at the ads a little bit, just a little bit deeper before we dig into the way the emails worked, because all this stuff works in conjunction, right. The emails work in conjunction with the advertisements and the landing page as well.

Let’s move to July 8, and what we’re gonna see is that the cost of these sales are beginning to rise, like $7, $8, $14 and $15 on Instagram which is probably why we turned it off, because it wasn’t performing as well as we went further. And if I can switch to the last day we ran it, which is the 11th, you can see this is up to nine bucks. This is up to $17 to fans, and re-targeting was still performing very well. So, over the course of the week that we ran these advertisements…and we only ran these again to our Facebook fans, people who had visited our website and people who had visited the actual sale itself and didn’t purchase.

We linked all these ads back to this landing page. Just to tell you, everything that’s in this campaign, so far the only things that are in this campaign are an email…I have this little suspender thing that suspends it. These emails that went out, right. Email one went out on July 7, produced $156,000. Email two went out the next day on July 8 to people who did not open. If we look at the actual results of that email, what we can see, it’s actually this one here, is these are people who received the first email but didn’t open it. We got an extra 10% to open and an extra $53,000 in revenue just by re-emailing people who did not open. And you know what we did? Was we sent them the exact same email which is here. Same email, just different subject line.

The only thing that was different between these two emails was the subject line, and down here we said “Only available for three days” instead of available for four days. Again, this email is an image with call to action buttons. Another call to action button and then a little bit of text. This is the second email we sent of three. The first email’s here, day one, 20% open. The second email we sent to people who did not open the first one. And then the third email, we waited all the way until the day before the sale was over and we sent it to anyone who did not purchase in the last seven days.

So whether or not you opened these or saw these, if you did not make a purchase in the last seven days, we sent a third email which produced more revenue than the one to the unopened. And I’ll show you what that email looked like. It actually looks a little bit different than the others. Here it is. Basically the only difference here is it’s like, “Hey, big call to action button. The sale is ending today,” and then we use our image, which is the same image from all the emails. And then we’ve actually modified the copy a little bit here to say it’s only available for the next 24 hours, and then again a call to action button that links over to the landing page.

This campaign, the landing page in this campaign was built inside of our landing page builder called Zipify Pages. And what Zipify Pages does, is it allows you to build landing pages, direct response pages, sales pages, product detail pages, post purchases email pages for your brand. What we do is we figure out what works in our store, for example, our holiday sales page here, and then we code that into Zipify Pages so that if you have a Shopify store, you don’t need a designer or a developer.

You can literally just come to Zipify Pages just like this. You can click on “add page,” you can use one of our templates, you can then scroll down and choose the holiday promotion sales page. And what that’s going to do, is it’s going to populate all of the content that we use on our page, which you can then edit. You can modify your logo here. Let’s say, for example, you wanted to add like a countdown timer, you can switch over to content blocks, and you could grab a nice countdown timer from the blocks here and you can modify the timing so that your page would have a countdown timer on it.

You could then modify the button to either link to a specific URL or a pop-up and opt-in box. You can change the color of the button. You can do pretty much anything that you want. And then what you can do is, you can dynamically pull the products from your store right into the landing page. You can grab the products that you want to show up on this landing page, throw those in there. If you want to modify this button, you can change the content of the button, like “Shop this product.”

What’s cool about using our dynamic product blocks is you can decide to link to the product page, to the shopping cart. You can link to the checkout, or you could link to a specific URL. Again, you could modify the color of these buttons, and then what would happen is the…oh sorry, I’m gonna link to the product page. What would happen is that would modify. And the other cool thing about Zipify Pages is, you can use our layout if you want. You can modify all this content, or maybe what you want to do, like maybe the “your brand,” the background color, sort of more in brand would be like a black. Maybe that’s more in keeping with your brand. You can modify, pretty much any block. You can change the content within the wizzy wig editor. Or, if you want to do…again, this is just gonna have all of our pre-content, our testimonials and things like that, our footer.

If you wanted to, you could completely modify the page altogether. You could add different blocks as far as having like a long form left/right sales page if you wanted. Like I was talking before about how that long form left/right content looks really good, maybe you want a video block and a text block, and then underneath that maybe what you want to add would be like a text and image block just like this. Or maybe you want a different footer, right? Let’s say you want to have a really simple footer, and you want to delete the footer that’s on this page. Basically, you have complete control over the landing pages in your business.

We built this because we wanted it. Even us, right? We’ve got a team of 40 people. I’ve got designers on staff, I’ve got developers on staff, I’ve got copywriters on staff. Even my business, it takes me…it took me a month to produce this landing page that you see here. Because what I had to do was…first thing I had to do was get my designer to come up with a logo concept and then I had to get my copywriter to write the copy, and then I had to get my other designer to lay out a landing page based on that copy. And then I had to get my coder to develop it. So it took us a month to do this landing page, and you could do it in Zipify Pages in 15 minutes. You just modify the copy to match your business.

So, a couple of things. Number one is if you’re interested in Zipify Pages, we’re in our beta, and we’ve got a couple of spaces left. You can buy into the beta at a discounted price. Now, if you do want to use…become a beta user of Zipify Pages and build landing pages for your store, I ask that you give me feedback. You tell me what templates you want built in there, examples of landing pages you’d like to see, integrations you want. If you’re interested in sort of being my research and development team and helping me make this product even better…I spent a year on it. I spent over $100,000 developing it. It’s by far the most intense software cycle that we’ve ever been involved in. We’ve really put our lives into this thing, and it’s working out really well. If you want to get into the beta, I can give you a discounted price. You can just email help@smartmarketer.com. Say, “Hey, I saw Ezra on Facebook Live and I’d love to be a beta user of Zipify Pages.”

The other thing I didn’t show you in Pages, which I’ll show you maybe in another show, is that you can actually create completely custom pages. You don’t need to use our templates. Now, we add templates in all the time, but you can also do custom pages. So that’s Zipify Pages. But back to the lecture at hand, because what we’re talking about Smart Marketer Live, birthday realizations and a birthday campaign. As a strategy for marketing your business, you want to constantly be creating high-quality content that you use to engage your subscriber base. And look, your subscriber base is your Facebook fans and the people on your email list. That’s pretty much it.

Now, maybe you’ve got people who subscribe to you on YouTube, maybe you’ve got Instagram followers, maybe you’ve got Twitter followers, but most likely your main sort of demographic of people that you’re communicating with are gonna be your Facebook fans and the people on your email list. So what you want to do is consistently… My wife’s looking at me like, “Dude, you got to bring it down a notch.” Or no, maybe she wasn’t. Maybe I just interpreted that. But what you want to do is…yeah, hey, if you’re on Facebook Live, give me some of the love. You know where you click the like and the love button, because what that does, it makes little fun, little things pop over the screen.

I’d love for you to just give me a little Facebook like. You can just do a little like button. Like now, I’m liking my own show on my thing. But you can see here, if I press like and I do this, you see those little things floating across the screen? You guys can give me that. I love that. It’s so cool to see that coming in. Anyways, what you want to be doing is producing high-quality content that is relevant to the topics and conversations and problems that your prospects face, and you want to leverage that content to mention things that you have, your offers, your products, your services, that you think are valuable to your subscriber base.

And then once every month or two, you want to make a direct offer where you say, “Hey look, I have this thing. It’s a product.” For Boom!, it’s a physical product. For Smart Marketer, it’s a piece of software or a training course. “And I want you to check it out. I think it would really help you out. I think you would love it.” Just like we did here in the case of the anniversary sale, we sent an email, we ran Facebook advertisements, we had a landing page that were all sort of in relationship to an offer that we were making to our subscriber base.

Now, Smart Marketer is releasing a course where we document…this is coming out in November. What we do is, we send automated email based… If someone signs up for our email list, like pre-purchase, they get a certain set of automated emails. And if they buy something from us, they get a certain set of automated emails. We also manually broadcast emails to our list. Uh oh, we lost one of our cameras. We lost the main camera angle here. But looks like it’s back now. That’s the behind the scenes angle. Here we are, main camera angle. So we are doing a course, and this course is coming out in November and it’s going to be about email marketing for your business.

It’s going to show you all of the broad…the manual emails we send out, the weekly blog post, the sale campaigns like the one I just showed you, show you how to set the Facebook campaigns, how to set up the landing pages, how to write the copy, everything that we do. So if you’re interested in learning about the automated email messages and the manual email messages that we send, how we figure out what type of content to create, when we send out our emails, what every email has in common, the stories that we tell in our email, things like that.

If you’re interested in taking your email marketing to the next level for your e-commerce business, you can also email help@smartmarketer.com and say, “Hey, I want to get on the wait list for the email marketing course that’s coming out in November. I’m interested.” And we’ll put you on that list so that…we’ll even give you a discount on it because you’ve asked to sign up early. And that’s coming out in November.

Anyways, let me check if there’s any questions in the feed here. I can see Kyle Badis, Eric Leong Shar, Dwight Antonio Perry, Simone is in the house, Mat Callen, my man Mat Callen is with me. We’ve got Usef, who’s on the line. William says he thinks that I won the ribbon in the judo contest. Dude, that was pretty good when I was a kid. I was not bad at judo. Shawn’s here, Brandon Clark’s here, Juliane’s here. Johnny’s asking if there’s gonna be a replay. Yes, there will be a replay. Chris Toffer is asking me, what’s the setup that we use to make this broadcast happen, where we’ve got one video feed, two video feeds, we’ve got a computer video feed, and we’ve also got more stuff going on in the background that you don’t even know about.

Which I will show you when we actually show you the live set up in another show. Todd Crimmey is here. My good buddy Todd Crimmey. Mona Sanderson says “Birthdays are a good sign.” Juliane loves the landing page template. Juliane, I’ll make sure you can get it. Just get it in the Zipify Pages. Okay, doesn’t look like we have many more questions, so Ezra Firestone here for Smart Marketer Live, October 3, 2016. Ezra Firestone the talent, Carrie Firestone director, Aunt Charles on technology, Ben Lieberman, Emily Reuben and somebody whose name I don’t actually know but I will find out, on the live song. It wasn’t live, it was recorded yesterday. Thanks for watching. I’ll catch you in the next one. Over and out.