S17 E10: How to Launch Black Friday Two Weeks Early (with Ezra Firestone)

0:04What's up, everybody? Welcome back to another episode of Limited Supply. Now, last week, we shared a talk from the Q4 Summit. Today, we've got one more. And this is Ezra Firestone session from the very first one. In this, Ezra walks through how he approaches Q4 across his different brands, from launching Black Friday early to building out offers, warming up audiences, getting customers to buy again. So if you're putting together your Q4 plan right now, there's a lot to listen from from here. Here's Ezra.

0:30Ezra Firestone:Listen, I think that the most valuable thing that you have as an entrepreneur is your time. And when you choose to spend some of it with me and with found e-com founders, Sharma Brands, we got Prescient AI, we got Triple Whale, Dylan Ander and Heatmap. And I am excited about them for you on your behalf. So we're going to do everything we can to make sure that you get value out of this. I've got a pretty cool presentation for you. Thank you for showing up. A few things about me. I started e-commerce in 2005. I was America's number one Afro wig, Elvis wig, mullet wig retailer in America. In fact, my suppliers were two Hasidic dudes, like two doors down from here.

1:08Ezra Firestone:You had Elliot and you had Moodle. You'd walk in there. Elliot's just got a bag of miniature apple pies that he's eaten. They were great suppliers. And I started this business looking like this. I sold it in 2012. I look a little bit more like that. Kind of weathered me a little bit. I was Shopify's first ever professor at their e-commerce university in 2013. I'm still teaching for them today. I manage 180 people across five different brands. I've done, this year I'll do 140 million across my businesses. And by the way, look at me, dude. I didn't go to college. I have no, I grew up poor. Like if I can do this, it is possible for you.

1:46Ezra Firestone:I'm not any smarter than any of them. But what I have done is showed up every day consistently with a positive attitude and taken the next step that I could take at the direction of my goals. And if you do that, it turns out consistency is really what it's about in this game. So this is my number one brand here. We're the last five years here. We're almost at 200 million in Shopify on this brand. I bought this brand here. I see somebody out there with red hair in 2022. Hey, Adara. Hi. But you don't color your hair. You have beautiful natural red hair. Yeah. If you ever want to color your hair, I got you.

2:18Ezra Firestone:Overtone color. I own Smart Marketer and Zipify. Smart Marketer is an education company. We got masterminds. We got, you know, corpses, all kinds of stuff and Zipify's apps for Shopify. And in 2020, I sold 70 % of one of my businesses to private equity for about 56 million. We got paid. Check this out. Nobody yet has had, watch that. Have you seen this today? Watch this. Pow. You haven't seen that? You haven't seen that. And I bought this company with private equity. This company has about$100 million a year. It's called Navaj. And look, oh, I built some outdoor showers. Has anybody experienced in life the pleasure and satisfaction and goodness that is an outdoor shower?

2:59Ezra Firestone:Raise your hand for me. All right, now do me a favor. Yay! Turn it toward, keep it up, keep it up. Turn it towards yourself and just pat yourself on the back because you know what life is. Yeah, these are my favorite things. So look, I'm not telling you this to brag because I feel as human beings, we are of equivalent value. I'm telling you this because in this industry The way that you share that you know what you're doing is you show what you've done And i've been in this game now for 20 years and i've had the pleasure and uh luck and joy of having a whole lot of success and a whole lot of failures And what i'm going to share with you today is how you can execute on q4 What i'm doing still i'm gonna show you what i'm gonna do for q4 If you want if you got an e-commerce business and you want q4 to go well This is the shit you got to do And you know, real quick before we get into it, look, you don't know what the year is going to throw at you.

3:49Ezra Firestone:You don't know what life has coming for you. I've had some pretty traumatic events over the last several years of my life. My business partner suddenly passed away. She was like a second mom to me. This was us. I might've been 22 in that picture. This is the most, the biggest brand I have. She was the face of the brand. She was, all our emails came from her. All of our videos came from her. And she was like my best friend. And so that was really intense on the business. I spent about 95 % of my year in 2022 in a neonatal intensive care unit with my daughter who passed away last year. And not to bring you guys down because her life was actually not a tragedy.

4:25Ezra Firestone:It was a really beautiful life. But the point is you can't control what life is going to throw at you. But what you can control is how you show up. The attitude and enthusiasm and deliberacy and intention that you bring to your world is your choice. and you control that, how you respond to what comes your way is ultimately what dictates whether or not you will be successful. And if you do the shit I'm about to tell you for Q4, you will have a more successful Q4. You also control what you do in Q4. But this is the Q4 high level. We're going to talk about high level strategy. And then we're going to talk about how to execute and implement.

5:01Ezra Firestone:How does that sound? You guys a little bit more with me? What's up, Jeff? How we feeling, dog? Let's go. Give it up for Jeff, ladies and gentlemen. man. My man, somebody be Jeff's business partner. Somebody buy Jeff lunch, please. All right. Um, so here's, here's the high level strategic framework. Uh, go early. The reason we're going to go early is Amazon is 52 or 3 cents out of every dollar spent in America. And Amazon is training consumers how to buy. What's up? Hey, are this selfies right here? What are we doing? No. All right. What's your name, man? Dylan. All right. We got a couple of Dylan.

5:36Ezra Firestone:Any other Dylan's in the room. Dylan might be the most common name in the room. Hey, give it up for Dylan. All right. Nobody wanted to give it up for you, dog, but I'll give it up. So we're going to go early. We're going to run our first sale October 9th and 10th, because that's when Amazon is running their sale. And that's when people are expecting to buy. Then we're going to hit our peak days. I'm going to show you how to do this. We're going to merchandise. Merchandising is everything in e-commerce. Merchandising is the incentive that convinces people to buy. It is why they, there's three things you need to know in marketing.

6:07Ezra Firestone:You want marketing to work? I don't do a lot, but I do the simple stuff consistently. Three things in marketing, incentive, deadline, ownership benefit. The incentive is why are they buying? The deadline is creating the urgency. And then the ownership benefit is what your content has to do. It has to communicate the benefit of owning the product. What are they going to feel, be perceived as, obtain, get? What is the after state? your videos, your copy. It all is about ownership, benefit communication. If you can do that, you win in marketing. So we're going to do emails, SMS and ads really heavily.

6:46Ezra Firestone:And we're going to mimic across all of our channels. We're going to bundle and kit and add new items. I'm going to show you examples of all this. And then content around our merchandise. It's going to be buy my stuff, buy my stuff. It's going to be educational gift guides, things like that. And then 60 % year over year increase in Shopify pay, mobile expedited gateways grew by 60%, which means everybody's buying on their phones. So we want our stuff to be optimized on mobile, I'm gonna show you how to do that. And then we're going to amplify our organic posts. So let's look at this is the strategy.

7:18Ezra Firestone:And then I'm gonna show you how to implement it. And I'm gonna leave you with a few thoughts that are going to help you in your business. So first thing, these are my campaign phases, you don't got to get this crazy. And you can have these slides. Notice I'm going prime day early. But one thing that you definitely have to do is, did you know that the average adult in America gets 347 emails a day and about 15 text messages? And then on Black Friday through Cyber Monday, they get 10 times that amount. They get between 1 ,500 and 3 ,000 emails a day. So what I do is I open my Black Friday sale two weeks early.

7:52Ezra Firestone:I'm Black Friday through Cyber, call it Silver Friday because I'm selling to people with silver hair, but I'm getting inboxed with my sale. I make more money on early Black Friday than I do actual Black Friday. So if you do nothing else in this than what I'm telling you, run your Prime Day sale, open your Black Friday sale on, it's going to be November 8th this year is the two Fridays before actual Black Friday. Open your Black Friday sale on November 8th, run it through that next Monday. You will get inboxed, you will get seen, and you will make more than if you just ran a normal Black Friday sale and then come back out on actual Black Friday.

8:26Ezra Firestone:And then watch what I'm about to show you. Well, these are our peak days. Our peak days are our prime day sale, our early Black Friday before anybody else is going, we're going. Then Thanksgiving, everybody's eating turkey, eating stuffing. And if you don't have marshmallows on your mashed potatoes, you are not invited to my gathering on Thanksgiving. But if you do put the marshmallows on it, then you could come upstate about two hours. So, and nobody is a fan of marshmallows. But you do. All right. Hey, Aaron, what's up man all my friends in the crowd are just like hey i'll give you some attention and enthusiasm thank you aaron give it up for drink uh breeze aaron nosbich they do um thc and not that anyone in here well maybe you guys could use a little bit of heightened i don't know high kind of brez kind of breeze kind of brings you down a little bit right that uplifts you we could use some of that you got any with you yeah if anybody wants to get high after my talk thank you very much.

9:19Ezra Firestone:Please go over there. You know, what's interesting about, about business is it's kind of like gardening. Um, I have grown some shit in my life, if you know what I'm saying. So what thing about gardening is you, you plant a seed, right? And then you water the plant and you water that fucking thing and nothing happens. And you're kind of like, what the hell is going on? And then you keep watering it and you might be, you might be like, you know what, nothing's happening. I'm out. But what's interesting about business is you plant that seed and you're like running ads and you're doing emails and you're merchandising and you're what's up?

9:50Ezra Firestone:Hey, you're doing every doing this is selfie. All right. So you do your by the way, I'm on social media at Ezra Firestone. If you want to do videos and stories and all that shit, it is good for my brand. I'll share it. Hook me up. So in business, we're we're running our emails, we're running our ads, we're doing all this stuff. And then we're like, hey, nothing happened. And we quit. But below the soil, the seed had sprouted. And the plant was growing. But we just couldn't see anything yet. It hadn't broken through the soil and we stopped. And the interesting thing about advertising, email marketing, merchandising, promoting product launches is it is like a diet and a workout program.

10:25Ezra Firestone:You must do it consistently every day for years. There's a reason why businesses reach eight figures in year four, five, and six because of the compound effect, the halo of the energy from the years prior. I don't care what happens in your business this year. I care what happens in your business next year, the year after that, the year after that. This is a five to 10 year game. Don't let anybody tell you different. So Thanksgiving Day, then actual Black Friday, then actual Cyber Monday, then Green Monday. Green Monday is December 11th this year, I think. It's December 10th or 11th. It's the last Monday where you can place an order with regular shipping and get it in time for Christmas.

10:57Ezra Firestone:And then New Year's Eve. Check this out, y 'all. These are my peak days. We're sending three emails. We're doing two SMSs and we're doubling our ad spend on those peak days. Look at how much extra revenue I make on every peak day. You guys don't seem to care much about that, but it's cool. Check this out right here. This is early black, this is black Friday last year. We did about 10 million from early black Friday through the end of the year. And these peaks, that's early black Friday. That's early cyber Monday. Then there's actual black Friday, actual cyber Monday, then green Monday. This is green Monday last year.

11:27Ezra Firestone:And then look, this is new year's Eve. So check this out. The people who I do, what's called a countdown to new year's sale countdown to new year's last chance, whatever my promotion was on black Friday, cyber Monday, I run it from December 26th to the 31st. And these people right here, who you're seeing at the end of the year there, those spikes in revenue, they would have started getting emails and SMS and ads on December or on November 11th. And because it was now the final incentive, the final deadline, they decided to act. They would have gotten 50 emails, 30 SMSs, a bunch of ads. And now because it was the last chance to save, they acted.

12:06Ezra Firestone:So your countdown to New Year's sale, Take your Black Friday, Cyber Monday merchandising, repeat it, countdown to New Year's. Nobody's doing anything that week of the year. Everyone's chilling. It's a wonderful time to promote. Nobody does it. And we make a lot of money doing countdown to New Year's every year. This is our merchandising last year. Merchandising, and by the way, I was talking to the dude from Firebelly Tea, David, who's a partners with Harley. Give it up for David, ladies and gentlemen. So he doesn't wanna do big discounts. You do not need to do big discounts to do effective merchandising.

12:36Ezra Firestone:Now, we will discount up to 25%. Did you know the average discount last year for Black Friday was between 35 and 50 %? So if your discount is under 20%, it is not considered a large discount. But we've got threshold-based discounting. Hey, if you spend up to 75, you get 25 % off, or 20 % off, you spend over 75, you get 25 % off. We got an early bird, early Black Friday, those four days that are November this year, 8th through 12th, I think. If you buy during that time, you get a free gift with purchase. It's one of our highest margin items. It's one of our overstocked items, but we add a free gift with purchase to incentivize it.

13:12Ezra Firestone:We've got a rotating deal of the day. We're doing content around that merchandising at boom. It's much simpler at boom. It's just 15 % off because it's a older crowd so that they don't need it. It's not, you don't have to get as fancy. And then it's a free gift with purchase that we rotate throughout promotion. So with merchandising, there's a lot you can do. Buy one, get one, get one half off site-wide discounts. We do a Facebook live, Instagram live, TikTok live every week of Q4, where there's a special discount only for the people who watch that live. And then guess what? We amplify that organic post.

13:42Ezra Firestone:I said this earlier, people don't do this with page post engagement, with video views campaigns, because they're way cheaper than conversion campaigns. Facebook and Instagram and TikTok charge you much less when you're not asking someone to leave the platform. So we take these live feeds that we do where it's like influencer being like, yo, this is how I colored my hair. And we amplify that. And the people that would see our conversion ads see that instead. and it's much cheaper. We do limited time bundles, single item promos, subscribe and save, deal the day. One thing that we always do is we extend the sale.

14:13Ezra Firestone:We're like, yo, it's Tuesday, the sale's happening again today. So you can extend your sale by one day. Whatever you're doing, your merchandising is designed to incentivize people to buy and it does not have to be discounting. It could be bundling, it could be kidding, but you must do effective merchandising. If you just do 10 % off, not gonna work. You wanna mimic across all social channels. You want to Facebook shop. You want to be on Instagram shop. You want to be on TikTok shop. You want to be on the new YouTube shop. The interesting thing is this will only account for 10 % of your revenue.

14:42Ezra Firestone:But you know what? I grew up poor. I'm not above an extra 10 grand, 15. My mom needs dental work. You know what I'm saying? Like I will make all the money I can make because the more money you can make, the more you can reinvest back into your products, the more you can reinvest back into your team. And the social shops are easy to set up and they're easy to use. And the interesting thing about the social shops, if you look at the data, the people going to them are not your fans and followers. They're all the people from your feed that are seeing your ads, that are seeing your posts. Those are the ones going to your social shops.

15:10Ezra Firestone:And right now it's about 10 % of the business and it's gonna keep growing. Integrated social commerce. I made a prediction in 2014 that we were gonna see wearable technology. And then Google came out with the Google Glass and everyone called them glass holes and nobody liked them. And it turns out technology just wasn't that good. But now we have wearable technology. We've got the Apple Watch. That's the first real mass market wearable technology. And Facebook now just launched these glasses that do augmented reality where they over the digital world onto the physical world. So integrated social commerce, shopping within the social platforms.

15:42Ezra Firestone:In five years, right now we're at 10%. Websites are gonna be much less. It's gonna probably be 50-50 where the commerce is wherever somebody is, not on your website. So you wanna get on this now. Notice that we're mimicking our merchandising everywhere. Inside of Google Ads, We've got our merchandising layered across. It's super easy to set up. We've got it in SMS. We got it on Amazon. We post it to organic and we amplify that. So we're mimicking our merchandising everywhere, not just in our emails and ads. Then we got content. I haven't got into how to execute this. I'm just giving you the big picture strategy right now.

16:14Ezra Firestone:We got content in and around our merchant. And we're not just emailing, yo, we got a sale. Nah, we're like, yo, Jessica from New York went into Target. She bought our stuff. Look at what she did. We're doing educational, interesting content that is relevant to the life experience of our consumers that's related to our products. You could do gift guides. You could do how-tos. You could do social media roundups. You could do tips, tricks, and listicles. If you go to my blog, boombeauty.com, overtonecolor.com, or.co, go to my blog, go back to last year. You're gonna see different pieces of content that get emailed to the list during the sale period.

16:48Ezra Firestone:And then when you click the links in those articles, they go to the holiday offer page that we're gonna get to in a second. So too fast for you guys? Are you with me? With me? All right, sweet. All right. So now we're gonna get into how do you execute this? I had 30 minutes. I wanted to give you everything that I thought I could give you to execute on a good Q4. First, your strategy has to be right. If you travel in the wrong direction, now you gotta travel all the way back. So high level strategy, that's the strategy. Now here's how we execute it. We warm up audiences. We build an email list.

17:18Ezra Firestone:This is the execution plan for our Q4. Now let me break down each one of these for you. First, all of October, outside of Prime Day. Prime Day, we're running our sale, October 8th and 9th. Then the rest of October, we're doing video views, baby. We are taking 10 % of our total marketing budget. We're running video view campaigns on TikTok, on Facebook, on YouTube. The beauty of these video view campaigns, as you can see right here, that I had about 800 ,000 people. I spent 4 ,500 bucks. You don't have to spend this much money. It works at low budgets too. but I traded a nickel to get somebody to watch 30 seconds of content, ownership benefit content about my brand.

17:56Ezra Firestone:Here I spent 10 grand. I got 25 ,000 people to watch four minutes and 30 seconds of content of a woman talking about how she uses my products and why she loves them. The benefit of this is Facebook is only going to show a certain amount of conversion ads in a day, but they'll show that same user an ad that's just designed to get them to watch a video. These are the people who are going to eventually convert. I call this engage and filter. I take prospects, warm audiences, buyers, I put video content in front of them. And then I filter out the people who consumed and I market to them. And the other thing it does, you know, about the iOS 14.5.

18:29Ezra Firestone:And you guys are familiar with all that? Yeah, some of you guys are. So basically, what happened was that that Apple owns the hardware. And they said, you know what, we're interested in this ad business that's making trillions of dollars, we're going to shut down the ability for you Facebook for you Google to see what somebody does when they leave your site. And And then we're gonna build our own ad network over here on the side and we're gonna take all this business. So now Facebook and Instagram and Google are much dumber when it comes to selling who's one of your good customers. So when you do this, you give them information.

18:57Ezra Firestone:You feed them information on who's the most interested and then they're like, oh, this person watched 80 % of this video. This other person's just like them and the algorithm then knows who your buyers are. So it helps your conversion ads as well. So October, we're spending a little bit of money amplifying our brand through video views, getting people to know who we are. then in November leading up to the sale. Now, like I said, we're coming out early Black Friday. So basically November 1st to November 7th, we are buying email leads and warming them up. We're emailing people to get them on our early bird list.

19:28Ezra Firestone:So we're doing lead generation campaigns to get people's email address, emailing them, we're SMSing them, communicating them with them any way we can to get them on our early bird list. I started doing this in 2015 and this has now become standard practice in the industry. You got ads, you got emails, you got organic social posts. They go to an opt-in page, say, hey, are you interested in being the first to find out about our sale, to get the access before anyone else can shop, to make sure that we don't run out of stock? Send them to a thank you page. They get put on an early bird email list and then we warm them up.

20:01Ezra Firestone:Ads, emails, organic social posts, go to an opt-in page, go thank you page, which then pushes them to all your social profiles and stuff and then you warm them up. Why would you do this? Why would you spend money and time and energy and send emails to people who are already on your email list? Well, I told you three things about marketing. I told you that you needed incentives, deadlines, and ownership benefit communication. There's one other thing in marketing that is a very key thing to understand. And there is a reason why every movie that comes out has a trailer that came out a year before.

20:33Ezra Firestone:There's a reason why Apple did the iPhone 16 product launch event months before the iPhone 16 came out because anticipation is a very, very enjoyable experience for human beings. In your life, you got three times you can enjoy something before it happens, while it's happening, and after it happens. And if you as an individual get good at cherishing before, during, and after, and you don't need a trauma or tragedy like one of your children dying to learn this, you will have a much more fulfilled life. And with my sales, the people who raise their hands and say, you know what? I'm trying to get on that early bird list.

21:09Ezra Firestone:It's 10 % of my total audience that does this. I send emails, I run ads, I do organic social posts, I do SMSs and I get about 10 % of my total audience to say, I wanna be on the early, I wanna find out about it first. That's 50 % of my sales from the people who are anticipating, cause I'm warming them up. I'm like, oh, it's coming, it's going down. We're gonna have the best discounting ever. Look at what this lady did. And then we open the sale and we give it to them first and they respond. So the interesting thing, here's a couple of ads. Notice that we're using capital letters. We're using emojis as bullet points.

21:38Ezra Firestone:Notice that we have subliminal arrows in all of our ads. And I've got a technique I'm gonna tell you about later called Peacob, which is an ad technique I created for image ads. And what I just, and I'm not gonna tell you about it now. That, by the way, is called an open loop. And point there is like, I'm like, yo, this thing's gonna happen, dude. And then you're like, oh shit, Peacob. And then you're waiting for it. And hopefully it's supposed to keep you more engaged. We'll see how that works. So these are some of my ads. Turns out on these opt-in pages, I've been split testing these opt-in pages now for almost a decade.

22:07Ezra Firestone:Simple is better. I have a landing page builder for Shopify called Zipify Pages, where all my templates are at, but you could use Shogun, you could use Gem Pages, any one of these page builders. I don't know if Gem Pages is still in business, but anyways, there's a whole bunch of them that will build these things for you. And what you want is a thematically relevant image at the top, a headline, a sub headline, a call to action, and then some terms and conditions. And also notice that I got a colored backdrop on mobile behind my opt-in. So it's really easy. I see a lot of opt-in pages and it's on white.