Trending: Long Form Product Offer Pages

Ezra: And we are live. Welcome, Facebook, to my home studio. As always, I’ve got my maple table here. Holiday season is upon us. Man, has it been a wild couple of weeks for my business. Ezra Firestone, if you don’t know me. Today, we’re gonna be talking about some really cool stuff, long form product offer pages. My viewpoint is that product offer pages are really kind of what the business is about, in a certain sense, and I will explain that. Before I do, I’m gonna check my mobile phone here and make sure we are live, which we are. I’m gonna go ahead and share that to my public profile which I’ve now done, which is awesome.

So we’re live on Facebook. It’s looking good. If you have questions, comments, anything like that, in relationship to what we’re talking about today, you can post them right in the Facebook feed. And at the end of the show, what I will do is I will answer them. I’ll look at them, I’ll look at the comments, I’ll respond to them, I’ll answer your questions. You can give me a little love by clicking the double tap love signs, like signs. My wife told me that I’m not allowed to like my own posts so I can’t do it for myself, unfortunately.

So we’re gonna be talking about a couple of things on this show today. This is Smart Marketer LIVE. We do this show…We’re striving for once a week in 2017. So you’ll see us here live. We’ve got three things we’re gonna really dive into on this show today. The first is going to be offer pages, long form product offer pages because those are a big trend for our business. And I’ll talk to you about offer pages in a moment. The second thing is going to be our holiday email campaign because it did really, really well and it was very exciting and I was extremely surprised by the results of our holiday email campaign. And I was surprised with how aggressive we emailed, and we were sort of inspired by brands like ALDO Shoes and Cohorn and J.Crew. And some of these bigger ecommerce brands who are extremely aggressive on their emailing. So I thought to myself, “Hey, maybe we could be a little more aggressive.” And we were. And I’ll show you those results in a moment.

And I also have a special guest, someone who’s a good friend of mine, who’s a super sharp ecommerce marketer and has their own blog and shares information and is also in my mastermind group and comes to hangout and we talk ecommerce and we strategize and we bro down, I think is the terminology for that. And he’ll be coming on in the second half of the show. He’s actually siting right over here. You can’t see him on camera. But he’s gonna come on second half of the show. Let me just go ahead and make sure that we are in fact live. Yeah, we’re live. Got some love going. I can see Nick Alvarez with us. Kay Cornelius is in the house. Awesome. Wow, we got already got 50 people, cool. All right.

So the first thing that I wanna discuss today are long form product offer pages. So, when you think about a product offer page, some people call it product detail page, some people call it offer page. Basically, this is the page where you are actually trying to get someone to purchase your stuff, whatever it is you sell, you sell services, you sell physical products. Many of my subscribers and followers sell physical products because that’s what we do. We have ecommerce businesses and we sell physical products. We’re really good at it. And by the time someone has made it to the product offer page, they’re like very seriously considering engaging with your product, purchasing your product, doing business with you, giving you their money in exchange for the offer that you’ve promised them. And so, your product offer page has to make a really good promise.

And there’s some elements of a product offer page that you really want on there. Frankly, it’s the most important page on your website. Some people will tell you your check out page is the most important. I think your product offer page is the most important. And the reason is because that’s where people are gonna make the decision about whether or not they’re gonna do business with you. And we’ve transitioned this year into really focusing on longer form product offer pages. And I’m gonna actually dig into my computer here, inside of my Shopify landing page builder and show you a new product offer page that we’ve created. And I’m also gonna show you some of our long form pages. I’m gonna just go ahead and pull one up. I’m not gonna show you my screen just yet, but I will. I wanna talk to you a little bit more about offer pages first. So I’m gonna show you some of our longer form pages as well.

So, the thing about product offer pages is, it used to be that you try to stick everything above the fold. Get everything above the fold, sliding banner images and video above the fold, image above the fold, text above the fold because people wouldn’t scroll. But that was before everyone was carrying around these mobile phones. It was before the consumption of the digital medium, the consumption of the internet had gone touch-based and had gone mobile. It was like when people were on laptops and desktops. And at that time, it was really important to sandwich everything above the fold, make your product pages real short.

But a trend has happened, in offer pages across the spectrum, not even just in ecommerce, but in offer pages in general, a trend has happened where they’ve gotten much more long form. And we’ve been doing long form product offer pages this year. It’s worked really, really well where essentially we kind of do this long form left-right style of offer page where we’ve got like image, text and bullets, text and bullets, image, video. And we’re kind of laying out the features benefits sort of ownership benefits of the product in visual, image and text format on the page.

And when we hop in to BOOM! by Cindy Joseph here, let me go ahead and show you. This is one of my main websites. I do a lot of volume on this store here. You can see our offer page is interesting. We’ve got like a hero shot. We’ve got some text. We’ve got a couple of videos above the fold. We’ve got a social proof, people rating our product and sharing imagery of how they’ve used our product. Then we’ve got some long form left-right content. Then we have a call to action button, really big call to action button. And we’ve got some more social proof. And then we’ve got some more social proof of customer video testimonials, we’ve got some “you might also like.”

So this is like a good example of long form product offer page. But the one that I really wanna show you today is one that I’m super proud of, that we actually built into our Zipify landing page builder. We’ve developed a landing page builder for Shopify that allows you to quickly and easily deploy long form product offer pages and email landing pages and other types of pages into your business, because like hiring a designer or hiring a developer, writing your copy, getting all that stuff coded, takes a long time and we kind of wanted to make that a little faster. So if you look at Zipify here, I’m just gonna zoom in a little bit and pop back over the computer.

So here we are, we’re inside of Zipify Pages. You click on add page. You go to use template. And you’ll notice, if you scroll down, that you can see…we just added this one called long form product detail page. And I wanna talk a little bit about it because this is the kind of page, like this is a great example of a long form page. Now, we’ve had a couple of things here. We’ve got a nice logo, a little header that you can easily modify, a call to action right at the top. And then we’ve got a countdown timer that would reset for each person saying, “Hey, this special offer is going to expire soon.” This is the way to introduce some scarcity so you would just like click this and say, you wanna count it down 12 hours and then you click save. And so that way when someone comes to the page, it’s like this offer is available for the next 12 hours. And we do this because we, in general have, limited availability of our products.

What’s kind of cool about this block is basically, once it counts down, this content here is gonna show up on the page. So if you were to count this down to like one minute, let’s say. When this counts down to one minute, when someone hits the page, the countdown will go away and this content that you set here will show up.

And then we’ve got a hero shot here and a, I call, a buy-box which is a little of content and a bit call to action button. And what I love about our buttons is that we built an anchoring functionality. And anchoring functionality has been really profitable for us. I’m gonna show you on another long form product offer page in a moment. This is this page publish and this is what anchoring functionality means. It means that your button on the page can anchor. So what that did was that anchor down to the offer section of the page. So every one of these call to actions buttons on the page, even though this is a long form page about an offer, hero shot call to action text, social proof, some imagery that explains the offer, a layout of the ingredients, every one of these buttons and testimonials, they all anchor down, when you click them, down to this offer section of the page.

And the way that we’ve built that in is kind of cool. So when you click on, let’s say, one of these buttons here, we’ve actually updated this button editor which is really nice. So now, this right here, this little thing is the preview window. So it’s like, Shop Our Big Sale. And you can see what the button is gonna look right here in the editor. You can say you want a large button, extra-large button. You can change the font on the button which is kind of cool. You can say you want maybe rounded edges instead of square edges or maybe you want a completely round button.

And then you also get to see your hover effect. So like, let’s say on the hover effect you want it to change into opaque…change opacity, and I’ll show you what that looks like by the way. I’ll just save that and then I’ll publish that page. And that’s publishing to my Shopify store, by the way. The other cool thing is you can kind of see what it’s gonna look like on a tablet here. You can see what it’s gonna look like on a mobile phone, you can see what it looks like on desktop. So you can look at the preview on all devices when you’re messing with these pages. But if we preview that on the store now, you can see that this button, the opacity of the button changes when I hover over it. Now, if I wanted to modify that even further, I could edit that button and say, “You know what, change the color and have it highlight to a different shade of green” let’s say, when you hover over it, like maybe a lighter shade of green, and then you could save that. And then when you publish it you’ll be able to see that.

Now, going down the page, you’ll notice that we’re leveraging all the things that should be on your offer page, social proof, the ownership benefits, or the benefits of shopping with our company. So we say, “We’re cruelty free. We’re USDA organic. We’re made in the USA.” So we’re not only talking about the benefits of the actual product itself, we’re also layering in benefits of who we are as a company, of what we stand for as a brand, which is a really important thing to include on your product offer page. It’s not just about what you’re selling. See, we live in a social economy. People want to know who they’re buying from and they wanna know the story of who they’re buying from. So it’s your responsibility, as someone who’s selling something, to tell that story, to tell the story of who you are and what you stand for and why your brand has integrity.

This chair is empty because I got a guest coming in soon. Now, as we continue down this offer page, and we’ll keep going down. I actually didn’t show you the coolest part. So with our button editor, you can anchor these buttons to another block. See, the way that Zipify Pages is built is with blocks. You can click this plus button here. You can add a block. Like let’s say, for example, you wanted to have a video on your product offer page which is a really great thing to do. You could say I wanna have a video and then you could pop a video in here. I don’t have a video URL so I’ll just…Basically you put the video URL in here. It will pop the video and then you can decide how big the video is gonna be on the page. I’ll get a video URL so you can see that. But it’s built in these blocks, so every one of these sections is an editable block that you can modify.

We like to do this a lot where we kind of call out what’s in our product in their own little subsections. You can edit the images and there’s like a cool little drag and drop image editor. And then we’ve got another call to action here. But the point is that you can anchor these buttons to a specific block on the page, you can link it to another Zipify page. You can create a light box. If you wanted to do the “you might also like”…then you’ve got our customer testimonials, our risk-free guarantee. And then this is actually the offer section we really like. And what this is called, we can go to the face camera for this, what this is called is a “pre-purchase sales bump”. So one of the things that we really like to do on our product offer page is cross sell.

So, when you look at ecommerce, probably the most important number in ecommerce…there’s two numbers that are gonna be your most important numbers in your whole business, and that’s gonna be your initial average order value and your lifetime customer value. So, for example, your initial average order value, you can increase that by making additional offers right on the product offer page. The business that kind of made me famous in this industry was a wig business. I was the number one retailer of mullet wigs in America, which I’m very proud of actually. I was the number retailer of mullet wigs in America in like 2008. I sold afro-wigs and Elvis wigs.

And on this website…back then, it was like a drop ship thing. Right on the offer page, like you’d see me in an Elvis outfit, Elvis wig. And I’d be like, “Buy this Elvis wig.” And then it would say, “Hey, would you like a wig cap,” which were these things that you put on your head to like make the wig fit better. It was like, “Would you like a wig cap to make your wig fit better? You can just add it right here for 4 bucks.” So it was right on the product offer page, cross-selling a relevant item that went along with the product they were buying, which you’ll see here on this page. The way that we are achieving that is with a one, two or three. So it’s a pre-purchase order bump.

And I’ll show you actually another page here…another page that is leveraging this real quick. So it’s gonna /pages. Let’s take a look if I can pull it up here. Yeah, here we go. So this is a long form offer page, same thing, long form offer page. When you click the call to action button…and we’ve got some push notification happening going on, which is cool. But you’ll notice that this is this order bump in action. So basically, where like you can buy one, two or three. And a lot of people choose three or two. So you’re able to increase the average order value by doing cross-selling on the offer page itself.

So essentially, you know, the beauty of a long form product offer page is that you get to communicate the value of the offer that you’re making in text format, image format and video format. And the beauty of that is that like certain prospects and certain customers are only gonna read or they’re only gonna watch the video or they’re only gonna look at the pictures, because different people prefer to consume content in different formats. And so, as someone who’s making an offer on your website, it’s your responsibility to make that offer consumable to your prospects and customers. And I can see that we’ve got a lot of comments and questions coming in here, which is really cool. And I will get to these. I will answer these questions.

Hey, Molly Pittman’s in the house. What’s up Molly Pittman? Molly Pittman is the vice president of DigitalMarketer and she is amazing. And we’re actually gonna do a webinar together next week. I can see Drew Sanocki is on here. You guys might be hearing from him, at some point. So with this landing page builder, what we’ve done is we have developed it so that you can use templates and we add a new template in every week. You can also build your own custom pages. So if you wanna come back and add a page, you can use a custom page and you can just like pick a header and then you could add to that or you could edit it and do all kinds of fancy stuff. You could add to that by saying maybe you wanna go and leverage…

One of the things I didn’t show was that this is going to plug right into your products on your store and you can just select that and it will then engage with the products right on your store. So if you wanted to have a section on your store, let’s say you grab THE BASIC BOOM BAG and then you grab like THE SKIN CARE BOOM BAG. We did bundles. I’ll show you our holiday offer page in a moment, when we get into email marketing. But what’s cool about this is, if you wanted to have that product offer page, that long form product offer page like we just showed, and then you wanted to add a section that was like…which I highly recommend, adding this section by the way. I’ll just find the headline. We’re gonna reorganize this stuff so it’s a little easier to figure out pick your blocks, but grab this headline of text, you could say, “You might also…” Oops. If I could spell. “You might also like these awesome products.” So you have your…and you might wanna just bold that up and make it like 36 point font and save that.

And now you’ve got a headline and then you’ve got these “You might also like” products. And then with these products, what you can do is, since it works right with your Shopify store, is you can link to the product page, you can link right to the shopping cart, with this product in it, you could link to the checkout, you could link to a specific URL. So there’s blocks in here that will pull products right from your store. So you can directly link right into the products that you have in your store. And then if you wanted, what you could do is you could modify the buttons, right. So maybe you wanted to say, “Shop now,” or whatever and you wanted to change the color of that, so you could leverage these blocks.

I really like to do the rounded edges buttons. I think those look…these pill buttons, I think they look a little bit prettier in relationship to my brand. But I like to add to all my product offer pages as a second cross sell, you’ll notice here. If we look at like the BOOM! offer page, as a second way of cross-selling additional items that I have, I put these “You might also like” sections and then I linked to the actual product detail page for that offer. Because some people might be considering one offer and then scroll down and see, “Oh, there’s other offers that I might also enjoy that are related to the category of product that I’m looking at now.”

So I built this landing page builder for Shopify, specifically. So if you have a Shopify business, it makes it a little bit easier to quickly and easily deploy high converting, high quality landing pages in to your business like that long form product offer page. And we’re gonna be releasing a series of templates, a series of long form product offer pages and other types of pages right inside this landing page editor. I actually have a commercial for it. If you’re interested in trying it out, being a part of the beta program, you can email help@smartmarketer.com, say, “Hey, I saw Ezra on Facebook. He was showing the Zipify Pages builder. I’d love to be a part of the program. How can I buy into the beta?” And we’ll get you information.

And I created a little video that kind of explains what it is. So I’m gonna run that right now and then when I come back, we’re gonna have a guest here, when the commercial for Zipify pages is over, there will be a guest siting right here. We’ll be talking about email marketing, holiday email campaigns. We’ll show the holiday email landing page that we used, that’s actually also in Zipify pages. Check out this short promo video about Zipify pages, which is a landing page builder that we created and I’ll catch you back here in two minutes.

Promotional video: 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 signup 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 check-out 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 your Shopify store. So you have to deal with confusing plugins and subdomains and skewed analytics, which is extra cost and extra hustle. Well, now, there’s a solution. Introducing Zipify Pages.

Zipify Pages is an ecommerce 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 ecommerce 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 our drag and drop editor. You can chose from our collection of conversion elements or blocks, as we like to call them, like featured products, countdown timers, social proof section, 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 is Zipify Pages. You can email help@smartmarketer.com if you wanna get into the beta. We’re gonna come out publicly and we’re gonna launch Zipify Pages to the public, to people who aren’t on the Smart Marketer subscriber list. We’re gonna charge more than we’re charging for the beta program. So if you’re interested in being in the beta program and you wanna get that into your Shopify store, which I highly recommend, I think it’s amazing, you can email help@smartmarketer.com. Say, “Hey, I saw Ezra on Facebook. He said that I could be a part of the beta. I’d like to purchase my way into the beta.” And then we’ll send you the details on that. With me, I’ve got Drew Sanocki.

Drew: Ow.

Ezra: Did that hurt? Sorry man. I apologize. I was kind of hard. I smacked your back. I apologize. How about a little bit of a pat, a little bit of a rub.

Drew: Good to see you. Happy holidays.

Ezra: Yeah, thanks for coming. Drew Sanocki is the Nerd Marketer from nerdmarketing.com, is that correct?

Drew: That’s correct, nerdmarketing.com

Ezra: Nerdmarketing.com. He wears glasses and stuff. So. Drew, thanks for coming on the show, man. I appreciate it.

Drew: My pleasure.

Ezra: Yeah, we’ve been buddies for a while now. And we kind of nerd out on ecommerce together. We also talk about life and other things. We eat roasted macadamia nuts. We drink coffee.

Drew: Yeah, sums up our morning.

Ezra: Yeah, that’s what we did this morning. Now, one of the things that I’ve learned a lot from you…learned a lot from you about, is email marketing. I mean, you’re the data guy man. You really get how to dive deep in the data and create value from that. And I had you do that for one of my brands. And I’ve gotten a lot of value from you, in relationship to how to make email from my brand work better. So a little bit about kind of your story with ecommerce, how you got here, how you got into the sort of email side of things. And then I wanna dive into actually looking at the campaign that we ran this holiday season and talking about email campaigns.

Drew: Sure. Yeah. I’ve been in ecommerce for 15 years. I had my own store, much like yours. It was back in 2003, I started. It was not a wig store, it was a modern design furniture store. By drop ship retailer, sold that in 2003 and then I started taking more senior positions at bigger ecommerce companies. A little bit less entrepreneurial but I was most recently the CMO of a retailer called Karmaloop.

Ezra: And you turned them around basically. Big turn around there.

Drew: Yes. They were bankrupt last summer. We bought them out of bankruptcy and sold them about a year later.

Ezra: And was a big part of that email marketing?

Drew: It was probably the biggest non-merchandising part of it. On the marketing side it was all email. This is a retailer that had a huge, I don’t wanna say exploited, but under-exploited email list of five plus million names.

Ezra: Well, I think it’s interesting that you say exploited because I…

Drew: I don’t wanna make it sound like we were exploiting the customers but really it was under-optimized.

Ezra: Under-optimized. And I think this is a common view point in our industry, that emailing people is somehow bad. And I have to say, I held that viewpoint. And I held it until this holiday season. And with the statistics I’m about to share on screen, have blown my mind. So where do you think this sort of underlying viewpoint that emailing a lot is bad stems from?

Drew: I think it’s because we think like consumers and we say, “We don’t wanna get too many emails, we don’t like being spammed.” But what we don’t understand is that every customer has a lifecycle. Online, when the customer gets into your brand, they wanna hear from you, they wanna be sold. They wanna be exposed to more products you have. And emails is a great way…

Ezra: Because they’re like digging what you’re saying, they’re interested in your offers. I know I’m that way. I find a new brand, I’m like, “Dude, I want everything they have.”

Drew: And when you first acquire a customer, they are more into you than they probably will ever be. He or she has his credit card out there ready to buy and they’re ready to be marketed to. And most retailers don’t take advantage of that.

Ezra: Yeah. And so check these numbers out and then let’s break them down. So guys, when you look at…Right now, if you pop over to my screen, this is my Shopify store. This is one of my Shopify stores. And you can see that since November 25th, which is Black Friday, we’ve done $2.2 million in revenue in that like three week period. You can see we’re at 27 grand for the day. Now, let’s look at the email side of that. And this is actually…I’m gonna zoom in. Right now, we are in a service called Klaviyo. I really like them. If you’re a Shopify business owner and if you’re interested in Klaviyo, please go through my affiliate link. I can get you an affiliate link to them and then you can sign up. Yeah, I always like to monetize my behavior, dude. So I’ve got an affiliate link for them.

But check this out you guys. We look at this, we can see that of this $2.5 million in revenue over the last…since 11/20…where is the total? Total from email is 50%, $1.2 million from email and $1.1 million from broadcast campaigns. Meaning, we started mailing on Black Friday. So that’s like three weeks ago, and we’ve mailed like 25 times since Black Friday, and we’ve generated a million dollars in revenue from emails. And what’s so fascinating about it, and we’re gonna break down. We’re gonna look at some of the emails. We’re gonna look at where they went. We’re gonna look at the unsubscribe rates, the spam complain rates and things like that and how many emails we sent. But what blew my mind was, I just couldn’t…Like for example, we sent out like 25 emails in 3 weeks which is sometimes 2 to 3 a day. We may skip a day here or there.

Drew: So 25 per customer.

Ezra: Twenty five per customer, 25 total email broadcasts. And some people received all of those email broadcasts and did not buy to like the last one. And I just blew my mind that emailing that much, number one, did not upset people and number two, was extremely profitable. I’ve never emailed that aggressively. In Smart Marketer, all the subscribers who are watching this, never get aggressive like all the time emails from me, really. But I’m gonna probably up the amount I communicate via email because of how effective it’s been. I mean, just, I’m really surprised by this.

Drew: Yeah, when you email that frequently, when you go from less frequently to more frequently, what you do is you will see some turnover in your list. There will be people on your list who don’t wanna hear from you that much and they will unsubscribe. And you may see an initial kick up in unsubscribes. But then, you settle in at a baseline and it’s pretty much the average unsubscribe rate that you were at before. You just end up losing people like your mum who was on your list and she’s not interested in buying from you anyway.

Ezra: I mean, take a look at this campaign. Let’s pop in. Let’s first kind of show the type of emails that we were sending. So I’m gonna go all the way back. Now, our emails obviously were the most profitable like when we first started. Like for example, this is our initial holiday…Let’s go back one more, I think, actually. So here’s our initial Black Friday email. So here’s something that’s fascinating. I had never mailed more than once in a day. I’ve never mailed people twice in a day, but I saw J. Crew, ALDO, all these guys…

Drew: Black Friday, you’ve gotta go throughout the whole day.

Ezra: So look at this, I mailed twice. The first email on Black Friday did $124,000, the second email did $107,000. I doubled the revenue by emailing again at 7 p.m. I dropped that like 7 a.m., you can see, and 7 p.m. So two emails, that day, doubled the revenue for me. So basically now, anytime I’m having a sale, in any one of my brands, I’m definitely emailing twice in a day because look at the response rate, it’s freaking incredible. Now, let’s look at the unsubscribe.

Drew: Yeah, if you’ve got one offer, then just send the offer out again later on on Black Friday. If you’ve got more than one offer, then trickle your offers out throughout the day.

Ezra: So you’re saying, if you’re gonna communicate twice via email on a day and you have multiple communication points, multiple products you’re offering, maybe make that second email about the other product.

Drew: Yeah, yeah. I mean, you wanna plan out your email strategy ideally in October, September and stack those offers throughout Black Friday because there are people who just sit in front of their computer all day looking for the best deal and when they see it come through, they click through and buy.

Ezra: They’ll wait for it. So check this out. Let’s pop into this email. Hey, we’re back. The good camera is back. We’ve got two camera angles here. One of them kind of messed up and so then our tech guy Ant Charles is in the back running the show. Big love to Ann Charles. None of this would be possible without him. Built this whole crazy studio that you can’t see. He’s a gangster. So check this out man. Look at our unsubscribe rate, 506 unsubscribes, 0.4%.

Drew: That’s nothing. And 25% is a great open rate.

Ezra: And look at this, 52 recipients spam complained it. Nobody, right? Now, let’s go back, let’s just pop out of here and we’re gonna go through this email in a moment. We’re gonna look at what’s in them. But when you look at this, okay…I actually I’m curious to count. I would love to count with you. Let’s just do it real quick. Total number of emails sent. Gosh, we started way back here. Not all of these were about the sale, but okay. One, 2, 3, 4, okay, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21…25. So went through like 30 emails, 35 emails. Now some of these were emailing to un-opens. So some of them were like…I’m gonna show you who we broadcasted to, but some of them were emailing to unopened. So maybe each person didn’t get 35 emails. They got more like 25. But check this one out. The last email that we sent at 10 p.m. on December 15 saying, “The deadline was over”. This is what blew me away. I would have assumed that this unsubscribe rate would have ballooned by like a mile. But look, still, it’s lower than the first one.

Drew: Right. If you’re afraid of that, you can do some things in Klaviyo or other email software where you can just say, “Hey, if somebody has opened any of these emails over the last couple of days, then I’m gonna create a new segment of them and not email them through the holidays because they’re just not engaged”. But the risk you run is like you’re gonna lose those incremental sales at the end. But, I think, at Karmaloop we sent probably five on Black Friday, five different offers.

Ezra: This is what I’m saying.

Drew: We sent a 100 million emails from Black Friday through December 11.

Ezra: Okay, so moral of the story here is email more than you think you should. And don’t be douchey…

Drew: Over the holidays.

Ezra: Over the holidays, not all the time. But let me show you this. So look at this, zero purchases since Black Friday. That’s who this went out to, zero purchases since Black Friday. So they had not purchased yet and we emailed them 25 times and made 20 grand on the last day. At least one purchase since Black Friday. So they had already purchased once. We were emailing those folks trying to get them buy again. Zero purchases, at least one purchase.

Drew: And you’ve gotta do that because everybody is doing it. So it’s a crowded marketing channel over the holidays and that channel is the inbox. And in order to be at the top, you’ve just gotta email again and again.

Ezra: Yeah. I mean, what we did was we had some other channels that we leveraged like Facebook advertising and we are also using push notification and Facebook Messenger and some of the stuff that I talk about in my email marketing course. Real quick, I just wanna show you what one of the emails that we sent looked like and then we move on, so you can pop over here. We were doing fun things like including GIF mexeges and having some discounts. This was for people who had already bought. We had offered them an extra discount. And we kind of laid out in a long form left-right manner, the different products that we had on offer. And then we always have these nice little call to action buttons.

And every one of these links leads to the same place, which is our long form product offer page for our sale, which kind of breaks down what we have on offer. It’s got a little video. It’s got some long form left-right content. It focuses on the bundle offers. It focuses on trying to get purchases for our sort of higher ticket items, which worked really well for us. We also promote our gift cards. And then we also have the other offers on the page. And you’ll notice, on this page, we’re leveraging that same functionality in anchoring. We’re anchoring as well. And this page actually is already built into Zipify Pages. If you’re a Zipify Pages customer, you can use the template and you can just grab one of our holiday sales page templates in here of which we have a few. You can leverage that.

Now, if you are interested in my email marketing training, where I talk about how we do email marketing, kind of like what you just saw but like really in-depth pre-purchase, post-purchase, these kinds of things. I have a live email marketing training coming up in February. That’s when we’re gonna launch it. It’s gonna be really good. If you’re an ecommerce business, you need to be doing email and we’ve got a system about how we do email. When I sell that, it’s gonna be pretty expensive. If you’re interested in purchasing it early and getting a discount, you can email help@smartmarketer.com and say, “Hey, I’m really interested in the email marketing course. I’d like to get access to it ahead of time. I’d like to pre-purchase it for a discount”. I’m gonna show you a little video that kind of talks about that and then we’ll be back and we’ll close up the show. So check out this video about our email marketing training and I’ll see you soon.

Ecommerce emailing marketing mastery. So in our business, 30% of our revenue comes from email. And if you’re not making at least 30% of your revenue from email, you’re not doing email enough. And so, email’s such a big subject. There’s automated email such as pre-purchase, post-purchase, cart abandonment, things like that. And then there’s also manual broadcast. We send out an email every week. We also do a holiday sales campaign or sort of just regular sales campaign, once every one to two months. And so, understanding the type of content to email, how to structure emails to be the most effective and also how to run email sales campaign. No matter how big your subscriber database is, you should be running email sales campaigns at least once every 45 to 60 days. And so we’re doing a full training on this.

I do think that email is super important for ecommerce businesses and it’s such a huge subject that we have to get into, how to create content, how to structure your blog, how to write emails, how to tell good stories and specifically, the automated side of emails, pre-purchase, post-purchase, cart abandonment and more. So I’d love to train you on how we’re doing email marketing in our business, how we’re doing content marketing because emails are also where your initial content or social media is started. So in this email marketing course, we’re also going to be doing social media training. So it’s kind of gonna be a blend. It’s gonna be all the email stuff we do but then email transitions into social, so we have to cover that as well. So if you’re interested in it, I’d love to have you in there. Thanks for considering it. I’ll see you in the next video.

Ah, we’re back, okay. We were kind of watching along with you. So if you’re interested in pre-purchasing our email marketing course that’s gonna come up in a month or two here, you can email help@smartmarketer.com. Say, “Hey, I’m super interested in getting the discount and pre-purchasing the email course.” We’ll get you hooked up. Now, Drew had an idea of something that you kind of wanted to talk about in the subject of email marketing. So what was that?

Drew: Yeah. I think it’s like five days before Christmas now and most of you watching are probably saying like, “Thanks for talking about how to market on Black Friday which was, what, two weeks ago”. So what can we do now? There’s five days left. If you haven’t hit your list…I mean, the big lesson is you should hit your list, but what kind of offer do you put in there. And at this point, I think most retailers are shifting over to gift certificates. So that’s a great way to email the list gift certificates now, through really the 24th.

Ezra: Maybe a discount on gift certificates?

Drew: You could, yeah, discount them.

Ezra: Because that way you don’t have to ship them.

Drew: Yeah. I mean, it’s a great item to ship, sorry, great item to push and I would recommend moving your marketing over to gift certificates at this point.

Ezra: I like it. Market gift certificates the next four days. Let’s answer a couple of questions from the feed and then Ezra Firestone and Drew Sanocki from nerdmarketing.com will be out. But let’s answer a couple of questions. So let’s see. Thank you for the information. Awesome. Gmail has the best open rate. Mico Monument says Gmail has the best open rate. Kemi Turman says, “Hey, Ezra are you finding long form pages are performing better than traditional ones?” Well, what we’ve done is we’ve taken our traditional pages and we’ve made them long form. So what we did was we kind of took that more traditional ecommerce style with the…What are these things called where you’ve got a carousel of images on the left and then like a buy-box on the right with the button and a little description and kind of selecting your variance, you know, that traditional ecommerce offer page with tabbed information?

Drew: And you’ve gone long form on those.

Ezra: We’ve gone long form on those.

Drew: With the buy-box at the bottom or at the top, with the anchor text?

Ezra: We basically have the…We have the traditional ecommerce top with the carousel of images and the call to action and then we’ve got long form content. And then, if you click any of the buttons in the long form content, it brings you back up to that buy-box. So we’re actually anchoring up the page as you scroll down, which has been helpful. Let’s see. Where’s the link? I don’t know what you’re asking for?

Drew: Maybe just any link.

Ezra: Any link that exits. Let’s see if I can find some more images here. Hey, we’ve got Phil Crapon who’s on the line. Jeremy Lee Henderson’s with us. What’s up Jeremy? Adam Firestone, my brother is watching. That guy is in town. How many flows did you set up for BOOM!? So BOOM!, we did a bunch of campaigns, all right, broadcast. Of course, we have a pre-purchase flow, a post-purchase flow, a cart abandonment flow, win-back flow, all that stuff’s covered in my email marketing course.

What else do we got going on here? What is your CPA for BOOM!? Is it around $35? Well, BOOM’s kind of interesting when you look at cost per acquisition from Facebook advertising because when we first started, our cost per acquisition was around…sometimes as low as $12 and then kind of raised up and we sort of plateaued at 35 bucks for a while. We were paying around 35 bucks for a sale. And then, now we’ve jumped way up on our cost per acquisition because we are casting a much wider net because we understand our lifetime customer value, we understand…Like we’re playing a bit of a different game than people normally play when they’re first starting to market a product.

Drew: Yeah. Holiday is a great time to do that too because the customers you acquire from say, the beginning of November to the end of December, typically have a much higher lifetime value than customers you acquired in the summer. So don’t be afraid to spend up really on your acquisition over the next month.

Ezra: Absolutely. I’m gonna pop open this show here on Facebook so I can look at some of the comments. Here we go. We’ve got a lot. Did you notice Facebook cost per acquisitions went up on cyber Monday? Yes, they did. Facebook cost per acquisitions were big but that’s because everyone was advertising. What else?

Drew: Because the lifetime values are higher.

Ezra: Yeah. How many people should you have on your list to send these many emails to? Your list could be as low as a couple of hundred people and you should still email them. My list for Smart Marketer is only 25,000 or 30,000 people. But the folks on that list are…they pay attention to me because I’m adding value, I’m doing my best to produce high quality content, serve them. And then, when I have an offer that I think is relevant, I make that offer. So it’s about adding value through content, in addition to making offers. If you’re just broadcasting offers all the time, you’re probably gonna burn out your list a little faster than if you’re also creating value for your community.

Drew: Yeah. Instead of list sizes and metric, it’s certainly an important one if you ever go to sell your company, it’s probably the number one or number two question you get, is how big is the list. So strategically you wanna grow that list. But a better operational metric is really, dollars per subscriber per month. And if you just keep track of that, over time, and do really well with your triggered emails, you can gradually move that from maybe $1 per subscriber a month up to $10. It depends on the business but triggered emails are the ones that are really gonna do a great job of increasing that.

Ezra: Some guy just said he sees my grappling dummy in the corner. I have no idea how he would see that. It’s in the opposite corner of the room. Maybe he sees it in the…

Drew: Behind the camera.

Ezra: Yeah, that’s strange.

Drew: That’s not a grappling dummy. That’s me.

Ezra: This is Drew Sanocki. Drew, you’ve got someone here saying, “Drew, dude, you’re a beast. I need to listen to more of your podcast episodes.” You’ve got someone saying, “I was just listening to your podcast, Drew.” So you’ve got a lot of podcast people here.

Drew: Great. That’s my mum and my brother.

Ezra: Okay. Yeah, well, they love you. Okay, you sound a bit surprised. Molly Pittman in the house. Hey, Molly. I think we’re good. Ezra Firestone here for Smart marketer LIVE. I love doing these shows. Thank you so much for watching. I really like talking about ecommerce and how to grow our business and how to add value to our communities through creating content and making offers. Super thankful to have you on the show. Drew Sanocki from nerdmarketing.com, really great content, data and analytics stuff and has courses and things. So check that out and we’ll catch up with you on the next episode with Smart Marketer LIVE, whenever that is, probably a week from now, 10 days from now, something like that.

Drew: Happy holidays.

Ezra: Bye.