#TBT - eCommerce Is Changing - Here's How To Compete and Win w/ Ezra Firestone

Two clicks out of the newsfeed and you have a brand asset that is super valuable because the next time you run a launch, the next time you introduce a new product, the next time you have anything to say to anyone about your brand, you have an audience to whom you can say it to who will listen. They're a Facebook messenger subscriber.

Hey, capitalists. In traditional throwback Thursday Fashion Week, we're re releasing one of our most popular episodes that we've had on capitalism dot com. Enjoy. This week we are leaking a talk from one of our audience's favorite speakers at the Capitalism conference, Ezra Firestone. There is no one better to talk to about the future of marketing than the Internet marketing futurist himself, ezra. He runs smartmarketer.com as well as several multimillion dollar physical products businesses. And they're all built on the back of Facebook traffic and modern digital strategies. Ezra has become a pioneer at using Facebook messenger as a form of modernized email marketing to promote products, increase sales and build an audience. In this talk, Ezra reveals just how he grew one of his businesses to over $25 million and in just 12 months. And how you can use Internet advertising and new technology to grow your business.

Capitalism Conference, let's give it up for Ryan Daniel Moran.

My viewpoint is that where it's at in life is in relationships, community, people. I think that is ultimately where you will get fulfillment. It's ultimately where you will find happiness. You know, external validation, markers of success with relationship to how well your production cycle goes. Those are cool. But ultimately that's not what it's about. So my name is Ezra Firestone. I lead a team of 70 people now. We'll do about 27 million in revenue this year. We are all direct response, meaning we don't, we never took any VC funding. I'm just some random dude, you know, off of a couch in Brooklyn who just fell in love with marketing and learned how to do it pretty well. And I'm going to share with you what I do. We're all virtual also, by the way. We don't have an office. So we are various systems and processes oriented so that we can run a virtual company. This is my revenue yesterday, here's last month and this is year to date for one of my brands. We'll do about 27 million couple million more this year from this brand. And the other 7 million or so will come from my business that sells digital trainings to help folks like you grow their business and software as a service. Now, I don't show you this because I want to look fancy and cool. I show it to you just so that you know, like I actually know how to do this stuff Right. In our business, the way that you demonstrate you know what you're doing is you show that you've made money. So there you go. Now that the social proof and authority section of the conversation is over, let's do some content. All right. More than half of the world now uses a smartphone, which is kind of amazing. Let's take a look at China. China is the world's largest e commerce market with 1 trillion in revenue from e commerce in 2016, up from 672 million in 2015 and expected to explode and hit 2 trillion by 2019. We can learn a lot from the one economy that is larger than ours when it comes to e commerce.

China has a population of 1.38 billion people with 721 million Internet users. For America, we'll only do about 396 billion, 324 million population, 286 million Internet users.

What do those stats mean for you? Well, when we look at China and we look at where America is going, it means mobile. 65% of shopping that's happening in China is happening on mobile. And it's on average once per month they're buying on mobile and they're not just buying on their mobile devices, but they're buying within one application, WeChat, which is sort of China's version of Facebook messenger, which is what this presentation is ultimately going to be about. I'm going to get into how you can use Facebook messenger to grow your business. I got some other stuff I want to tell you first. So it's time to be aggressive about mobile optimization and mobile strategy and understanding the way that people consume the digital medium dictates how we are going to communicate with them because they're consuming and we want to get in front of them. So if we're paying attention to how they're consuming, we can better get in front of them. Now, I advocate for consistent investment. That's sort of my thesis is none of you are investing enough in your brand. And at the end of this presentation, I'm going to tell you how much of your top line revenue you should be investing in your brand. That's called an open loop. It's designed to pique your curiosity and have you stay interested all the way till the end. Let me know how it works. Okay, come tell me. I got a booth out here. You can come talk to me. So I advocate for consistent Investment.

Build the snowball, put more in. You get out of your business what you put into it. And I think you should be as smart as possible with your investment. Create the best assets possible for your brand. There's three assets that I want you to create. There's three assets that I want you to generate for your Amazon brand. Did you know, and I'm going to tell you what they are in a minute. Did you know that 67% of consumers start shopping on one device and continue on another? Two thirds of consumers start a shopping experience on one device and continue it on another. People are moving to bigger devices to make purchase decisions. They're starting out on mobile because you're on your mobile phone all the time. You're on it in the bathroom, you're on it everywhere. And then you save the stuff you like and you make your purchase decision on an iPad or a desktop. Quick little win. If you're buying advertising, which I am going to, this presentation is going to be about how you can buy advertising for your business more effectively. So mimic user behavior. If we know that people are starting on mobile and converting on desktop and we're running ads and we're on a budget, run your awareness ads, that is, ads to people who don't know about you yet, only on mobile phones, and then run your retargeting ads on tablet and desktop, because that's the user behavior, that's what people are doing. You'll be way more profitable. You cut your cost per acquisition in half. And then when you scale, you can scale out to all devices that make sense. Yeah, it's a cool little tip. All right, so here are the three main problems that I see with people who try to buy ads. Now, ultimately, I want to share with you a sales process for your Amazon business, but I first have to get your advertising up to par. So big problem number one, people target way too broadly. They don't understand that you have to put your message in front of the right group of people if you want them to respond to it right. You can't put like a pro Trump ad in front of a Hillary supporter. It's not going to work. You need the right group of people. So let's look at a couple ways that you can do that. Because the success of the amplification of your business, which is the only business I know how to grow, and I think it's the most predictable business model. Now, Amazon's great, but Amazon owns your business. Amazon is cash flow. Amazon is not an asset. It's just money. That you're making. But Amazon owns those customers. They own that listing. They can knock you down at any time you want to use that cash flow. Still the best place to start a business, by the way, and a wonderful business model. But you want to use that money that you're making on Amazon to invest in amplification. And the success of your amplification hinges on your ability to target. So the big issue for most folks is specificity. So let's cover a few tips about targeting for ads. The first is to use interest and behavior stacking. Now, when I got started back in the day, all we had was search visibility, meaning someone's typing in a query dog bowl. Now we have contextual visibility. We actually had contextual visibility back then, but we like had one data point on a user. We knew the website they were visiting. So we could say, someone's on a website about cats, let's show them an ad about cats. Now we have thousands of data points on every user thanks to Facebook Multi data point contextual targeting. So we want to take those data points and we want to stack them. Here's what it looks like. I want people who have. This is actually one of my best targeting groups for new people who don't know about me yet. So if you're in the beauty, skincare, cosmetics world, try this targeting group. People who have purchased a cosmetic product in the past and purchased a fitness product. Both of those. I'm stacking two demographic data points on top of one another and saying, give me the cross section of people who meet both of these data points points. I'm not saying I want these people and these people. I'm saying I want. We could talk to Montana later. You know, start with the people who are most likely to respond.

The other thing is, certain placements perform better. For example, for us, iPads across the board are our most profitable placement. Especially when we say only when connected to Wi fi, which means someone is sitting down. So think about this. People who bought a cosmetic product and a fitness product in the past who are women who are over 45 who are in California who are on an iPad. There's not a lot of scale there. But you know what? There is profit. You're going to find profit somewhere. If you target properly, then as you're making money and your Amazon business is growing, you're sending these people over to Amazon or wherever you're sending them. Then you take that money and you reinvest it in scaling, right? But you people say, my advertising didn't work and it's like you just didn't advertise to the right group of people and we're going to talk about the next big problem. The other thing is, if you don't, if you have an audience, right, like let's say you have a fan, a set of fans, or you have people who bought from you, or you got a bunch of phone numbers of people who bought from you in the past, you can upload those as a group of people and create a lookalike audience. I'm a big fan of running video advertisements. I'm going to show you some notes about video ads in a moment. So what I like to do is make an audience of people who watch 95% of my video. So let's say I advertised a video to women over 45 who bought a cosmetic product. Facebook lets me create a group of the people who watch 95% of that video. Now I can create a lookalike audience here, a lookalike audience of the people who watch the most videos. So now I'm saying, facebook, give me the people who look the most like the folks who watched 95% of my video. It's another way to get attention for your brand and have it be targeted. The big problem, another really big problem from visibility is the lack of use of multichannel retargeting. Most people are generating visibility on Facebook. But once someone visits your website, once someone engages with you, you can target them everywhere they go on the Internet. So you should be using Pinterest to retarget people. You should be using Google to retarget people. You should be using YouTube to retarget people. So once someone has visited your site, and I'm going to show you how to filter people through a website to Amazon in a moment, then you follow them around with ads from YouTube, from Pinterest, from all these other places. And you know what? Those are profitable. Now. You don't have to figure out how to be profitable on Google. You can just say, only target the folks who came from Facebook. And you're still targeting them on Facebook later, but you're also targeting them on additional channels, if that makes sense. Second problem that I see with people who run ads is selling the click, actually getting people to click on the ad or engage with the ad. Sup my right side of the room. How you guys doing?

That was. That was kind of nice. It was sort of harmonic, you know, bit like a choir. It's sort of like drafted, selling the click. I like to use upper and lower thirds on my image ads. So I actually put big giant text on the image ad, less than 20% of the image. It works really well, right? It works really, really well. It gives you an additional headline for people to read. The other thing that I do on my image ads that I found to work really well is the use of cartoons and faces. Some reason people like to click on other people's faces. I don't know what it is, but it's a thing and I make them really stand out quite a lot. Right now, everyone now is running these problem solution video ads. Like, oh man, you dropped your phone in your car. Stick this little leather pocket in it. Now when you drop your phone, you can reach in and grab it, right? Problem solution, that's the video. I would advocate for a longer form video. Because some people will sit down and watch like 7 minutes of content about your brand. So why not give them the opportunity? Show the problem, show the solution. Stick a customer testimonial in there. Just make the video longer, make it five minutes, seven minutes. Because the people who watch and consume longer are more likely to go to Amazon and buy your product. And if you're going to spend the money on ads anyways, why not give people the opportunity to watch longer 7 minute videos? I call them long form stacked videos. Because you're stacking like a problem solution, a customer testimonial, a lifestyle story, all of these things that we know about. Use square video. So when you're on a mobile phone, instead of rectangles, you can have your video editor edit the video so that it's a square. It takes up a lot more real estate on the mobile phone and it'll perform better. The other thing that we've been doing is GIF videos. So once someone engages with us, we retarget them with like a three second video. But it's just a GIF image. It's like a GIF image that you know what, it's GIF or gif. Anyone know gif? This is a heated debate, GIF or gif. I'll go with gif because this lady was like serious about it. So a GIF is basically just an image that moves and these work really, really well to recapture someone's attention once they've seen one of your ads. The other thing that we do is our first level of ads that you see from us about our brand are very aggressive. They're loud, they've got cartoons on them, they're these long videos. But then once you've engaged with us, and by the way, on average someone needs Three to five touch points before they're willing to purchase. So you're gonna need to re engage people with advertising. I'm gonna show you how to do it. Once you've engaged with us, once all of our advertising becomes brand specific, right? So once we've gotten your attention, then we are doing branding, then we're talking about our, you know, ethos and what we believe. And all of our colors are similar. And one of the things that we found recently for products is once a user has visited your product, if you show that product on a colored paper backdrop, these ads across many markets right now are doing super well. You might want to take a screenshot of this, see if you can get someone to do product imagery for your website or product imagery for your ads like this. It's essentially just a colored paper backdrop, basically. And they work really, really well for re engaging people in a conversation about your products.

There's only three goals of every ad. Frame the prospect, get them to consume your story if it's a video, and get them to click. That's like what you're trying to do with the ad. So those are a few tips on how to have your ads perform better. Now here's the problem that we came to discuss. Post, click engagement. Post engagement. Selling. So once someone has clicked, getting them to engage with the sales page or sales message or sales process, and once they've engaged with the sales process, getting them to buy. So that's what I'm going to share with you. Let's review quickly the game that we're playing as business owners. Right? So I gave you a few tips on how to target people, how to have ads that'll get their attention. But ultimately you need a sales process that's going to be effective. So the game that we're playing as business owners is pretty simple. We are building a relationship with another human being around a collective experience. So every brand is talking to a group of people around an experience they're having. That's like what your brand does, right? And that experience probably relates to a problem they're having that your product solves. Our goal is to build some intimacy, build some relatedness, deliver value to that human. It's a person that you're dealing with here. It's not like a number on a screen, you know, and ultimately have that value. Include a product offering, right? That's the game. So what your business is is really just a group of people. That's all. Every business is a group of people and multiple communication mediums. You have a Group of people. And you're communicating with them in a bunch of different ways now. First it was only email. Back in the day, when I thought about my brand, I thought about my email list. The problem with Amazon is you don't even get that right. So I want you to create these assets. Number one email lists. Then after emails, it was Pixel bliss. I remember it was around 2010, 2011. This idea that someone didn't have to join your email list for you to communicate with them again was mind blowing. It was like, wait a minute, I didn't even understand it at first. Like, what do you mean they don't have to join my email list for me to be able to talk to them again? Pixel lists. What these are is someone visits your website now you can say, show this ad to this person on Google, on YouTube, on Facebook, etc. Because they visited this page. It's called a Pixel audience. It is an amazing brand asset. So the second thing I want you to be able to generate are pixeled lists. Because what I notice when I deal with Amazon business owners is they don't have brand assets. So that's what I want for you. I want brand assets for you. Because then you can go back and you can communicate with that group of people, make them additional offers and sell more product, then have more money to invest in things like better customer service, better product, perhaps charitable endeavors, or whatever you think is cool, you know. So pixel list was the next thing. Well, now, and those really are still the two big ones. That's like when you think of a brand, it's emails and ads. That's how you communicate with your group of people. Right? There's now a third one, Facebook messenger lists. This is really like, man, the opportunity of Google AdWords. When I got started, that was sort of the ad source and search engine optimization was the visibility source of the day. Then it was Facebook, then Instagram, and then the Amazon. Private labeling was like sort of a business opportunity that was around right now. And there's always a new opportunity, by the way. You've never missed the boat. E commerce is growing by 23% year over year. And it's just like going straight up. Partly because the millennial generation is coming into their prime spending years and we don't have have a technology adoption curve. Baby boomers, Gen X, Gen Y, they were all afraid to buy online. They were worried about technology. So it took a while to get them to adopt online purchasing less Millennials become the driving force of the economy. They've got no problem Spending money online. So it's going to continue to grow.

There's always a new opportunity. And right now the opportunity is with Facebook messenger lists. It's cheap, it's easy, it's free. It's not going to be this way. You got six, I was saying 12 to 18 months, like six months ago, you got like six to nine months to do this. Still got a good window, but now is the time. So a Messenger bot, which is what we're going to be using to build this audience, essentially is a software program that's designed to simulate human conversation through written text. Basically, you message and they reply back and they're going to be everywhere. They're going to be how you book travel, they're going to be how you get restaurants, they're going to be how you select an Uber. They're going to be how you get your date. Like this is the future of communication. And if we look at your iPhone now, you've got 100 apps on there. They're all consolidating down into Facebook messenger and Apple iMessage. Apple missed the boat. They didn't open up their API for imessage. Facebook did it first. That's why they're winning this race. Inside of Facebook messenger in New York City, you can order your food, you can order your Uber can do all of this within one messaging app. Just like China's WeChat, Apple is going to open. You already saw with the new update, Apple has a bunch of stuff you can do in messenger now. So they're making the jump to opening up that API. You know where this is leading? This is leading to integrated social commerce. The idea, basically, websites are going away. A user's going to consume content and they're going to make a purchase right inside their social experience. Wherever they're consuming that content, they're going to make that purchase. Inside of YouTube, inside of Facebook, one click purchases from the newsfeed. This is where we're moving. So you need to be present in this communication channel, which is Messenger. I'm going to show you how to do that. So Facebook Messenger's funnels to grow your e commerce business. The goal? Make sales. I'm always trying to make sales. That's what I want to do. I see money as a form of energy. I see wealth creation as the ability to generate surplus and then use that surplus for things that I think are cool in the world, you know, and we are like a weird group of people. There's not very many of us who are paying attention to how to broadcast messages to other groups of people and engage them in conversations and engage them in sales cycles and ultimately result in the growth of businesses, which results in surplus energy, money, whatever you want, however you want to look at that, that you can deploy to places that you think are valuable. Right? So I'm always trying to make sales and that's what these funnels are about. Increasing your Amazon rankings, another goal that we have, Getting reviews, another goal that we have, and growing your audiences. Messenger subscribers, email subscribers, and pixel audiences. I'm going to show you, as I break down these sales processes, how those are being generated along the way. So funnel number one. Now, you'll notice that if you've been hanging out with me for any amount of time, you've seen similar sales processes. But every one of these sales processes that you're about to look at starts with paid amplification. That is buying visibility for your offer, which is what I like to do because it's scalable and it's consistent and you can count on it. And it starts with generating the brand asset of a Facebook messenger subscriber. Then it goes on to get email addresses and pixel lists and stuff like that. So number one, page post comment funnel. So it starts with a page post on your Facebook fan page. I think Ryan might give you these slides. You have to ask them for them. If not, you can take pictures and stuff. It starts with a page post on your Facebook fan page. This is what that post looks like. It's literally just a post on your fan page that has an image and some text. Amazon sale. Notice that I've got bracketed caps at the start of that post. We found that that gets more readership. Comment yes, on this post and we'll private message you a special deal on our product. Notice that we have emojis separating the bullets. We've also found that that increases readership. Notice that there's social proof and a hero shot of the image in the ad. Social proof for the Amazon stars. You can see the hero side of the image. You can see the unique, unique selling point propositions here in image format in the image as well. Being like, we're organic, we care about you, we're awesome. Okay, so this is on your Facebook fan page. Then a user, you, you put that post out there. You target people like we talked about with it. A user comments on that post. You may have seen Ryan Moran doing this lately. We had a chat about it a while back.

Where you comment on his post and he responds via Messenger. So user comments on the Post, they say yes because you told them to comment yes on the post. Now, actually, it doesn't matter what they comment. I like to use positive words like yes or win or hoorah or whatever. Hoo. We, whatever you want. You know, something cool, something that gets people excited. User comments on that. This has a side benefit, by the way. Tell you about in just a second. Now, we use a tool called manychat.m a n Y C H A T. Full disclosure, I'm an investor in this company, but I was using that before I was an investor. I was using it because I thought it was awesome. And then I liked them. I liked where their heads were at. I liked their business model. And I was like, they asked me to invest, so I did.

So basically, inside a manychat, you can do something called a growth tool, where basically you select the post in question and then you say, when someone comments on that post, automatically reply to them in Messenger. So. So when a user comments on the post, we send an automatic reply. It's super easy to set up a manychat. Hey, Ezra, you're almost there. Just reply to this message with the word coupon and I'll private message you the coupon code for Amazon. The user replies, they say coupon, at which time we use something called a keyword automation. Also in Manychat, I think Manychat's free or it's like 10 bucks a month or something. A keyword automation. And what that does is it says when someone messages my fan page with the word coupon, say this back. So when this keyword comes in, respond with X. So then, by the way, as soon as they send you that message, they're a Facebook messenger subscriber. You've generated a brand asset that is significantly higher value than an email subscriber. I'll tell you the exact number at the end of this presentation. Also another open loop.

You guys doing all right? Too fast. Write speed. Following me. Cool. They become a Facebook messenger subscriber, which is an asset that you want to generate for your brand, because you can communicate with people via Facebook messenger for the next year or so for free. And they actually open it like a text message. Think about the intimacy of the way people communicate is messaging. You text your friends, you text your significant others, you have your most intimate conversations via text. Most of the time. Facebook messenger, like, this is a really intimate communication medium, and it's one that you've got to be respectful of. I'm going to show you how in a moment, but it's a really awesome opportunity. And Facebook is looking for a way to make more money. So they've opened this up to marketers. Let's not ruin it. Let's be cool about it. You know, marketers have in the past had a reputation of ruining new technology. We don't want to do that to this one. So they become a messenger subscriber. Now. You can talk to them, you can send them Facebook messages, which is a privilege and an opportunity.

Now we respond.

Saying, hey, congratulations, you've accessed our 75% off deal. By the way, I'm a huge advocate of still running coupon deals on Amazon for 75% off, 60% off, 50% off, 90% off. I've seen no negative effect of doing that. I'm not incentivizing them to leave a review. I'm just boosting my sales velocity, I'm boosting my sales rank. And I think that 10% of your overall marketing budget should be reinvested in essentially what used to be giveaway campaigns today. So you could link from here directly to Amazon. The Amazon only version ends there. You got a Facebook messenger subscriber. You link to Amazon through whatever kind of special URL you want with a coupon code in that Facebook message. Or you could do what I do, which is I send them to an opt in page that gets their email address and as soon as they visit this page, now I have them on a pixel audience. Now I have a second brand asset. They've now visited a webpage of mine and I'm asking for their email address and then I'm delivering the coupon with instructions. That's another way to do it. But if you want to do it simple, you just have the page, the post on the Facebook page that tells them to comment, that replies to them with the link over to get your product on Amazon. The beauty of these posts is Facebook doesn't know how to determine that this is a page post amplification. So basically, they're going to give you at least 30% of your traffic for free because everyone's commenting on this post. I have some posts that are generating like 80,000 views for free because a bunch of people start commenting on it, Facebook's like, oh, this must be valuable. And now you're getting right now, in any good market, an email subscriber, like for example, in the market that you're in, where I'm trying to get you to show up to one of my webinars that shares with you strategies I have for how to grow your business cost me like six bucks. An email address. In markets that are not as highly competitive, it's like $2. An email address here you're getting a Facebook messenger subscriber for around about 30, 40 cents. And it's worth a lot more than an email address. Number two, Facebook messenger comment funnel. To do a straight sale. This the previous one, we were trying to give our product away at a discount to boost our bsr. Now we're trying to straight up sell a product. Here's how we do it. Same page, post comment.

Starting point where we've got a post on our fan page, but we're using a video this time instead of an image. Because a video sells better, right? A video sells better, so it's still a post on your fan page. Notice that we've got the emojis. Notice that we've got a border around the video. If you're not putting borders around your videos, it'll increase the effectiveness of your video advertising. We used to do borders around our image ads and one day I thought, why don't we do borders around our videos? I bet you that would work. Square format worked a lot. Notice that we did a text overlay. This is that lower third I was talking about. We don't just do that on images, we do it on videos too. Comment yes on this post and we'll private message you a 50% off coupon one day. Only.

User comments on the post. Yes, they want it. We use a ManyChat growth tool to auto reply to them. Hey, this is the what the growth tool looks like. You select the post and then you put your message in there. Hey, you just unlocked our secret discount. Respond to this message with the word honey and we'll give you a link for 50% off. Now you can do 20% off, 10% off. We are still profitable at 50% off. So this is still a straight sale.

Once they respond to that message with the word honey, we. So we send them this, right? This thing you were looking at. Hey, respond to this, by the way. Use. People can't spell. It turns out this is not like a negative value judgment against people. It's just a total description of my experience. Use words that are simple, you know, super simple. Like honey is a little too advanced.

Dude, I'm telling you. Look, I'll show you. We put in like honey. Honey. Because people don't spell it right. We had one that was sweetheart. We were getting things like sweatshirt, you know what I mean? Like, you gotta just like use simple words. Give is a good one, right? So the user responds as soon as they respond. They're a Facebook messenger subscriber now. We can broadcast to them at a later date and remarket to them. We generated a brand asset in a sales process for a very small amount of money. It's. I generated an email list of about 150,000 life coaches in around 2004 for about 30, 40 cents. An email list. This is the equivalent of that. This is like that opportunity is there for you now. So now the only difference between this one and the last one is the last one we said, okay, sweet, go straight to Amazon or okay, sweet, go to a page where you can enter your email address to get a super high discount for our product. In this one, we send them a message. By the way, these messages can contain sales copy. So as soon as they comment, honey. So as soon as they reply, okay, Facebook page post says comment yes. On this post to get a deal, they comment. Yes. We pop up a message that says, reply to this message with the word give to get your deal, they reply. They're now a Facebook messenger subscriber. We send them this message. Notice that this is a long sales cycle. Commitment and consistency. If you can get someone to take a couple actions, they're more likely to follow through with ultimately buying your product. So it's okay that the sales cycle is long. Congratulations, you've unlocked our secret sale. Available for 24 hours only 50% off our all natural skincare product. Click here to get access. Now at this time we send them to a long form sales page. This is as soon as they hit this page. Now we have another asset. What is that asset? Pixel Bliss. Now we have them in an audience where we can retarget them with ads. Notice some direct response elements on this page for those of you conversion rate optimization specialists. Countdown timer consistent with the time frame that we told them they had. Which, by the way, I have a tool that lets you do this so it stays proper.

Isolation effect on the call to action button. There's this concept called the isolation effect, which is a color of your call to action button should be the only time that color is on the page. So it really pops. Long form, left, right content. Now from here you could link this directly over to Amazon. Some of my students link their long form sales page right to their Amazon listing and people go and buy on Amazon and they have the little Coupon code for 20% off or whatever it is. The goal of the sales page is to sell the product. So you're actually trying to make a sale here. You've got a sales video, you've got a sales page, you're leading to Amazon. The only difference is you're generating the brand asset of a Facebook messenger subscriber first and you're doing it for cheap. And if you're like me, you can go to your own shopping cart. You can do things like upsells, you can do a traditional e commerce play, but you don't have to. You can go straight to Amazon now. Third of four funnels. Facebook JSON ad. This is a little bit better because it's two clicks to generate a Facebook messenger subscriber. That is, this is my version of a click. Okay? Apparently, I don't know why I did so. The beauty of the other ad format is it creates organic visibility, right? People are commenting on that post, it's getting seen for free. This one doesn't do that, but this one on that one, they have to comment on the post, then reply to a message to become a subscriber. Comment and reply. This one, they have to click the ad and click the message. It's a lot simpler. So check it out. We have what's called a JSON ad, which is easy to set up in manychat. Basically, it's an ad that says, click on this ad and I'll private message you a deal. User clicks on the ad, we automatically message them. We say, sweet, by the way, this is what it looks like inside of manychat. You set up what you want the response to be. It says, hey, thanks so much for your interest in our product. Click here if you'd like to get access to it. So when a user clicks on that ad.

This pops up. Hey, thanks so much for your interest. It pops up, opens Messenger. When they click the ad, all they have to do is click this button. And now they're a Facebook messenger subscriber. And I'm going to attempt to iterate. I'm going to attempt to convince you of the value of generating an audience of Facebook messenger subscribers over the next six to nine months in your business. It should be one of your focuses. I'll do it at the end of the presentation. I'll give you some stats on it. So as soon as they click that, they're now a Messenger subscriber. Two clicks out of the news feed and you have a brand asset that is super valuable because the next time you run a launch, the next time you introduce a new product, the next time you have anything to say to anyone about your brand, you have an audience to whom you can say it to who will listen. They're a Facebook messenger subscriber. And then you can link to Amazon. You can link to a sales page with copy, you can do whatever kind of sales process you want. We link to another type of special item offer page which will either go to Amazon or go to your own checkout. Some of my students link directly to Amazon from that. So it's the same as the last funnel. It's just a JSON ad which is two clicks to become a Facebook messenger subscriber rather than a page post comment funnel. I know this is kind of technical. Don't worry. I've got some inspirational stuff at the end. And you could do a traditional, you know, e commerce play. But check this out. 4,000 people clicked the JSON ad, right? And I pay like 50 cents a click, okay? 67% of them said give me access. Which means 67% of them became Facebook messenger subscribers. 2,731 people became Facebook messenger subscribers for about 80 cents each. And look at the. When you say you're going to see in a second when you send an email to Facebook messenger people, by the way, this is an email to Facebook. It's a broadcast. Look at the open rate. 2,600 people clicked that thing. I sent it to 6,000 people. 2600 people clicked it. If you have an email list, you know that to get 2,600 clicks on of an email, you need about 30,000 people on an email list, maybe more, maybe 50,000. So but notice that we say, hey, I've got this thing for you. Can I send it to you? Yes or no? This is an intimate communication medium. You have to give people a way to opt out. So you can see a lot of people say, no, no, not right now. Because they're not expecting brands to communicate with them. So when they say, no, not right now, we say, okay, sweet, here it is for later. And then a lot of people click on it later and we also give them the option to unsubscribe. So you want to be delicate about using this medium to communicate. Last place to use Facebook Messenger. And this one's a really, really. If you have an e commerce website, I had to show this one because it's working really well. People who visited your shopping cart but didn't buy, it's called a bottom of funnel event. It's all the way at the bottom of your sales process. They visited your shopping cart, they didn't buy. We've seen a cost per acquisition reduction of 30%. It used to be like 10 bucks to make a sale from someone who visited our cart and didn't buy. Or someone who clicked from, in your case, maybe clicked from a Facebook ad over to Amazon and never bought. Or you know, it'll decrease the amount you're paying to generate a sale. So here's what it is. This is our sales process. It's pretty wild. I got a webinar that breaks it all down. But I want you to focus on this part right here, the shopping cart. Someone makes it to your e commerce website. They make it to your shopping cart. They don't buy. You create. So Facebook works like this. Campaigns, ad sets, ads. A campaign is where you tell Facebook the objective that you have and set the budget. The ad set is where you tell them who you want to target. Women in California. And then the ad is the actual piece of creative that you put in front of that group of people. So in this case, our campaign objective is a Facebook message. So we create a campaign in Facebook. We say the objective is Facebook messages. We then set it up so that when a user clicks that ad, this is now in the ad set level. It's going to click to Messenger. It's not going to go to a URL. You say facebook, when someone clicks this ad, have it go to messenger. Tell them who you want to target. In my case, it's anyone who visited my shopping cart and didn't purchase, who's a woman in the United States over 45. That's the group that I want to target. And then you create looks like that. Include people who visited the cart, exclude people who bought. Right. And you can get a Facebook person to help you if you give them these slides or show them these pictures. It's pretty easy to set up tech wise. Then you set up your ad. You've got your image, you've got your text, you've got your call to action, Right? So this is what the ad is going to look like. Hey, limited, you know, someone visited your cart, then they're floating around on Facebook. Hey, limited, time discount. Click this ad and we'll private message you 10% off. Or you can ask us any questions you want. Ad looks like this inside of Facebook. User clicks it. We pop up a message that says, you've accessed our deal. Click this button to get 10% off. So they click the ad. Now all they have to do is click that button and they become a subscriber. As soon as they click that button, we say, sweet, congratulations, you've successfully accessed your code. Enter it at checkout or go over to Amazon if that's what you're doing. And you can also put more content in this. You can show images. One thing to note is that the last thing that you put in a Facebook message is always going to be the thing that gets clicked the most. Hard to see. But 36% of people click the last thing in the ad. So the last thing in the message should always be two lines of text and a button. Super simple. Tell them exactly what you want them to do. If you're going to use Facebook messenger, make sure that the last thing that you put in the message that you're sending to someone is, is two lines of text and a button. Check this out real quick. 6200 people got this thing. 5000 of them opened it and 2600 clicked it. It's incredible how valuable this brand asset is and how easy it is to build this right now. Manychat makes it super easy. Facebook's pretty easy to do. It's cheap. It's a, it's what you don't have on Amazon as a brand asset. So if you subscribe to the notion that the way to grow your business is to invest in it by amplifying it with advertising and by the way, forget about being profitable. I have a eight figure business to 27 million this year. One of the ways that I got there, I was stuck at like 5 or 6 million a year for a long time. And I'm well known as sort of like the growth guy for E commerce. Like if you have a business that's doing a million bucks and you want it to go to 10 million, you come to me. If you are a Fortune 500 who wants to understand how to use digital marketing for customer acquisition, you come to me and I've got a bunch of friends who are in the private equity venture capital world. They buy and sell $100 million E Commerce businesses and they'll come to me and say, hey man, we're going to buy this business. Can you give us a growth plan for it? So over the last three years I've done dozens of these growth plans for nine figure retailers. I've never grown a nine figure retailer. I'm in the process of it. Our goal is 50 million in 20, 2018 and 100 million the year after. So we're working towards that. But I noticed something interesting that changed the way that I look at my business. That ultimately is what allowed me to go to eight figures. Really, really interesting. I noticed that they all looked at their business different than I looked at My business. So the way I came from no money, I came from being super poor, bootstrapped my whole business and was always really, really worried about running out of money. Had to live off my wife's yoga earnings for a while. She wasn't too happy about that, you know what I mean? So it's like always like super, super concerned with staying profitable. And so what that translated to was this view of advertising as this campaign works or it doesn't, these ads are profitable or they're not, it's not profitable, turn them off, just run what's profitable. Right? Well, when I looked at these nine figure retailers, they give me their analytics, they give me their email list, they give me their ad accounts, they give me access to everything because I need the data to be able to say, listen, this is what you need to do to grow. You need some life cycle customer marketing. You need to run amplification like this, you know, they need to give me the data. So I noticed that almost all of them, like 9 out of 10 had one channel that supported all other channels. For you, that's Amazon. Let me explain. It's usually email, organic traffic or an advertising source. It's one of those three. And it's uber profitable for you. All that free traffic you get on Amazon, uber profitable. You're just making cash and you're not paying to make that cash. Right? So that channel should support every other channel. They're taking all the money that they're making from organic, all the money they're making from their email list, and they're investing it in customer acquisition through advertising on other channels at a loss just to grow customer base. Because then, and this is what it means, means a longer view of your business. And I'll explain then six months down the line when they run a sale at Christmas or the holidays or Black Friday, their customer base is five times the size of mine. Because they've been acquiring customers at a loss because one of their channels is profitable, growing their business and therefore they end up winning in the long run. They're taking a longer view of attribution, right? So this is like, it's a mind blowing concept when you actually grock it. It's what allowed me to be from stuck at 7 million to almost 30 million two years later. Because I understood that, oh, if this isn't profitable, I can leave it on because I'm super profitable here and I can acquire customers at even a small loss. But I'm acquiring customers, I'm growing the brand, I'm growing the brand. Asset. I'm building my pixel audiences, I'm building my email list, I'm building my messenger list. And I can communicate with these people over time and engage them in a conversation that ultimately results in a sale. Does that make sense? It is a mind blowing concept. And if you're making money on Amazon and you're not reinvesting all of that money and I understand you got to live, you know what I mean? You want your lay's potato chips, you want whatever you need, I get it, you're trying to do your thug fizzle. I respect it. However, I will say if you can live humbly and reinvest as much as possible, you will end up with a much bigger pie in the long run. Take a longer view of your business. So a Facebook messenger subscriber is nearly 10x the value of an email subscriber. From my data, you can see here that it's Already the number 16. Attribution source, revenue source. This is a one month and what my business does, about a million and a half a month. This store, it's going to be in the top five in the next six months. 12% conversion rate per session value from Facebook messenger, about $6. It's such a valuable brand asset and you have this opportunity right now for the next six to nine months to develop this brand asset before anyone's paying attention to it, while it's still free. Because by the way, you know how you got to pay to send an email? You got to pay that email service provider for everybody. X number of email contacts that's coming with Facebook very soon. It's not there right now. Still free, still free to generate subscribers, still free to send messages. This is the way people are going to communicate with brands. It's going to be through messaging, text messaging and Facebook messenger. Email is going to continue to decline. It's still, by the way, email. We make a lot. A third of our business is email. It's not going away, but it's going to decline further and further, not by huge margins as these communication mediums like messenger and like text rise because that's how people communicate. The younger generation, they don't email, they message. So you gotta be on that platform. Are you farming or are you hunting for me? I'm interested in the long game. I have been in this business and I started this when I was like just some wannabe professional poker player in New York. I was actually doing pretty good, but I started this when I was 18. I didn't go to college. I've just Been doing this ever since. And I've seen a lot of people burn out and just overwork themselves and get super excited about one business model and just go for it. But it's like the idea here is that rather than trying to spear a fish, we plant seeds, we water them every day, we're in a marathon. We're just slow and steady. We're deliberate, we are conscious. We put attention on our personal life, we put attention on taking care of our body, we put attention on our, our relationships because that's ultimately what is going to give you the energy to sustain a consistent work ethic. If you like this whole like sacrifice and like, it's such a flawed model because you're not doing anyone ever. If you are a wreck, you're not doing anyone any favors. You can't show up in other parts of your life. So you can't have your work life just burn you to the ground. You know, you've got to go slow and steady because it's just a more, it's actually a more effective model in the long run, it's a better model. The main problem that I see is that people are not investing enough back in their businesses. You get out what you put in. Do me a favor. Think in your head right now. Your total top line revenue number for 2016. What is it? Just think about it. The whole amount of money that you made in your whole business in 2016, 20 to 30% of that number should be dedicated to advertising and amplification of your business. If I did 30 million, that means I got to spend 10 million. That's a controversial viewpoint. Some people would disagree. My experience of growing several seven and now one eight figure business via paid amplification tells me that if you're not investing a minimum of 20% of your top line back into amplification, you're not going to scale as quickly as you could. It's really a good idea, especially if you're doing it smart, you're doing it deliberately. You're building assets, people who you can communicate with.

Investment creates growth in the long term. Investing in your business, not pulling out of it, putting it back in.

The more you put in, the bigger the snowball grows. And look, you're on the right track. You're here, you're clearly willing to invest. You decided to flip, fly across the country to be with a bunch of other crazy people to talk about. I mean, really, we're not normal people. We are the weird ones, you know, the ones who decided that it was a good idea to risk everything to try to build our own ventures. You know, to be an entrepreneur, you've got to really have a lot of guts and a lot. You're taking a lot of responsibility, you're taking a big risk and the more responsibility. You know, they say that with great power comes great responsibility, but actually with great responsibility comes great power. You're willing to take responsibility for 60 people's salaries. Well, now you've got eight hours times 60 every day to deploy. That's a lot of power. So the more responsibility you take, the more power that you have as a business owner. Double down on that investment. Make, do at least one thing this month that you learned here, like make it worth it. You know, repetition is what creates mastery. You pick up an instrument every day for 30 minutes, you get better at that. You put your attention on amplification every day for a year, for an hour, you're going to get better at it. And ultimately, if I think there's one skill set to develop, it's the skill set of knowing how to pay for amplification of a brand effectively. Because you can use it anywhere you go and nobody is going to care about your money more than you do. Which is why I'm telling people like, yeah, you know, look, you got to source good products, you got to have good support, you got to build infrastructure, all this stuff. But man, have someone who really knows how to advertise, who invests in developing a mastery of paid amplification. It's a really, really valuable skill set. It's also not about how much you work, it's about what you produce. This was the whole thing about people burning themselves out. So what I see the most often is I look around. I come to events like this all the time. I really like doing this. I like speaking to stuff. And a lot of people are burned out because they're overworked. They equate to working a lot to doing a lot. It actually doesn't end up working that way. Work will fill the amount of time that you set for it. It really will. So if you set really hard boundaries, you'll actually get more done in less time and you'll be a happier human being. I'm not saying you shouldn't grind sometimes. Sometimes you got to work those 14 hour days, sometimes you're running launches for sure. But if that's all the time, it's not going to work out for you. But that's my present.

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