The Basics Still Win: Ezra Firestone's Ecommerce Playbook After 20 Years

Full conversation and audience Q&A

Good morning. Good morning. Stand up for me Everybody up

All right, now, put your hands on your hips. Yep, yeah, kinda get that chicken wing going, and then just kinda rub elbows with the person next to you. There you go. All right, now you can sit down. Listen, I have some good stuff for you. I have some stuff that is gonna help you make money, which is why you came here.

But what will make you more money than whatever I have to tell you is making a friend. If you-- Way, there's Ale. Give it up for Ale, ladies and gentlemen. That was, not very enthusiastic. But that's okay. I love Ale, so that's enough. But listen, Ale's a good buddy of mine. In fact, we're in business together, and that is what is possible.

If you meet somebody, and you, like, take the time to be vulnerable and make a connection. Now, you no longer have permission to touch anybody. That was a one-time-- unless, you know, they offer it, in which case, you know, hey. You know, do you realize it goes down at these events, you guys? It is going-- Any single people in the room?

Can you raise your hand? Single people. Hey, the dude in the back was quick with it. Yo, put your hand up back there. Yeah, that dude right there. What's your name? I can't hear you, bro. But that dude needs a lady or a man, we're not sure, but he's interested. And what you guys will be shocked about, especially in Vegas, I do a lot of these in Vegas, it goes down.

So, so there's an opportunity afoot outside of bus-business for you as well. Now, what's interesting about these events, you guys, I have been speaking at events like this since about two thousand eight or nine, and Not much has changed. And you know, there, there's a lot of stuff people are gonna tell you, all kinds of stuff.

You're gonna get fancy, you know, very sophisticated, fancy stuff. That is not what I am going to share with you. I am going to give you very, very basic things to do. I, I, I-- this is me, by the way, yo, I'mma give it up for Omnisend. Omnisend in the building. Okay. People like Omnisend more than they like Alay.

And that's good because I'm a brand ambassador for Omnisend, and I would like it... I mean, we want Alay to be liked also, but we, Omnisend's, you know, we gotta, we gotta promote them a little bit. So anyhow, Omnisend's in the building. My-- I have a booth for Zipify, which is one of my software companies. But look, I have at this point, probably eighteen brands.

I do, you know, about a hundred and fifty million a year, maybe a little more, across my... I have more than two hundred employees, and these are some of my companies. Safe Sleeve, that's Alay's company. Navage, this is about a hundred million dollar company. Sm- Zipify, Smart Marketer, Boom, Overtone. I have a bunch that I share publicly, and I have others that I don't.

But the thing is, I don't do anything fancy. I just do... I've been doing the same shit for about twenty years. And what I'm going to tell you to do is basic stuff that you probably already know. But I'm gonna give you good examples on how you can implement it. And the problem is you're not doing it. And if you would just do some of this stuff, you would, have more success in your business.

So I'm gonna give you a bunch of practical examples of things to do that might seem basic, but guess what? The basics win ballgames. The simple stuff works, and you just have to do it, and you have to do it consistently. There is a reason, we'll go back to, we'll come to this in a second. Why? Look at me. I do not...

Like, it's like the, I have been unwilling to quit. The, the key in business is don't quit before the miracle. Don't quit before the miracle. I'm gonna give you a couple examples of this. In a business I just bought in twenty twenty-two, was losing four hundred grand a month when I bought it. We're gonna talk about it in just a second.

You just have to stay at it and keep compounding little bit of effort every day with a positive attitude. Now g- put your hand up in the air for me Put your hand up. Come on, guys. Put your hand up. You came all the way here. Turn it towards yourself. Pat yourself right on the back. There you go. Yeah. Listen, this was, this was my daughter.

She passed away about three years ago, and I have a charity in her name called Love Runneth Over, where we take care of, medically complex babies and families who start out, life with some hardships in the neonatal intensive care unit. Because unfortunately, that tends to affect people on the lower end of the economic spectrum who do not have the ability to, like, be with their babies while they're sick.

They're at their-- they're at work, they've got other kids, and there's hundreds of babies who are sick who, don't have anybody with them, and they feel all alone. And the babies who have people with them survive at much higher rates 'cause they feel like, "Somebody loves me." And so by showing up here, you are contributing to this.

'Cause th- when I do these speaking events, I get paid for it, and then it goes to this charity. So any money I make goes there. So you contributed to that, and thank you for that.

It's for the babies, y'all. It's not, you know, g- you know, if you're gonna applaud, give my-- That's-- She brought that energy with her. That was her gift to the world. anyhow, you can check out, her story, by the way, if you wanna read it. It's loverunnethover.com. So this is-- I bought this business in twenty twenty-two.

It was losing four hundred grand a month. We're about to go full chain at Walmart. We're about multi- multi-eight figures now. it's called Overtone, and here's a quick little thing that nobody does. See this product right here? That's the same as this product right here, but it's in a sample size, and that's my number one volume SKU at retail and soon to be on the site.

If you-- I'm gonna talk a lot about basket builders in a minute, but people don't use basket builders. And basket builders, this is, I think, our, our, our display at Sally's. We're-- We've got a bunch of our products at Sally's. Basket builders are products that are designed to build someone's basket. They're easy to produce.

They're easy to manufacture. Hey All right, we got, you know, we just got to do it for the Gram. By the way, if you want to post me on the Gram, I'm on there, dude, or any other of your social media profiles, I will repost you, and we could be like internet friends. it'll be fun. So basket builders are something that you should be doing that none of you are.

It's easy to manufacture. It has a high profit margin. I'm gonna show you how to use them in just a minute, but they could literally be products you already have that you just made in a smaller size. So this is, Drew Sanocki, and he's a good friend of mine. He owns this company called PostPilot. I was, like, one of the...

I think I was the first investor in PostPilot. By the way, when it comes to money, I have some viewpoints that I'll share with you at the end if we have time, but one of them is fewer, bigger bets. I, I, I think I put a hundred grand or something into this company. I might have put twenty-five grand into twenty or thirty other little companies all that failed, and this one paid it off.

Fewer, bigger b-- I don't do the little bit here and there anymore. Now, I do fewer, bigger bets where I have more upside and more equity and more on the line. It's a better strategy in s-- than angel investing. We can talk about money towards the end. Okay. So why do I wanna tell you about Drew Sanocki? Well, back in about 2014, big private equity companies would come to us, like for example, when SlimFast got br-- bought out of bankruptcy, they came to us, and they were like, "Hey, will you evaluate this business and let us know if it's worth buying?"

Yo, I didn't know you were gonna be here, Kevin. Hey, give it up for Kevin, ladies and gentlemen. That's a beautiful human. Stand up real quick. Stand, Kevin, stand up That is a guy named Kevin. And I will tell you about Kevin, is when I hired Kevin, I had a lady named Bevan working for me. And for years I was looking for a Devon because I wanted Kevin, Bevan and Devon all to work together.

And then at one point we got an Evan, but it was too late 'cause we'd lost Bevan, and it just all fell apart. But, but it was a real dream of mine. I would have really enjoyed that. And so unfortunately, at this point, we only have Kevin. oh, you know what? We got a Devon now. We got a new Devon. I don't know if you know that, but we now have a Kevin and a Devon.

So if your name is Evan, Bevan, Mevin, or anything like that, and you wanna work for me, I will hire you. Just letting you know. Okay. So, why am I telling you about this guy? Because we would evaluate deals for big, you know, venture firms and private equity firms, and they would come to us, and they'd say, "Hey, is this a good...

Is this a deal worth buying?" And we'd look at all the data, and then we would tell them, and these would be, you know, between ten and two hundred million dollar brands, sometimes bigger. SlimFast was bigger. And we saw something interesting, something fascinating, which was that every single nine-figure brand only had one source of profitable visibility.

They only had one way they were generating traffic that was making them any money, and all the rest of it was loss leader. So for example, maybe it was Google Ads. At that time, Google Ads was big. Maybe now it's Facebook, maybe it's TikTok, maybe it's Amazon. They were acquiring customers at a profit on one channel, and then they were taking all their profit and dumping it into other channels at a loss to build the brand.

They weren't worried about having every channel be profitable. They were only worried about growth. And then when Q4 would come around, they would have all these customers that they acquired that they would then monetize. And so the game is, can you acquire customers at breakeven? If you can acquire customers at breakeven, you have a multi eight-figure business on your hands.

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Link in the show description. Now back to your replay. And so it was kind of-- it kind of blew my mind, and I learned that that year I had a brand that went from three million to fifteen million because I used that approach. Because I, I didn't grow up with money. I didn't come from money. I didn't make it out of high school.

And so I'm like very trying to like have everything. Oh, turn that off. It's not making money. And I was like, "Okay, I'm making money over here. Let me put it over here to acquire customers. Let me put it over here to acquire customers." And we immediately expanded. I sold that business for fifty-four million dollars in twenty twenty.

So, thinking about I don't care what happens for you guys this year. I don't care what happens next year. Business is a five to ten-year game, and I'm going to tell you about that with Overtone in a second. It's about investing and letting the snowball build and, and having a side hustle that pays your bills so that the snowball can build, so that the snowball can build, so that the snowball can build.

Don't start pulling out of it and balling out on Instagram and wearing fedoras and shit and renting Lambos. Don't pull money out of the thing. Let it build. Invest. What more can you invest is the question to ask. Okay, here's a couple strategies for you that you should be using that are gonna help you buy customers at a profit.

This is Overtone. This brand was losing four hundred grand a month when I bought it. And, now we're doing really well, and we're making a lot of money. And one of the things that we do is we figure out multiple avatars and multiple use cases that we not only have ads for But we have specific landing pages for.

And the key is one of these-- Look, one of them can ju-- I, for, so, so I have a business called Boom, and I sent, I, I did about two hundred million in sales in the last eight years in that business, and about ninety percent of it went through one page. But it took me several pages to figure out which one. It took me like a year of testing.

So you're gonna have to test multiple pages. I'm gonna show you how in just a second. But this is about people who have silver hair who want to, keep it vibrant looking and not go yellow or people who wanna... And I'll show you another one in a second. But like this is a specific to people with silver hair.

Now, and these are some ads that are about it. I'm gonna-- I'll tell you about ads in a second. We're gonna talk about us versus them and before and after. Those are two flavors of ads that people aren't using. People know about before and after. They don't know about us versus them. We'll talk about that in a second.

But here's another one. Okay, what about if you have brown hair? Well, I've got products for you. You're a brown-haired person. I'm starting with a particular avatar. That company, Navage, wh-- did you know that a hundred and fifty years ago people didn't brush their teeth? How many people brushed their teeth this morning?

Man, some of you motherfuckers are lying statistically. But, but thank you. And, and you know what, dude? I was-- Yo, I was out there in the Hasidim in Brooklyn, and it was me and like six dudes named Shmuley and one dude named Yankel, and it was at this like Hasidic convention. And, and, and I got in there, you know what I'm saying, and I was doing my thing, and it was great, and then this one dude was like-- he kept taking a step towards me, and I kept taking a step back.

And I thought-- It was a ballroom like this size, and I thought, "I wonder how long we can do this." So I would let him step forward, and then I would step back, and then he would step forward, and we traveled across the ballroom. I don't think he noticed, but Shmuley was a close talker, and he also had bad breath.

So God bless him. He was a good dude. He just was struggling that day, I think. But b-- Why am I saying this? Well, well Navage, it's a nasal irrigator. We clean out your nasal passages, and we think that, nasal health is, to the next hundred years what oral health is to this hundred years and-- or was to the last hundred years.

That it's like really revolutionary what it can do, for fighting off viruses and all kinds of stuff. Long story short, though, is that with Navage it's like, who-- Well, yeah, people who don't wanna get sick. But what about firefighters? What about people who cut their lawns, who get all kinds of allergens in?

What about people who live in big cities? What about people who are voice actors who want to have the clearest possible voice? Like we figure out the different use cases, the different avatars for the product, and we build ads and landing pages specific. This-- It used to be Facebook could do all this for you.

TikTok could do all this for you. Google could do all this for you. Then Apple shut them down. iOS fourteen point five. I don't have time to get into it, but now you have to go wide. You have to horizontally scale, and you have to test different offers. This offer right here, two for sixteen You wanna try something before you buy it if you're gonna color your hair.

This is where n-- like fifty, sixty percent of my traffic goes right now, and I'll show you how I came up with it in a second. But it's, it's selling the same products but with a different offer, and we're gonna talk about that in a second. "Hey, you got products that are... you're putting on your hair. You wanna keep your hair clean and, and, and healthy?

Use this product." I've got a couple like that that are more relevant to everybody who has hair. "Okay, you got a laptop that you put on your lap. Well, that is apparently, for men, not good for your testicles. You wanna have babies, dude? Don't put the laptop on your lap." So we've got a ad and a landing page, this is Alae's company that I'm, I'm a part-owner in now, that is about, about that particular use case.

And then it's like, "Hey, your phone is emitting radiation." I used to not believe in, using fear as a marketing tactic 'cause it's like, you know what? Do we have to scare the shit out of people to sell them things? Like, I don't like this idea of like, you know, "You're broken, and I will fix you. You stink, buy deodorant.

Your teeth are too yellow, you need to whiten them. You're fat, take this fucking pill." It's like, this is all you hear is about how you're fucked up and you need fixing, and I do not wanna be a part of this. And so I use other means of generating awareness for my products, not, negative messaging. And so I was not about trying to scare the shit out of people.

However, I was a user-- this is me on a webinar back in twenty eighteen. Was it twenty eighteen-ish, Alae? Yeah, twenty eighteen on a webinar talking about, "Hey, I got this product." When I got a cell phone, my mom had one of those stickers on it. Turns out those stickers are bullshit, but I didn't know that, and she was sh-- You inherit sometimes fear from people.

I inherited this fear of... Look, everyone is telling you something is gonna kill you. It's the pesticides in the food. It's the microplastics that are in your testicles now. It's the fucking fluoride in the water. Everyone wants to tell you some shit is gonna kill you. You cannot live like this. You cannot buy into all of these.

However, you're gonna adopt some of them. One of the ones that I picked up was that the EMFs are gonna kill you out of the phones. Okay, so I had this piece of conditioning. I believed it, I, and I found this company, Safe Sleep. I was on this webinar talking about... I was doing, it was an e-commerce webinar, and I was like, "Yo, check out this product.

Super cool." They reached out to me. I have completely forgotten why I'm talking about this. But what I will tell you, it-- Oh, because of fear. So turns out you can actually... So, when it comes to marketing, the best product doesn't win. The best product doesn't win in the marketplace. The best promise wins in the marketplace.

Who can get the customer's attention and explain the problem and the product the best wins. And sometimes you've got to, hey, say, "Look, this thing," you know, like, hey, cigarettes in the forties and fifties, they knew that shit was gonna kill you. They hid it from you. That's the same thing big t-tech companies are doing with their cell phones now.

They know... If you look in your cell phone, there are warnings about this. They know this shit is bad, but they're not gonna tell you about it, so we built this product that will keep you safe, and that's what Safe Sleep is. So you can use fear, and you can use us versus them And also it's like, okay, there's just basic high-level cell phones are bad.

Hey, your laptop, get it off your, your lap. But then there's also, hey, do you have a kid? Because if you have a kid, they're on their device and you want to protect them. That's another avatar. That's another, person who's in the space. Like, I sell, makeup, and you know what? Some women just do not want multipurpose blush sticks.

We're gonna talk about those in a second. But they will buy mascara. They will buy lip gloss. So it's like you wanna open up the avatar of who would be interested in your product by speaking directly to them. The one phone case I trust to protect my family. So this is another use case, another avatar. Our company-- Hey, they might not all scale, but we're n-- but the other ads we have, these aren't gonna talk to parents.

This isn't gonna talk to parents. This is gonna talk to parents. So you have to do the work to figure out what are the problems that your product could solve and for whom, and make ads and landing pages specific to those. I promise you, if you just have two of these, you're better than most companies.

Most companies are sending traffic to their homepage and their product page. They don't even use pre-sell articles or sales pages. I'm gonna show you one sales page in a minute, but I have like sixteen or seventeen different sales page and pre-sell formulas. If you DM me, I'm happy to share with you. I'm happy to share with you all my ad formulas.

I'm happy to share all the stuff that's working for me so that you can copy it and implement it in your niche. This is just an example of like, this is another page, long form sales page. Hey, I was having headaches. I didn't understand why. It was like someone's story about what happened to them with EMFs.

But it's a different page layout, right? Notice there's an us versus them on the sales page. We don't just use us versus them on our ads. You know what's funny about us versus them is, I Get followed around by Cheech & Chong edibles on the internet 'cause they, they were like, they were like, "We have fucking found our customer, man."

And they follow me around with their ads and it's like, listen, do I enjoy an edible here and there? Yeah. Fu- sure. But I'm not buying them on the internet. I, I'm getting them from the grandma down the road. You know what I'm saying? A mountain weed. Anyhow, sh- I, there-- What happened? It-- I, I mean, I don't know who you are, man.

We're gonna have to talk. I- Are you Steve? Oh, there you are. I c- I can't see from here. I got, I got, my vision, you know, that far. I, I know Steve well. Steve's a good dude. Yeah. Okay, I'll... Well, yes, I'll give you my address. You have my address. We're on Slack. But, anyhow, they, they did this us versus them ad, and I was like, "This is the best us versus-- the funniest and best us versus them I have ever seen."

And so I put it in one of my decks, and I was at an event talking about it, and Steve was like, afterward, I got a message being like, "Hey, man, thanks for shouting us out." I was like, "I di- I didn't shout anyone out." And then it turned out he was from Cheech & Chong, and now we're buddies and now we're... Zipify, which is my software company that does upsells, is helping them and, and I love those guys.

Anyhow, us versus them. So some more examples of pages. You have got to test the same messaging in different layouts. I will give you my templates in just a second. You've got to test multiple use cases, multiple avatars. Okay, here's an example. I built $100 million in sales on one product. It was a multipurpose blush stick.

I was the first person to launch it back in 2009. Nobody had it, and it was a wonderful product, and it worked really well. Yo, what happened, dude? Where you going? You gotta poop? You leaving? Oh, you're just going-- Okay, you're just taking one step back. All right. Look, if you ha- if you have to go to the bathroom, I get it.

But otherwise, come on, man. You came all the way here. I got some good shit, you know? what's your name, man? Micah. Micah, welcome to the party, dude. okay. So I built this company on multipurpose blush sticks, and then ten years went by, and everybody built the same product. Because one of the downsides of being public with some of my brands is that people will knock it off, and it's like, okay, right on.

So I had to, I had to pivot, and I had to feel like, okay, what will women be interested in? What, what problems are these folks facing? What are, what experiences are they having? 'Cause you know what your business does? If you were to simplify what a business does in just a sentence, your business relates with a group of people who are sharing a collective experience.

In my case, women over fifty who are experiencing the aging process and everyone telling them that they're fucked. "Your life is terrible. It's going downhill. It's anti-age. It's anti-wrinkle. It's menopause. It's, you know, hormones. Your, your hair's going gray. Inject yourself with bullshit. Get plastic surgery."

It's like all this crazy negative messaging, and they're having this experience of feeling like their value is declining. People are ignoring them because in society, women are valued for youth and beauty. Of course, this is not a true marker of a person's value, but it is, how they are treated, and it's pretty fucked up.

Of course, it's not actually true. But anyhow, one of the things that happens in perimenopause, post-menopause, and actually just during a woman's regular cycle, is that she will experience, under-eye darkness or lightness at different times in her cycle, and especially post-menopausal. You lose some of your, some of the, not collagen, I can't remember the word.

But anyhow, so we came up with this, this cream that's-- it's like a... It doesn't-- We're not, we are not the people who are gonna fix you. We're, we think you're right the way you are. We're not trying to fix you. I'm not telling you you're broken. But what this will do is it'll add a little, like, sheen. It's got mica in it.

It's a really beautiful product, and this product is working. Now, I need to get the average order value up a little bit, but it's like I'm speaking to a whole new use case of the same avatar who I already have, which is a product I didn't have before, and then that's going to pre-sell articles. We're gonna talk about pre-sales in a minute.

Long-form sales pages. So, and we're gonna talk about specific ways to win with your page. One of them is you must be upselling and cross-selling in the buy box. If you're not doing this, you're not making as much money as you can. These are all to sell the same product, different versions of the page.

Authority-based ads. If you could get a doctor in a lab coat, cue the old guy in a lab coat, that's a great one. Any amount of authority. For Navage, I got firefighters. I got guys who are like, "I'm going into smoky buildings. This thing is helping me." Any form of authority will work extremely well. Any partnership ads will work extremely well.

Yo, you got Nick Shackleford bringing you a personal beverage, dog? That's a really beautiful thing. I mean, if we're, if you're handing them out, man, I'll take one. Thank you. Give it up for Shaq, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you so much.

Beautiful human, good man, good father, excellent marketer. He's awesome. partnership ads, you gotta set these up. You have to be running them. Ten or twenty percent of your ads should be partnership ads. Guys, I'm rattling off a bunch of things. If you just do one or two of them, it will help you. This is all stuff you know about, but it's stuff that if you-- th-they compound.

The more you do, the more it compounds. Us versus them. I'm-- Why do I wanna talk so much about this? Because still, I put it in my decks, and then people join my mastermind, and they're not doing it. And it is in every one of my companies, one of my top five ads, every single one. I'm gonna show you a company I just launched.

So, so Navage. Everybody knows about a neti pot, clea-cleans out your, your, your, sort of, nasal passages. Are you filming me, dude? The whole thing? Damn, bro. What are you, what are you doing with that? Okay. That's a little creepy, but all right. it's okay. You can film me, man. Rock and roll. I-- Whatever that shit is, man, that looks...

I'm not interested. What is that? It's called Dharmal. Dharma? Dharmal. Dharamal? Date karma. Oh, date karma. And you just squirt it on stuff? You squirt it on whatever you want. Okay. Hey, man, rock and roll. Can I show you ours? this guy's got some shit in the tube for you if you want it. listen, Neti Pot is like the, it's like the Q-tip or the Vaseline or the Band-Aid of this industry.

It's like it is both a brand and it is a, you know, actual, actual product. And I don't really wanna come out against another brand because I, you know, I'm in the B2B software space with Zipify, and it's so mean and nasty. People will tear you apart. They'll say you suck. They'll be like, "We're better than the..."

It-- N-no, no industry that I have been in is meaner and nastier and will kick you in the face more than B2B software. It's really hard, to m-market in there within, like, in a good way positively. But w-what you can do and what I, and what I would recommend instead of coming out against a specific brand is come out against a type of product.

So I'm gonna show you an example of this in just a second. But we came out against N- Neti Pot. This is one of our most viral, best pieces of content that we still use over and over. And so, so the strategy here is use case and avatar-based ads that lead specifically to pre-sales and landing pages that are related to those use cases and those particular avatars.

I have a whole one-hour training just on this topic that I can send you if you message me or meet me at the Zipify booth out there after this thing or whenever there's a break at lunch maybe. but this strategy is still not being used, and I don't understand why people aren't doing it. It's not that hard.

Now, the key is you can't let AI write your sales page. Don't. AI cannot write your sales page. You gotta write it, and then you can let AI edit it, and you can let AI code it, but you gotta write your own pages. I'm gonna give you s- I'm gonna give you one formula that you can feed into AI with your product information, but you gotta use a predetermined good formula.

Don't just let it write it yours- without you. Okay, these are some examples from us versus them, right? This is the Safe Sleeve example. This is Gruns and AG1. Gruns just sold, I think. They grew. They, they were, they were running this ad years ago. They saw our stuff, I think, and started running it. wonderful company and, and their us versus them worked really well.

Athletic Greens was the big, big brand in the space, and they came in and took 'em out. this is the brand I just launched. I think we just did our first hundred grand in like the first sixty or sixty days, I think. So we h- are saying we're better than products that go in the water. We're better than brushing your dog's teeth.

We're going against other product categories, not specific brands, and it works really, really well. So us versus them is very similar to before and after. It's just a this or that. This or that is really like somehow... Like for me, I need simple formulas. I need things that are simple to do. That's why I break everything down into little formulas that I can then just replicate, like I'm gonna show you with my sales page in just a second.

Simple stuff, and us versus them is one of those deceptively simple things that really works, and there's a bunch of them. Okay, switching gears. That was a little bit on ads and landing pages. We're gonna do a, a sales page breakdown in just a second. Now I wanna talk to you about other things on your website that you are not doing that will help you, and one of them is badging.

Badging... What did I just do? Badging is very, very important, and people don't do it. Did you know that ninety-six percent of the information that you take in is visual? And so when you go to a website, and I'm gonna show you in, in the next slide in just a second, fifty percent of people who visit your site will never see beyond the buy box.

And so the badging is just like another way to recap the sales page in the buy box. This is actually a collection page. I'm badging on my collection page here, but, but I'm gonna show you badging in the carousel right now. So product carousel. The one thing that Amazon... I have, I have a couple businesses that are Amazon only.

I'm a big fan of Amazon. I buy Amazon businesses. I build Amazon businesses. But, the one thing that Amazon brand owners understand better than e-commerce brand owners is the carousel. Because on Amazon, you really only have those nine images and one video, and so Amazon brand owners will have infographics In their carousel, before and after, infographic, infographic, sales video.

Go to my e-commerce websites, look at the carousels, copy them. Your e-commerce carousel, that is where... If you look at the eye tracking, that is where all the action happens. People make buying decisions on e-commerce based on the pictures, and you guys just have, like, a product picture on white. You need infographics in the carousel to recap the sales page because most people aren't reading the sales page, and brands just aren't doing this, and you could be ahead of the curve by doing it.

Now, let's look at the, the rest of the buy box here. I th- actually, I have another slide where I go through the buy box, so w-we'll go through that on the next slide. Bundling. Bundling. Six-pack, ten-pack, three-pack, two-pack. Bundling in the buy box. Look, the sad reality is that eight out of ten people who buy from you will never come back the rest of your entire life.

Two out of the ten who buy, that's how you end up getting thirty, forty, fifty, sixty percent repeat revenue 'cause it's two people who buy every month. So they buy a lot. So eight out of ten people are never coming back, so while they're ordering, you have to get your average order value as high as you possibly can.

And I built a whole company on this called Zipify. It's all about upselling and cross-selling, pre-purchase, post-purchase. It's a wonderful company. We're in the back room. We help with this. We do bundles. We do upsells. But my... Forget ab-- I mean, hey, would I like you to use it? Sure, but forget about using it.

Just make sure that if you, if your page, I'm gonna show you an example of my new brand right now, does not have a bundle option on it, I promise you, you're getting about ten to twenty percent less revenue than you would if you did. You gotta give people a chance to buy more while they are shopping. I am b-- I bundle everywhere.

I build special bundles. I have a Black Friday/Cyber Monday training that, that is a one hour on, like, how do you do... How do you start from early Black Friday? Actually, how do you start from Prime Day in October to early Black Friday to Black Friday to early December to Green Monday, which is the last day you can order and get shipping, normal shipping and still get it in time for Christmas, all the way to New Year's?

How do you do this? I have a whole course on it. One of the things... It's free. One of the things that we do is we really talk heavily about bundling. So, okay, buy box. Look, can, infographics, plus badging in the carousel, plus sales videos in the carousel, opening with a customer testimonial, unique selling propositions in image format above the, the recap.

This is a recap of the ownership benefit. Listen, here's what people need to understand. Remember this one word: ownership benefit. What is the benefit of owning this product? What will I become? Who will I... How will I be perceived? What will I get? And if you can recap the ownership benefit, you, i-in the buy box above the add to cart button, your conversion rate will go up.

Whoever can express the ownership benefit the best wins. And, and then of course, - Other things in my buy boxes, there's other elements, but those are some key elements. Your buy box is far more important than you realize. Your pop-ups are far more important than you realize. They should be changing with every sale you have.

They should be cha- you should be split testing. You should use Omnisend. This is Omnisend pop-up to split test. You know, I, I, I, I had a kid-- I had a friend, and his kid came home, and the kid had a list of names and, like seven dollars. And, and the mom was like, "Hey, dude, like, where'd-- What's up? Like, what's happening?"

He's like, "Well, I asked people if they wanted to join my club for a dollar." He was in like-- He was like twelve or thirteen. And, and then so the mom was like, "Okay, well, like What do they get in the club? He's like, "Look, they're on the list." So people just wanted to join the club. They didn't get anything. And that's why I made my, my, pop-up.

It was like, "Join the club," and forever that was the best pop-up. And then mystery discount beat that, and then everybody took the mystery discount from me, and now all you see is mystery discount. "Hey, do you want a mystery discount?" It's the same discount you would've given them, but it's a mystery. It's-- And so they're intrigued by it.

Now I'm testing other stuff. You gotta test your pop-ups. Check this out. I bought this company in twenty twenty-two, January. Average order value was forty-five dollars. I had it at sixty within about nine months by bundling, by upselling and cross-selling, by testing different landing pages, by doing all of the things that I'm telling you to do, by using Zipify.

So you can really increase your average order value with bundling, with optimizing your buy box, and with split testing. I'm gonna show you some other examples in just a moment. This was the, sample page. So one of the ways I did this was I started by selling samples and then upselling and cross-selling, and see it became my number one page outside of the collection page and the homepage.

It became my number one selling product outside of the free latex gloves. By the way, if there's one thing that you do in e-commerce, do free gift with purchase. If you can figure out a free gift to give them... I was already giving away these, these latex gloves because when you dye your hair, you wanna put gloves on so you don't get the hair dye on your hands, and then I just put it in the shopping cart, free latex gloves, and it gave us a pretty significant increase.

And I did, the same thing with my canvas bag that I give. I'll, I'll get to you in a second. My canvas bag that I give away with my little boom thing, I just put it in the shopping cart as a free gift. Free gift with purchase is people's favorite thing when it comes to e-commerce. Okay, one thing that we just innovated this year, quizzes have been really popular in e-commerce.

So we figured out, what if you could do a quiz on the buy box? I'm focused on the buy box. I'm-- Look, I'm focused on a lot of things, but I spend a lot of time on the buy box. What if you could add a quiz to the buy box? Would it help? So we put a micro quiz. I built an app. It's in Shopify. It's called Perfect Match.

P- You can talk to us about it at Zipify. It's really cheap. P-E-- Perfect, P-E-R-F-E-C-T Match. And look, they click this little thing, and then it pops this up right on the, on the buy box. "Hey, what are you, what are you feeling today?" I'll give you guys these slides. "Okay. Oh, you're interested in this? Okay, one other question."

Just two questions. You could do longer, and then, "Here are some products we think that you might wanna add to your cart," and they can add them to the cart. Dude, eighty-eight percent of people who take this survey finish it It is, it, it's commitment and consistency. It goes back to Robert Cialdini, principles of persuasion.

We got them to take an action. Little simple quiz right on the buy box. Very, very effective. Another buy box optimization. Your homepage is your best sales page. I don't know if you guys saw this, but my homepage had the most traffic. Why? Well, because the top 10 websites in the world, Amazon, eBay, Home Depot, et cetera, they train consumers how to shop, and on those websites, you can access everything from the homepage.

So no matter where somebody enters your site, they go back to the homepage looking for what they want, shipping information, additional products, whatever. All-- You'll see that so much of your traffic goes back to the homepage. So your homepage needs to be a long form sales page. It needs to be a direct response, long form sales page with a navigation, we're gonna talk about navigations in just a second, with a...

Th-this structure is what now pretty much everybody does. We kinda pioneered this, and now it's, now it's very common. Social proof, unique selling proposition/ownership benefit statement, money-back guarantee, call to action sales video. Test that on the top of your homepage and tell me if it doesn't out convert what you currently have.

Then social proof and best sellers. Of course, there's more in the element stack. You can go look at our websites and see them, but very, very effective. The other thing to know about your homepage is that I've got a twenty percent-- twenty-four percent increase in cold traffic by optimizing the header because the header takes up a lot of space on mobile, and so it needs to be very thin.

It should take up no more than fifteen percent of the total screen real estate. It needs to be very, very thin. And you can have a w- a welcome bar, and then there's a few other things we can talk about in the header in just a second. One of them is we decided to add es-- This is for multi-product brands.

If you got multiple products, put your product categories in Instagram story carousel circles under the header on the homepage. Watch how many more people get... You have two goals in e-commerce on any page. There are only ever two goals. Goal number one, get them to see your products. Goal number two, get them to give you their information, phone number, email address.

That's it. That's your only goal ever. So on the homepage, how do I get more people to the products? What if I put my categories in Instagram story, carousels right at the top? What if when they open my hamburger menu, I stick my best sellers up there? This image navigation, giant text, twenty to twenty-five point font, best sellers.

These little optimizations matter once you get somebody to actually shop your website. Harry's also doing navigation, also not taking up more than fifteen percent. So the big brands are paying attention. They're optimizing. They're finding the same things. Big brand, lots of products, mega menu. Mega menu.

Shop with images, shop by color, shop by category, shop by starting shade of hair. I have light blonde hair. Let people self-select. We call this the wizardification of e-commerce. Create wizards where people can select where-- who they are and how they fit in. I'm gonna show you how we do this with the dogs in just a second.

But mega menus are really important if you have a lot of products, and we can talk about how to optimize them in a good way. This is a real simple one. Most people do it now. We te-- All of the stuff I'm telling you guys, what made me famous in e-commerce was I split test. The reason I got started asking to speak at events way back in the day, first of all, I was one of the only people.

Second of all, I had data on what worked because I'm interested. I, I didn't start with money. Every little thing, I'm not above hard work. I will do whatever it takes, and, and I'm not done optimizing. I'm gonna continue to try to make it better, and that way I can make more money, and then I can make better products, and I can pay my team better, and I can kinda keep the flywheel going.

Sticky add to cart button on the product page, better than, than, in the header and better than not having it. Buy boxes. More examples of bundling in the buy box, unique selling propositions and ownership benefit statements in, in bullet format in the buy box, money-back guarantees in the buy box. Just examples that you've got to continually test and optimize your buy box.

- Basket builders. You know, when I, when I sold-- when I bought this company, there was this, plastic... It's like a, you know, it's like a thing that you set on your counter that elevates your product. It's just like a stand. It's like, why? Do y- You could set it on the counter. Like, do you have to put it on a stand?

But people love this thing. But it is single-use plastic. It's virgin resin plastic. I'm not that excited about it. So I split tested it against a cleaning kit. This cleaning kit outperformed considerably. "Hey, add this to your shopping cart." And the thing about basket builders is you can bundle them. "Hey, here's all my basket builders together that are relevant to your order.

Let me bundle them together." I make so much money on this basket builder, which is all things that were easy to manufacture, that have a high profit margin, that are relevant to the product that you're building. Basket builders are really, really wonderful. You should be running promotions. Every four to six weeks, you need to run a sale.

And the-- when it doesn't work is when you're running too many, and you don't warm the audience up first. You should have four to six major campaigns, six to ten micro offers, fifty to a hundred and fifty pieces of content, and five to ten live events, influencer live, Facebook Live, so on and so forth.

You've got to be doing more email marketing and SMS marketing than you think you should. You start by putting the big blocks in, your big sales, Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, back to school, the big ones, right? And then you fill it in with... And by the way, you can't just do a percentage off sale.

Buy one get one, buy one get one half off, live shopping discount, single item promos. The better your merchandising, the better you will do. He or she or they who merchandise the best will perform the best. So then after your big blocks, the big sales that are like four to six days or ten days or twelve days long, micro offers, twelve to twenty or twenty-four to forty-eight hour sales that are simple, tiny micro offers that go to your most engaged segments that all have specific and custom landing pages with them.

It's twenty-four hours only, fifteen percent off these three products. You can-- And I have a, a landing page builder called Zipify, that builds all these. You can copy 'em. Okay, so a little bit about email marketing. You're not sending enough, and your calendar isn't structured enough. And I have, I have another training that's an hour long that I did for Omnisend, free on the Omnisend website, where I go through this in detail.

If you're interested, you can go, go ask Omnisend about it. But it goes really detailed into how do you build out a merchandising calendar in a good way. Okay, quickly, this is a formula for a sales page. I have many, many sales page formulas. I'm happy to give you them. Start with this one. You open with a hook.

You get their attention. Then you introduce the problem. Problem, agitation, solutions, right? You introduce this is the problem that you're facing that you don't know about. It's, it's emotionally aligned with them. It, it feeds into whatever frustrations they're having. Then you introduce the product that solves the problem, and then you go really deep into why it's such an amazing product with features and benefits and so on and so forth.

And then you get into your testimonials. I'll give you these slides. You don't have to take pictures of them. And then you make your offer, and then so you obviously have a really good buy box, and then you offer a risk reversal and a guarantee and, and money back and stuff like that. And that is... Here's an example.

This, this is our brand. We just did a hundred K in the first sixty days of this brand. That's one sales page. Here's a buy box. You can see all the elements of the buy box that we're, that I've been talking to you about, the bundling, all that stuff. Here's another version of the sales page for the same product that we're split testing.

Here's another version of the buy box for the same product that we're split testing. So I will give you guys the formula for all of these different pages that you can then try to write your own version, then get AI to help you with it, and then design and code your own. But you got to be split testing a bunch of these.

You can't just try one. if you have a big brand and you're making a lot of money, you can put ads on your thank you page from like Verizon and Hulu and ESPN, and it doesn't get in the way of the buying. It doesn't get in the way of the upsells and the post-purchase upsells. It just makes you more money.

We're making hundreds of thousands of dollars a month for brands with these ads using Zipify. So Zipify is, the, the tool that can help you do this one-click upsell. You can see it over there. It's pretty incredible. It's just an easy... You just literally turn it on, and it starts making you money. So those were a bunch of things that, simple little things and, and I just touched on all of them because I have deeper in-depth trainings that are free.

I'm not trying to sell you anything. Would I love you to use Zipify? Yes. Would I love you to use Omnisend? Yes. But more important than that, I want you to have gotten some inspiration to know that you can do it, that it, that, that it's not a m-a magic m-magical pill. It's like you just stay at it. You just take the next step you can take in the direction of your goals.

You do the next thing you can think to do, and I'll give you the formulas and stuff, but I want to just sprinkle a bunch of things. Maybe you're doing some of these. You're not doing all of them. So I want to tell you a little story And that story is about power dynamics. So all the body parts were fighting for who should be in charge.

And the brain said, "Well, I should be in charge because I tell all of you what to do." And the arm said, "Well, I should be in charge 'cause I grab the food and put it in the mouth, and without me, you can't eat." And the eyes said, "Well, I should be in charge because I see, you know, what, I-- without me, we can't see."

And the legs were like, "Well, clearly I should be in charge because I walk us around this earth." And then the asshole stopped up for two weeks And everybody agreed the asshole was in charge. And so why am I telling you that? Well, you see this in politics across both, both sides of the line. If you are a big enough asshole, you can amass a lot of power.

The problem with that is anger, conflict, those are poisons that kill the vessel that is holding them. And so a better strategy, if the goal is to-- I've been in this industry for twenty years now, and I've seen people burn out, and I've seen people burn bridges, and I've seen people have crazy fights and conflicts with their business partners and employees.

If you have the goal... People say leave the place better than you found it. I think leave the people better than you found them. Make the next lov-- most loving move you can make. Do the next best thing that is in alignment with your moral compass. And if you are that kind of person, that is compelling.

People will want to work with you. People will want to support you. People will ask you to speak at their events. Like you could be... And, and you'd be shocked at how uncommon it is that people have their goal to be, "How can I take care of the people around me?" And so that is a winn-- The, the thing about business is that it's actually not about the product or the marketing.

Yes, you have to do that well. It's can you coalesce a group of people? Can you have a group of people stay together, rallied around a common goal? The longer you can do that, the more your success and your chance of success is bringing a group together, keeping them together. And you know what, dude? Enjoy your life now.

Your daughter could die. You could get hit by a bus. You don't fucking know. You could get sick. If you are not enjoying your life, what are you doing? We don't have that much time around here. And so figure out even if you have to work hard, and even if you've got responsibilities, and even if you, are starting, you know, far back from where other people are starting because everybody has their starting place, and it's not all the same.

The way to do it, this is how you do it. This is the formula. You look around, and you find something in your life that you can approve of, and you approve of it. One thing, and you enjoy that thing. And they teach this at the Buddhist monasteries. They make you cut the grass with the scissors, and you're cutting the grass, and you're like, "This is stupid."

And then you like feel the wind, and you hear the birds, and you notice that what matters in any situation is the amount of attention and intention that you bring to it, that you get to look around and decide where you're going to put your attention. So you get to basically decide what you're perceiving by what you decide to put your attention on, and then you get to judge those perceptions.

You get to decide, was the thing good or was the thing bad? You could look around and find more things good. You could be grateful that you have an able body, that you have an able mind, that you have enough money to spend a weekend talking about how to make your business better. If you approve of your life, and if you're willing to be gratified by and willing to enjoy your life, it's very compelling because it's very popular to be miserable, to be unhappy, to be a cynic.

That is what is popular. That is what, you know, the, the, the sophisticated people, they're, you know, shitting on things. But if you just enjoy your world, you'll have a better world, and you'll be more compelling, and you will make more money, which is what you came here to do, because you'll be more fun to be around.

So anyhow, I think, you know, you don't have to lose a kid to learn this lesson, and I, I mean, I, I was doing this before, but much more so since my daughter. So it really is more important than anything is are you enjoying what you're doing, and that actually is your choice. You could choose to enjoy it, and then it would be more fun, and people would wanna be around you more.

So, you can go to omnisend.com/ezra, save some money on Omnisend, big fan of them, and you can go to zipify.com/bfcm, to learn all about Zipify and all the offers. We got all kinds of stuff. We'll build your upsells. We'll help you out with Black Friday. We'll do all kinds of stuff for you and, I hope you've enjoyed this.

Thank you for your time. Peace out.

It's, it's always good to kick off with you, dog. Hey, can you guys, can you guys do that again for my Instagram? Nah, nah, nah. You lost it. No, it's fake

Thank you so much. Well, let's, let's get a couple of, of questions coming in here. First off, Ezra, thank you for, for being here, brother. I appreciate the time, effort, and energy and all the examples. The examples are, are big time. So any questions for the Ez? We're only gonna do a couple just because I took too long in getting him up here, but let's let these start flowing in As, as you start having conversations right now across the audience, is there anything that you're like running new tests on but that are not conclusive on any of the current brands?

Any tests you're running that are inconclusive but interesting? Dude, we're running... We run so many tests and, one of the ones we're running right now is s- is like, what would happen if you replaced all the images on your site with just video? What if you just had sales videos and you had no images, just straight video pages?

You land on the page, it's a video. And we've got one brand where it's actually working really well, where basically it's like old school direct response, sales letter where it's literally just a video and a button. That's it. That is the only site, is a video and a button, and that is out converting a traditional page.

So yeah, I mean, that's one. I don't know. I can't think of any off the top of my head, but we got a bunch going. And the key really is like more so than like something like that is messaging, hooks, angles. You could find one hook. We found a hook. Here's an example, Shaq. We found a hook. So, so, an experience...

This is a really good example. An experience that women in one of our brand's demographics report is they look in the mirror and they don't recognize themselves. This is a, a brand that sells to women over fifty-five. And th- and that, we only found that out by interviewing a bunch of them, and then that is now our best hook.

It's like a woman... It's literally the image of her looking in the mirror, and then it's talking about it, and it goes to a sales page talking about that because it resonates with an experience they actually had, which goes back to this idea that your brand is a group of people who are sharing collective experiences, and if you can communicate with them about those experiences through content and touch on them and then offer them solutions to the problems they face or things they're interested in, then you will win.

And you only need one. You need one... Yes, you got to test a bunch, but like that one angle could be worth eight figures to us because it's, it's real. So you got to figure out like what are the experiences people are having, and then how can you comment on them? I feel you on that. Thank you. How much equity do you give up when establishing any of these new brands?

Okay, so this is a good question. In general, I need to own between fifteen and thirty percent of a company or I don't want to be a part of it. Ideally, more like thirty because by the time you have to think about it and work on it and invest in it and strategize with it, if you own less than ten percent at the time of a sale, it's like not worth it.

And so our companies all have a ten percent pool for our employees. So basically, if you're an employee and you're like a high level, C level or whatever, we've got ten percent of equity that we give for that group of people, and we distribute some to the CEO and some to the COO. So that's like the equity pool for employees.

When I'm going to buy or build a company I'm happy to give up... Like Smart Marketer, I gave up 70%, but Molly and John and Papine, they do a wonderful job. They run it. They operate it. I'm, I'm just a navigator. So Chris and I, I think we only, we own 45% each and we have someone who owns 10. I got another Amazon company, I only own 20.

Safe Sleep, I think I only own 15 or 20. So I, I, I feel like if you don't own between... Let's call it between 10 and 30, unless there's some- Like Navage. Navage is a $100 million company. I don't own 10, 10 of that. I own close to it, but it's like, okay, that's a big one, and, and the check I had to write to get into it was really big.

So, so it depends on the size of the company, but I really like to have... And I will never do another brand without a business partner ever again. It's so much better when you have somebody to collaborate with and so much more fun. And yes, you run into conflict, but it's like if you can't navigate conflict, well, you're not gonna do well in business anyway.

So I think minimum ownership you want is 20%. Feel you. Oh, someone called me the GOAT. That's fun. Yeah, John Chen, good, good man out there. Do you, do you have a checkout on your landing pages or do they lead to home PDP? What was that, Dan? that first one. Do you have the checkout on your landing pages or do they land to the homepage or PDP usually?

Which, which one? Any of them. Do I have the checkout on the landing page? Do you have the checkout on your landing page? Okay. All of my traffic goes... Unless it's like somebody abandoned cart and we send them direct to checkout, all my traffic goes to homepages, PDPs, pre-sales that you then add a product to the cart, and I don't skip the cart.

I do upsells in the cart. I'm, I am a slider cart guy, so all of our products go into a cart. Thank you. Sorry, I didn't realize they were there, man. I could have just fucking... Yeah. Sorry. It's okay. It's my fault. Do you notice sticky add to cart works on an educational pre-lander even prior to agitation or product showcase?

You notice sticky add to cart works on an educational pre-lander even pr- No. No. Usually on our pre-sales we will go from a pre-sale to a PDP mostly. Mostly we'll go from a pre-sale to a PDP. Although I'll say in the dog company, those are pre-sales that's just add to cart

I'm done. I'm done, right? All right. Ezra, thank you very much. He's a long-winded man. A round of applause for Ezra. I know I'm talking shit. I appreciate it. Let's go, Ezra