Copy the Winning Strategies Behind My 2018 Black Friday Sale

All right. We are live. “Black Friday Sale Results,” gonna be talking about strategy and talking about kind of how we got here. How we got here. This year have been a wild year. If you’re with me, you go ahead and leave a comment on the post say what’s up. Let me know what’s going on. We’re gonna be getting into the strategy behind our sale and looking at all of the sort of sale results.

So the strategy, you know, for us is we actually started our sale yesterday. So we kind of were looking at the trends from last year and seeing that Thanksgiving was growing like very large, a very large percentage year over year. Thanksgiving was growing as far as like revenue that was processed on that day. And also, you know, Black Friday day like today we’re doing great. And I’m gonna show you some of the ads and stuff like that but has way more competition. Everyone’s getting email the whole bunch more. So we thought we would actually start our sale a day early, which is Thanksgiving, and we did.

So we did $100,000 yesterday, which is actually part of this Black Friday sale. So while we only have 167 in revenue now, you have to add the 100 from yesterday, because last year, we didn’t let anyone into the sale before Black Friday. So that’s why we’re not on pace to beat last year’s. We actually opened up a day early. We’ll talk a little bit about that strategy. So like why would we do that?

We have found that if we build anticipation for an event, it’s why product launches, why Apple does this, why the big companies do it. Like if you build anticipation for something, it performs better than if you don’t build anticipation. You say, “Hey, we have a sale.” It works a lot better to build up desire, to build up excitement, to engage people and get them like stoked that you’re gonna be running a sale, especially if you have a Facebook, you know, an audience of past customers, past subscribers, past fans, past buyers that you can kind of reengage.

We had the strategy where we were using advertisements, emails, and organic social posts. And we were doing this for about two weeks leading up to this sale where we would… If you go to like, for example, our Instagram page here, you can see that even on our Instagram stories like we don’t have a giant Instagram following because our brand is women over 50. There’s not a lot of them on Instagram. But you can see like we were building up anticipation for everywhere. We weren’t just emailing and saying, “Hey, the sale’s gonna happen.” We were posting on social. You can see that on our Facebook fan page. You see that in Instagram stories. You can see it on our Instagram profile. Anywhere that we had attention, we were directing it towards this little campaign. We were directing that attention saying, “Hey, in just a couple of weeks…”

And by the way, this early bird list performed unbelievably well. And I’m gonna show you that in a minute. So, this strategy worked out really, really well of building up anticipation for the sale. And so basically, we ran some ads, and I’ll show you those to generate leads. I’ll show you the lead ads in a moment. We actually used Facebook lead ads and we used traditional Facebook ads. And we sent out a few emails that I’ll show you here in just a minute. And we did posts organically on Instagram and stuff like that. And we sent people to this opt-in page, which was a page that was built in our landing page builder called Zipify Pages, page looks just like this. Oops, I unpublished it now so you can’t see it. But you can see if we just look at what this page looks like, real simple page.

And the reason we do these pages really simple is because we’ve found particularly for opt-in pages that much simpler opt-in pages perform better and by the way real quick. If you want a store that generates this kind of revenue on a holiday like we’re having our Black Friday here, and you can see. Yesterday, we started our Black Friday sale. This is yesterday’s sale on Thanksgiving we started. And this is our numbers today. You should get good at email marketing because email is still the number one driver of conversions to an e-commerce store.

The number one driver of sales at this time is still the email channel, which is why we built up an email list before this sale. And even if you don’t have an email list yet, you can focus on building up your email list going forward. So, just to show you a heat map of that opt-in page, here we’ll just take a look at this, for example, and we’ll take a look at that. You know, you can see that we found that these simple pages perform extremely well. And we built this again in our landing page builder for Shopify, so it just publishes right over to our Shopify store and natively connects to Klaviyo, which is our email CRM that we’re using for our store. And it’s just a little landing page builder for Shopify called Zipify Pages.

The point is that the strategy here was kind of twofold. So one it was to get our most engaged subscribers to be on an early bird list and then to kind of juice them up. So we actually sent them. We didn’t just put them on this early bird list. We sent them some presale engagement content being like, “Hey, the sale’s coming. It’s gonna be awesome.” I’ll show you those emails in a minute. So basically, what happens is they enter their email address and then they were taken to this “thank-you page,” which we also built in our landing page builder. I’ll just go ahead and take a look at the “thank-you page” here.

This one is still published. So we will be able to just view it, similar, you know, image, a little bit of copy, and then links to social and a link over to our blog, really simple page built in this Shopify landing page builder, again, concise on mobile, easy to see the calls to action, take a look at the heat map for that page real quick, go early bird confirmation here. We can see that, again, you know, we keep our post-opt-in landing pages really simple in this mobile environment because 85% of people are engaging and consuming on mobile.

And then once they were opted in, you know, once they’d gone from an ad, from an email, or an organic social post and they had opted in to our 2018 holiday early bird list, we sent them a confirmation email that was just like, “Hey, thanks so much. You know, you’re on the early bird list and go ahead and get notified on messenger as well.” We actually push them over to Facebook messenger from that email. I’m gonna pull that email over here in another window. We ended up getting 14,573 people on to that 2018 holiday early bird list. So we ended up about 14,500 folks who joined that early bird list. And those people alone, we sent one email yesterday. That’s it. And it was only to those 14,000 people. And that is how we generated this…

First $100,000 in revenue that happened yesterday on Thanksgiving was 100% from this list of 14,000 people. And as we have been emailing throughout this campaign, as I’m gonna show you in a minute, we’re keeping them separate because I’m curious to know that throughout the duration of the campaign, how does the early bird list perform compared to people who did not get on the early bird list? Oh, and the answer is they’re doing really, really good. So anyways, what happens when you signed up for that early bird list, as you can kind of see from the graphic over here, let’s go to the graphic, is we send you a confirmation email. So I just kind of wanna show you that real quick. So I’ll show you. Just hop in and grab this.

When you opted in, you were sent this email right here that was like, “Hey, Black Friday’s coming. You know, thanks for signing up. We’ll email you as soon as discounts are available in our store. And we’re also gonna alert our Facebook Messenger community early. So, you know, do you wanna get notified on Facebook Messenger?” And if you were to click that, it actually opens up Facebook Messenger and asks you if you wanna get notified, you click “Yes.” And now you’re actually gonna get notified in Facebook Messenger as well. So we’re kind of using email to push people over to Messenger. So it’s a little bit more of an advanced tactic. But that’s kind of how they got on to this early bird list.

These are some of the emails that we’d sent to our list saying, “Hey, you know, do you wanna be on the…do you wanna be the first person to get notified?” These are full emails that are asking people if they want to get notified. Those emails linked to this opt-in page over here. So these are the emails that we sent to our list. We had some PSs. These PS images were in our blog posts. So when we were sending out content and blog posts, emails, these little PS images were linking to the opt-in page. This is all in the two weeks leading up to Thanksgiving.

And to look at real quick how this early bird list performed, I’m gonna pull up the email we sent out yesterday. I’m gonna pull up some of the ads. First, I’ll actually…I’m gonna show you some of the ads that went to…that were getting people to opt-in real quick. So let’s take a look at those because even though it’s now Black Friday, you can still use this strategy because, you know, the holiday sale really goes. This is not prerecorded, by the way. And it’s not jargon, Tom Basinski, Basinski. Can you prerecord it? I guess you can. You can prerecord and premiere a live video, but I don’t…I’m not that dude. I’m not the guy who’s gonna tell you it’s live when it’s not. That’s all I’m saying.

So, I am watching these comments too. So if you’re in there talking mess, I’m gonna call you out. It’s okay, though. It is your prerogative, you know, to say whatever you want in the comments as long as it’s friendly, you know what I mean, you can have your opinions and stuff, but you gotta be friendly. Anyways, if you have questions, you know, ping me, hit me up. Let me know. Please share this video. Share it in Facebook groups. Share it anywhere. Anyone who wants to see, you know, what’s gonna on Black Friday and learn some e-commerce stuffs, you know, please share this with them if they’re e-commerce business owners because my goal…you know, it’s funny. I put so much effort. You guys doesn’t even know. I put so much effort into the content that I produce at smartmarketer.com.

We have a blog obviously and zipify.com where we kind of talk about e-commerce and business and life and entrepreneurship and all kinds of stuff. And I put so much energy into this blog in producing content. And every year without fail, every year, look at these videos professionally recorded. I spent a lot of money editing, recording, buying camera, equipment, all that. And every single year without fail, the most successful piece of content that I produce is literally just numbers rolling on a screen. And now I wanna show the ads that we’re running.

We used ads, emails, and organic social posts to get people onto this early bird list. And these were some of the ads. Let’s pop these over and kind of zoom these in a little bit. See if that’s showing live on the screen. It is. Okay. So I’m gonna zoom this in. So you can see that the groups that we were running to were people who are subscribed to our list and had not yet purchased. I’m gonna switch this to be a leads dashboard here, so we can see the cost and value per lead.

So we’re targeting people who had subscribed to our list, people who would engage with our fan page, and here’s our lead numbers, people who were a lookalike of our buyers and fans and then buyers. And you can see that we bought 2,200 leads at 76 cents a pop for buyers and 674 leads at 2 bucks for fans. $2.34 it was to get an email lead for people who are in a lookalike so they’re not actually a past engager and $1.12 for people who would engage with our fan page or Instagram, $1.21 for people who already subscribed but had never purchased. And these are some of the ads that we were running.

And again, these ads were leading to that opt-in page that we had built inside the Zipify pages. These ad previews aren’t rendering exactly properly. Let’s see if we can get a preview that will render here. These were a GIF. Here we go, GIF ads. So, they actually…right now you’re only seeing a second of it, but they rotate. We find that moving imagery that Facebook actually lets you do these now. Facebook lets you do these in their little editor now. But we had our graphic designer create these. Anyways, so it’s an ad like this, and we sent out a couple emails. We sent out a Facebook Messenger. We got people under that early bird list. And when you see the value of that early bird list, let’s look at the first email that we sent out yesterday just to that early bird list real quick because it’s kind of crazy.

So what I was pointing out, the reason that we did this early bird strategy was because we have found that number one, email subscribers are our highest converting source of traffic. If we can get someone on our email list engage with them and then get them over to our website, they convert super well. So that’s like, you know, we’re pretty heavily focused on email marketing because that’s our number one value, is to get a lead and then get them over to our website later after engaging with them and get them to convert. So look at this. This is obviously a rare scenario, but you can see here that this email…this is Klaviyo now. This email went out to the early bird list, which is only 14,000 people yesterday. And this email of 6,000 people, 50%…sorry, of 14,000 people, if we just look at the email real quick so you can see it. This was the email little hero shot that was thematically relevant to the campaign. It says, “Shop our best deals now. Hey, you’re seeing this because you signed up to the early bird list. You signed up to get this early. You know, by the way, we’re not gonna have any support on. You will have no support.” But you can purchase the products before everyone else kind of make sure that we don’t run out of inventory. So that’s the email.

And then looking at how well it performed, I’ve ever had an email performed as well, 50% open rate, 26% click rate. And if we actually click into it perhaps we can see a little bit more detail. So it went to 14,000 people, and six and a half percent of them ordered $91,000. So, all this revenue from Thanksgiving came from that early bird list. So that’s a reason to do the early bird list. Now, if we look a little look at the emails that went out today because now we’re gonna keep the early bird list segmented out here. So let’s look at…it looks like this one went to the early bird list as well but it went today. So here we go. So look at that, already 60,000. So right now, we’re at 150,000 so far in revenue from people on the early bird list. There was only 14,500 people on the early bird list, but we have 150,000 in revenue from them already. And then we’ll see if any other emails went to them. This one’s all subscribers, and this one went to the early bird list just now minus anyone who had already bought because we’re sending them a couple emails day. And we’re gonna keep sending those early bird lists, those 15,000 people throughout the campaign.

But I mean, if you look at it like that and you look that we have 270,000…yeah, 270,000 in revenue so far from this campaign, and 150,000 of it came from our top 15,000 people who are on that early bird list, which makes the case for get people on the early bird list. Now if we look at the ads that are running right now and we just look at today because these are the actual sale ads now and we look at the early bird list, I’ll bet you it’s our cheapest cost per sale. Yeah. Look at that, $8 per purchase today, spent 400 to generate 4,500 from the early bird list on the ads. So if you look at the ads, these are Black Friday ads that we’re running. Look at this. That’s insane. That’s a 30% click-through rate on this ad, the one that’s getting the most juice, $7 a sale to the early bird list, 300 to make 3,500.

Again, you know, these are those types of ads I was telling you about, moving GIFs. Notice the contrast of colors. Notice the hero shot is contrasted by a colored background that really makes the products pop. And this will loop. This is a GIF image. So it’ll loop on Facebook, little bit of sales copy looking for the best deals of the weekend. Check out our boom bags. So anyways, we’re just kind of looking at these ads. I’ll show you a couple more of these ads. And then we’re gonna get into like the offer page and where these people are going. I’m kind of hopping all around here, another one. Like, you can make these in Facebook. You can make these now if you don’t have the ability to shoot your own GIFs or to create your own GIFs, which is a series of images moving together. And we’re using these.

You’ll notice every ad we’re running this year is a GIF advertisement using emojis in the ad, using testimonials in the ad, doing traditional direct response stuff. These things loop. Yeah, the early birds, so far people in the early bird list, $9 sales today, people who are past buyers, $13 sales, fans, 50 bucks, subscribers who’ve never bought before, $42, and then people who are engaged, 27, so far spent 5,000 on Facebook ads to make 22 of this Black Friday revenue that you’re looking at coming in right there. I’ll show you the other emails that we sent. And then we don’t have the sale retargeting going. If you look here, I got some slides that I’ve kind of prepared that I was gonna talk about, different parts of what’s going on in the campaign, but I’ll pop down to the little ads part real quick.

If you look at this number here, visited the sale but didn’t buy, most people don’t…so okay. So, all these people are going to this. This is our offer page. Again, this offer page can be built in our landing page builder, which is called Zipify Pages. It works for Shopify. And you can do some pretty cool stuff in it. Let’s say, for example, you wanted to build a similar landing page, you could come in here and like, you know, grab your products from your Shopify store. Pull them in. You can build a real similar landing page to the one that we’re running, if not the exact same one. But anyways, these folks go to this landing page. The folks that are buying they’re all buying from this holiday offer page. So most people do not read because sale events are short. So they don’t retarget people who land on this page.

By the way, we’ve made a change to this page already. During the sale, we’ve made a change to the live page. And I’ll explain why we did that and what we did here in just a moment. But most people don’t mess with retargeting folks because sale events are short. But you can see here every time we do it. So, for example, this is a sale. This looks like our Valentine’s Day sale from 2017, for example. You can see that we spent…for people who visit this offer page and don’t convert so that they make it to the offer page but they don’t actually buy. It’s like a 10X on ad spend that we get. So here we spent 2,000 to make 18,000 just by retargeting these folks. And when I was just showing you these ads in the ads manager, you can see that the visited sale but did not buy ad set is not active yet because we wait a day. We wait a full day and then we retarget the people who visit the sale who hadn’t yet bought throughout the duration of the sale, and it performs extremely well. So, it’s a good time to transition.

So question about profit margins real quick. I think that for e-commerce, you want to buy for one and sell for five. So for example, like if this is 27 bucks…let’s say this is 25 bucks. I wanna buy it for $5. That’s ideal. I wanna give you context on profit margins, which is my viewpoint is that if you have e-commerce product that’s under 30 bucks, you wanna be like buying for 1 and selling for 5, so buy for 5, sell for 25, buy, you know, 7, sell for 35. So you kind of want a 5X markup, which gives you enough money to buy ads, to pay for shipping, to pay salary. You know, it gives you the kind of margin that you need to run a business. So if you look at this Boomstick, it’s about that. I buy it for 6 or 7 bucks and I sell it generally for 27. I sell it in a bundle here.

Boomsilk, on the other hand, I have buy for one and sell for three. So my margin is not that great on Boomsilk because I buy this jar for 10 bucks and I sell it for 25 when it’s on sale. So that’s like buy for one and sell for two and a half essentially. And you can’t really run a business in today’s environment on that level of margin. Now, for me, today, I’m getting a lot of sales from past customers. So I don’t have a lot of advertising costs. I don’t have a lot of additional overhead. I mean, I have all my overhead, which is my technology stack. Klaviyo charges me a couple grand a month. Zendesk charges me a couple of grand a month. Wistia charges me a couple grand a month. YAPO [SP] charges me a couple grand a month. Shopify charges me a couple grand a month.

You know, I have my technology stack that is quite the overhead. I have my ad costs. I have my team salary. I invest a lot in benefits and paying my team really well, etc. My profit margin, my gross margin. not net net, but my gross margin after cost of goods sold is usually like 60 to 70%. So if I have like $100 in revenue, then I’m gonna have between $50 and $70 in profit. And then out of that 50 and 70 in profit, I have to pay for ads. I have to pay for salary. I have to pay for inventory. I pay for all kinds of stuff. But the point that I wanna make is that I think that you should shoot for buying for one and selling for five.

Now, let me show you an example where I’m buying for one and selling for three because the idea here is you wanna give your customers fair prices. You know, you wanna be priced into the market, but you also wanna have good enough margins that you can afford to go out and create really beautiful imagery, to have really great customer service, to invest in making better products. So it’s always nice to have more expensive products and then use that money to make the customer experience better. And we’ll talk about customer experience here in a minute.

But for example, this product here, this product is like 60 bucks. And I think I buy this for something like 18. So this is kind of a buy for one sell for three situation. Here it is for 80. I think I buy that smaller one for…the bigger one for like 25. So it’s kind of a buy for one, sell for three or four. So you kind of get away with that buy for one, sell for three, buy for one, sell for four on the more expensive items, so, for example, Boomsilk. This eight ounce one, I think I’m buying for 20 some-odd landed with, you know, jar and label and this and that or my manufacturing costs because I’m actually making that. Yeah. I think that you don’t…it’s hard to make it on anything under buy for one, sell for three. And ideally, you’re looking at buy for one, sell for five.

And if you look at all the supplement manufacturers, all the people who are selling supplements, the reason why that business is such a good one, so many people are excited about it, not only because the world that we live in tells people to take a pill and it will solve their problems. So everyone’s looking for pills that will help them. Supplements, you know, have really, really high-profit margins. People are buying for 3 and selling for 25, 30, 40, you know. So the margins are really great on those products. All right. Let’s talk a little bit about this holiday offer page. So a couple things. Go back to our slides here. Oh, we just hit 175. That’s kind of cool. See what states people are jamming in. Usually, California is a really big state for us. New York’s a big state for us. What else do we get going on? Zoom in a little bit. See if we can see. Here we go. Yeah. New York and California are really, really big states for us.

So let’s talk about the offer page. I’m getting blown up on my phone right now. So I’m just gonna make sure there’s nothing urgent going on with the team or nothing I didn’t miss. It’s also a really big weekend for Zipify because, you know, we power, I don’t know, 5,000 stores. So Zipify is the landing page builder that I was telling you about that we use to build out our landing pages and opt-in pages. It’s also the upsell application that we use to process post-purchase one-click upsells. This is the new Zipify app’s one-click upsell application where we’re able to do split testing on post-purchase one-click upsell.

So here you can see we’re split testing like, you know, one more Boomstick trio, nice-looking mobile offer pages redid these offer pages versus for example get two more. We can split test at every sort of level of the funnel. It’s a really, really powerful tool that allows you to do post-purchase one-click upsell on Shopify, which is pretty sweet. I’ll tell you more about that in a minute. It’s a very big weekend for us because not only is it the biggest sale event that we have throughout the year, we kind of work for the last several months to get everything ready, the offer pages, the emails, just all of it. I mean, my team has been going hard shout-out to Lauren, shout out to Bevin, shout out to Allison, shout out to Papine [SP], shout out to the whole team that has been pushing to make this happen. So this is this year’s offer page. Now let’s talk about how people are getting here.

So the way that it’s working is we have ads. This is last year’s setup. Notice that we have a theme. The look in the feel of the campaign, the ads match the emails, which matches the landing page, which matches the paraphernalia they get in the box. So we’ve really spent time, energy, effort to have it feel like a cohesive campaign because look and feel really does matter when it comes to brand, particularly if the goal is to continue to sell to people over and over and over again, which is what we’re all about. Engage people with content. Offer them different experiences. So, we have a very deliberate look and feel as you can see that we had last year. Here’s the sales process of it.

Basically, we have advertisements that you were just taking a look at, some of the sale ads that are live today. And let’s move this up. Yes. We have ads. We’ve got emails, some of the emails that I just showed you, and I’ll show you some of the other emails. We have also organic social posts and they all link to the holiday offer page. And yes, we are retargeting people who hit the offer page and then don’t come back. We follow up with them, and it’s very profitable.

From the offer page, they move over to one of the products. And we can see if we look at the offer page here. I keep losing this offer page. It’s actually quite hard to have like a million screens open at once. Yeah. From the offer page, the goal is to get them over to view one of the products as you can see in the sales process. And then from the product page, you wanna get them into the shopping cart. From the shopping cart, we have our checkout. After the checkout, that’s where these post-purchase one-click upsells come into play. So for example, you can see like, you know, if someone buys Boomstick trio, the first thing that we’re gonna offer them is another Boomstick trio. We’re split testing that versus actually, two more Boomstick trios. And it looks like just buying one more is winning. If they say no to that, we’re gonna offer them a Boomsilk. You can see that here. This is a post-purchase one-click upsell with our Zipify one-click upsell application.

And every store that installs this app, in general, makes about 10% in extra revenue day one. We’re testing that versus choose your own. So you can see the test here is kind of unique where basically we’re offering them a four ounce. If they don’t have Boomsilk in their cart already in the order, we’re saying, “Hey, get a four-ounce Boomsilk,” and that’s $33. And we’re split testing that versus choose your own size of Boomsilk. So you can choose any size you want. But it’s the same discount. And what’s kind of interesting is that forcing them into the four ounce, not making them choose is worth an extra seven cents per visitor to that offer page. It’s converting at 4.7%, and it’s worth more. We got some other tests going here. This whole interface of one-click upsell and post-purchase upsells and split tests on those up-sells. Those upsells funnels are happening after they buy. And then we’re also putting them into what’s called a two-time buyer sequence, which we’re not really gonna get into right now. But that is designed to get people who buy once to buy a second time.

Okay. So let’s take a look at this offer page, talk a little bit about it. So on mobile, we wanna save space. So we do not have a hero banner. We literally just have the sticky header with the discount and the call-to-action to shop the products. On desktop, we have this hero banner that is sort of thematically relevant, you know, to the emails, to the ads they would see, to what they’re gonna get in the box, which I’ll show you in a minute. We’ve kind of up leveled our packaging a little bit for the holiday. But we do have that cohesive look, feel, font, color thing going on. But it’s a very simple page. It’s a hero banner and then this list of our products. Why is it so simple? We want it to load fast and we wanted to get to the point. You can build this page real easy in Zipify pages. You can build a page just like this. This will publish right into your Shopify store using Zipify Pages if you’re interested in that kind of thing and the reason maybe you wanna throw borders around these images, which we’ve found to work really well. You can throw a little border around the images. And that’s working well, making the page look real nice. You can see that one with the border looks better, right?

But anyways, the reason why we’ve gone simple is we’ve found that the simpler the page and the faster it loads for the sale events and the faster it kind of gets to the point, the better it converts. So we have our most popular products listed up here, which you can click on the links to. And I’m gonna show you the heat maps in a minute. And then we have our products listed in rows of three that are gonna load as you scroll. They’re not gonna kind of preload make it load super slow. And I’m going live right now. So my computer is little wonky. We have the hero shot of the product. We have the product name. We have the review stars. And if you click on a product, by the way, you will see that…well, I guess it’s not. Yeah. We’ve added the review stars on desktop and mobile into the buy box here. And we found that that works really well under the no risk guarantee. I could talk to you about our product offer page, why we’re using a testimonial instead of the product name, our formula for the buy box here, our formula for the carousels, our formula for that long-form left/right content. We’ll get to that in a minute. Let’s keep focused. I’ve been known to jump around. And so I wanna keep focused then I’ll get to that in a second.

Hey, Russell Izzo’s in the house. What’s up, Russell Izzo? My man. And someone saying is who else is mad. They didn’t do a holiday early bird list. Dude, it’s not too late. You can still do a holiday early bird list because the holiday sale goes all the way ’til December 31. So you can still do an early bird list or you could do one for the next…you know, you could do one for the next event product launch that you do. Anyways, then we have the product price. We have the amount…boy, sorry about that. We have the product price. We have it crossed out. We have the amount that it’s gonna be and how much they save and then a call-to-action to view the details of that product with a highlight, perceived actionability. So when you hover over it, you know, it shows that you can take action there. And then when you click on that, it’s gonna take you to the individual product offer page, which again just some of the…you know, this you can build in Zipify Pages as well, some of the elements here. We’re starting with a testimonial. We found that to be the most effective thing to have at the top of the buy box.

Notice that on mobile though we have…the testimonial is under the carousel. And call-to-action, notice that we are showing the image icons on mobile. We found that to convert better. We got the no risk money-back guarantee under the call-to-action button. Notice that the call-to-action button spans the width of the page. If you wanna get someone to add to cart, you wanna have that button full-width on mobile. And then we’ve got that testimonial, which is sort of the first part of the long form left/right or stacked conversion content on mobile.

But anyways, so just a couple elements here. We’re starting with a testimonial and then we’re going into our little buy box sales copy formula and then we go into what our long-form left/right content. I got a little formula for this that I can get into in a minute and then a second call-to-action then our traditional reviews and then cross-sells. From there, you add a product to the cart. And in the cart, you can either continue shopping, which will take you back to the store, which is themed for the sale or…and sometimes we’re offering upsells in the cart. You can check out, and that’ll take you into the checkout that is going to offer you the post-purchase one-click upsells where we’re split testing at every step.

Another really kind of cool split test that’s kind of interesting. We’ll just take a look at Boom Clean here for a second. And we can see that this is testing a post-purchase one-click upsell where we’re testing a image as the hero shot when they land on the page, “Hey, you know, get another bottle of Boom Clean added to your order with one-click.” That’s post-purchase. And we make a lot of money on our post-purchase one-click upsells versus, for example, like a video, a video hero shot. So instead of a image hero shot, we’ve got a video. On this one, they’re split testing against each other. It looks like the image is out converting the video, considerably. It’s worth $2 more per visit. So we probably won’t use that. I mean, it needs a little bit more data before we can call it. But anyways, that is the sale. So what I wanted to show you was the original heat map for this holiday offer page and then how we’ve modified it.

So here’s the original heat map for the holiday offer page. And you can see that we have, you know, some engagement on these links at the top here on desktop, some engagement on the cart icon. We had Boomstick trio, Boomsilk, and then we had nectar clean scrub. And look at this cotton has activity down here. Color has activity down here. And some of these boom bags have activity. And then on mobile, it takes even longer. So we’ll look at the mobile version of the page. It got some action going on trio, which is the first one. So the idea here was we wanted to promote our products that have the best margins. And that’s kind of how we ordered it. But we looked at yesterday’s revenue.

Yesterday we did 100 grand. And we’re kind of looking at the products that were getting ordered. And what we did was we reordered the page. And here it is. This is today’s page. We reordered the products to be in sort of line with the popularity and what people were buying. And this page is converting better today because people don’t have to take as long. It doesn’t take as long for people to get to the products that they’re looking for because they’re right up at the top in the order that people are actually buying them. All this data is actually from today. That’s one little change we made to the offer page as we just put it into the order of what sort of…you know, the order of popularity rather than what we thought it should be.

We do individual ads. The ads that we have, these are all the Black Friday ads. But we actually also have ads specific to Cyber Monday. We have ads specific to…this is Black Friday. Hey, Black Friday but we got Cyber Monday ads. We have ads for every kind of mini-campaigns. So we have ads, Thanksgiving Day, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Green Monday. So, one of the things that we know about our brand is that like we’re really good at digital, like we’re super good at digital marketing. And we have really phenomenal products, like we do the work to ensure that our products are best in class. They’re super high-quality products. But the experience of receiving our product hasn’t always been that great. For example, like we don’t have like custom mailers, like you just get it in like a weird brown box. We don’t have like custom tissue paper. We don’t have really great product brochures. So like kind of like the experience of receiving our product could be improved quite a bit. And so we didn’t…like this is our…I’ll actually show you.

This is a page from our new product brochure. I’ll talk to you a little bit about that. But we didn’t have time to do like a full packaging up level before Black Friday, Cyber Monday holiday sale. So we kind of did a workaround like a little bit of a cheat. Why is everyone commenting yes? Did I offer you something and everyone is saying yes they want it. Can you tell me what it was because I’m happy to, you know, respond if I know what you’re talking about. But yeah, I’ll answer the questions in a minute. So, anyways, the way that we kind of got around that is we printed out postcards. This is actually the final we did. We printed, you know, 30,000, 40,000 of these things, same images that they would be seeing throughout the campaign and then like on the back a discount saying, “Hey, you can get a discount in January,” so trying to get them buy a second time in January. So we have that postcard.

And then we had this tape that’s gonna go on top of the box kind of like, you know, reminiscent of the ads that you’ve seen, reminiscent of the emails that people been getting. To give you an example, here’s some of the early bird emails getting people on to the list. Here’s some of the PSs. So that tape is the colors and fonts that we’re using in this campaign. And that will actually be on top of the box. So the way we kind of got around having not the best packaging in the world is we printed 30,000, 40,000 stickers. We printed 30,000, 40,000 postcards so that we still get the same brown box with the same tissue paper, but it’ll have a sticker on it and it’ll have a postcard in it. So it’s a little better while we’re kind of waiting to get our brochure printed and get some custom mailers and stuff like that.

My creative director, Allison, who’s amazing and is responsible for why everything looks so good, was really upset because she designed these stickers and then she got a proof sent to her. And then the actual stickers that they printed and sent to…that we had printed and are actually being used have like this little bleed. You can see at the bottom, like this sticker on the box and they’ll be like a little bit of a bleed over into the next line and every sticker’s like that. And I was like, you know, “35,000 stickers. I don’t wanna reprint them. They’re good enough. So we’re still gonna use them.” But she wasn’t happy.

I think the budgets that we’re running at right now, let’s take a look, for the buyer campaign, so 6,000 to buyers today, 1,500 to fans, $1,000 to subscribers non-buyers. Were going $500 a day to people who visited the sale but didn’t buy, but that doesn’t come until tomorrow and $1,000 to the early bird opt-in. And I don’t like this frequency. I want this frequency to be higher. I think I should raise this budget. I mean, I only get one day. I want them to be seeing this ad. Let’s go live see if we can update this. I want this ad to be seen four to six times per person today. So I’m actually gonna raise this budget because these frequencies are a little low. If I’m buying $8 sales, I’m happy about that. I’ll buy as many $8 sales as I can possibly buy. Look at that click-through rate, 30%. That goes to show you, man, this early bird strategy is awesome. And you should use it for your next sale campaign.

When did you start in e-commerce? I got in the game back in 2005, was my first real. I was selling cheese on Commission Junction. I’ve been in e-commerce since ’05. And I’ve been like really, really serious since ’07. And I’ve seen every wave. I’ve seen every wave of e-commerce. I saw Google AdWords. I saw Pinterest. I saw Facebook. I saw Instagram. I saw, you know, Amazon, private label. I’ve kind of been there for every big opportunity. And it seems to me that every, you know, 6 to 12 months, there’s a new big opportunity. Like right now it’s YouTube and Google and Pinterest. Those are big opportunities in e-commerce. And still private labeling and Amazon are huge.

I mean, e-commerce is growing 15% year over year, so the ability to get in. And if you’re looking at my numbers, you’re like, “Oh, man, you know, he’s done $183,000 today. And he did $100,000 yesterday,” but like I’ve been at this literally nonstop for 12, 13 years. And you can get here too. And by the way, you know, it’s not about how much money you make. It’s about how much money you keep. So profit margin is very important.

Top-line numbers are fancy, and I’m using them to get your attention, but like I have a very big overhead. I have millions of dollars in inventory sitting in my warehouse. I’ve got well over a million dollar, probably $2 million a year in team salary that I’m committed to. I have advertising costs. I have all kinds of crazy overhead. I’m still profitable. I make millions of dollars a year in profit. But my point is that like it’s not really…everyone will tell you that the game is make as much money as you possibly can. That is bullshit. I think that’s like really not the game.

Okay. Here’s the game. If we’re talking about like what is the game, here’s the game. Do something meaningful and valuable that you enjoy. So number one, if you don’t enjoy the process of marketing because this shit is hard, man. It’s not easy. I tell people, it takes six months to figure out the product, get the product source, make sure it’s good. You know, all that takes about, you know, get a product that you’re actually proud of six months, sometimes a year. I’ve been working on a new brand right now. I’ve been developing this product for a year. And I finally have the sample that I’m gonna go with. It’s been a year. So, it takes six months to get your product going, six months to build the technology stack and get your technology in place. Understand Shopify. Understand Klaviyo. Understand Zipify one-click upsells, Zipify Pages. Understand Facebook ads. Understand Google Analytics. Understand hot jar. Understand how to build the funnel. Understand how to track it.

I didn’t show you this. We mess around. We track our funnels. Look at this. This is the funnel tracking. This is how many people made it to the holiday sale page, about 56% of them made onto product page. You can see I misspelled shopping cart. I got shopping card here, people over the checkout. So, it takes a long time to understand the technology because technology built. And then once technology is built, you need another six months to market it and then six months to optimize it. Now you’re two years in, and you can judge whether or not the business is doing well. People quit after three months. It’s like, dude, you need to give yourself 18 months before you judge the business. But the point that I was saying was that everyone’s all focused on like, “I wanna make the most money.” That is such a hollow goal. And it doesn’t…actually, it’s you never have enough. There always need for more of it. You got bigger projects. You got more overhead. You got more debt. You got more expenses. So you’re always gonna need more money. And so that doesn’t go away the idea of generating.

And I think that like those of us who are paying attention to this who have the ability to generate resource have a responsibility to do so. So then you can use that resource to support your community to help out people who maybe weren’t born with as fortunate circumstances of you who aren’t able to generate the kind of resource that you can generate. So, here’s what I think. I think that the goal is to do something meaningful that you’re proud of that you can feel good about to be having a positive impact on the world by providing good products, building cool shit, having good products that you’re proud of, that you enjoy creating and that you enjoy doing the work because this work is not easy. It’s hard work. But the goal is to do something meaningful and valuable that’s good that you enjoy and be profitable. But profit and revenue is last.

I don’t want to have a $40 million, $50 million a year business that I’m working 80 hours a week at that I’m shackled to that results in me not being able to pursue my passions, take care of my body, spend time with my family. Work will fill the time that you give it. So set borders around your work. Start work at 10 a.m. after you’ve moved your body, after you’ve meditated, after you’ve eaten a good breakfast, after you spent some time with your family. And then work until 5:00 or 6:00 and then go off and spent…you know what I mean? Like, work will fill the time that you give it. And so all these people that are telling you that the whole game is make as much money as you possibly can, they’re miserable. They’re unhappy. They burn out.

And for me, the goal is to be doing something that I enjoy that’s meaningful, to be able to take the resource that I’m generating and reinvest it in the project to pay my team. I want it to be that when you work at my company, you have a better salary than you’ll get anywhere else from that position. You have a better work environment than you’ll have anywhere else where we’re chill, we’re having fun, you’re not getting beat down and overworked, we’re doing meaningful stuff, we’re optimizing the process, you’re contributing, you’ve got great benefits. So I think like the goal is to generate resource so that you could, not so that…

Yeah. I mean, look, you can ball out on Instagram. You can buy. It’s nice to have nice shit but like it’s nicer to share. It’s nicer to take care of people. So anyways, the reason I went on that tangent was like you look at these numbers and you’re all impressed and stuff and it’s like, “Well, I’ve been doing this for 10 years. And these numbers are not what they seem. I have more overhead than you. I’ve got more team salary than you. I’m taking all this profit and I’m putting it back into the business to grow it. And I’m putting it into my team salaries. I’m putting it into making better products.” So I’m leveraging it to build the snowball bigger. And I think that, you know, e-commerce is continually growing.

And the reason why I have all these trainings and the reason why I’m so passionate about sharing what’s working for me is because I want to inspire you to do the same. I want you to be successful in your business because I feel like entrepreneurs are the ones who have the resource. And the people who have the resource are the people who take care of other people. And guess what? You’re no good to anybody else if you’re not well taken care of, which is why you’ve gotta not overwork yourself. It’s why you’ve gotta work out. It’s why you’ve gotta put attention on your social life. It’s why you have to take care of yourself because if you have an empty cup, you can’t pour from it. You can only give from your own surplus. So it’s your responsibility to generate surplus in terms of money but also in terms of energy so that you can give that out. Anyways, let’s go back to answering your questions. I just kind of went off on a crazy tangent there.