http://www.themcmethod.com/ezra-firestone-of-brown-box-formula-on-email-marketing-for-ecommerce-stores/ Listen to this podcast on email marketing and email copywriting with Ezra Firestone. Meet Ezra Firestone, an ecommerce expert with some serious clout. He has built a bunch of profitable ecommerce stores and along the way, he has developed a bulletproof framework for selling more with ecommerce stores. Ezra believes that by implementing strategies discussed in this episode, you can increase your total sales by 10-15%. Learn more about email copywriting here: http://www.themcmethod.com/email-copywriting/

1. http://www.themcmethod.com/ezra­firestone­of­brown­box­formula­on­emai
l­marketing­for­ecommerce­stores/
Ezra Firestone Interview Of Brown Box Formula On Email Marketing For Ecommerce
Ezra: We should not refer to them as the “old people”.
John: Okay, the “people with beautiful skin people”.
Ezra: Yeah (laughing).
John: Hey podcast listener, you’re about to discover insider tips, tricks and
secrets to making more sales and converting more prospects into customers
with email marketing. For more information about the email marketing
podcast or the autoresponder guy, go to themcmethod.com/podcast.
Hey everybody, it’s John McIntyre and it’s time for episode 14 of email
marketing podcast where we talk about the top tips, tricks and secrets for
making more sales, growing your revenue with email marketing. Today I’ll
be talking to Ezra Firestone from brownboxformula.com and
smartmarketer.com. I met Ezra at an event in Sidney a few months ago and I
was completely blown away by the content he provided. He spoke for about 2
hours, all about e­commerce. He had an entire, 12­step system about how to
build an e­commerce store, how to drive traffic to it and how to make money
with it. The way he presented it made it so easy to understand that I went to
him and I asked him about email marketing. I wanted to find out if he could
do a podcast on it and that’s what we’re going to do today.

2. We’re going to talk about email marketing as it applies to e­commerce stores.
In this episode, you’ll find out how to boost any e­commerce stores revenue
by 10 percent to 15 percent just by implementing an email marketing
campaign. It’s very basic, straightforward stuff, but you need to execute on it.
You’re going to find out about the three main types of e­commerce customers
and how you need to treat them to get the best results.
You’ll get Ezra’s cart abandonment sequence that he has tested in numerous
markets so it’s proven to work, plus you’ll also find out how Target figured
out a teen girl was pregnant before her father did, which is kind of insane and
a little bit creepy but it’s very, very interesting stuff. To get show notes for
this episode of the email marketing podcast, go to themcmethod.com/ep14.
Now we have another review; this one is from David Braun from
proappcreators.com. David says, “I look forward to every new episode John
done. Why? Because he gets right to the point, extracts the best strategies and
doesn’t waste time on lots of fluff like many other podcasts. His interview
with Terry Dean was awesome and I have written lots of notes that have
helped me as well as some clients. Nice job. Cheers John.”
Thanks for the review David, I totally agree. I’ve listened to podcasts before
and they just take way too long to get into it, which maybe I’m doing that
right now and thank you again for the review. If anyone listening wants to
leave your own review and get your website read out on the show, go to
themcmethod.com/podcast.
Now, I’ve got some good news. There was no episode last week and some of
you might be wondering why. I was at a conference in Europe in Lithuania of

3. all places with Simon Black and Craig Balantine. Both of them use email,
some of the coaches were there too, big time internet marketers and kind of
underground though, but they shared some amazing information that I think
is really relevant to me and I think it could really help a lot of people who
listen to this. No promises, but it looks like I’ll be able to have Crag
Balantine and some of the other coaches on this podcast in the next few
months and I’m sure they’ll bring their A­game with some amazing, killer
information so stay tuned for that.
I don’t want to make David too angry, so without further ado, let’s get right
into today’s podcast and talk to Ezra Firestone.
It’s John McIntyre here, the autoresponder guy. I’m here with Ezra Firestone,
an e­commerce expert. I recently had the privilege from hearing from Ezra in
Sydney and he spoke a million miles an hour but I don’t think it was because
he was nervous, but because he had so much to share. He went through his
entire strategy and since this is an email marketing podcast, we are actually
going to be talking about e­commerce stuff, the big picture kind of stuff. I
thought we would talk about e­commerce email marketing because I don’t
know much about it and I’m sure most people listening to this don’t know
much about it either. That’s why Ezra’s here.
Ezra, how you doing today?
Ezra: Man, I’m doing so well. Thank you very much for having me on the
show and thank you listener for listening in to us talk about email marketing.
It’s awesome. I feel so blessed every time I get to come on a podcast or on a
show because I know that people are taking time out of their lives to listen to

4. me, which is really nice. That’s the most valuable thing that someone has is
their time and they’re choosing to spend it with us. That’s awesome.
John: Absolutely. It’s kind of crazy when you think about it, they’re probably
in their car right now or the gym, or walking around their neighborhood,
they’re just living life while they’re listening to this.
Ezra: I know, it is a trip and a half is what it is.
John: (Laughs). That’s pretty good.
Ezra: We can dive right in to email marketing for e­commerce, specifically
… the good thing about email marketing for e­commerce is that it is not
particularly difficult. It’s pretty straight­forward. It’s probably the most
straight­forward type of email marketing there is because you are not doing
much persuasion. You’re not doing much selling. You’re mostly doing
relationship building when you’re doing email marketing for e­commerce.
I’ve kind of broken it down to three main segments that we can talk about.
I’ll just jump into it if you want.
John: Sure, let’s do it.
Ezra: You’ve got three main sort of segments of customer who you are
talking to when you have an e­commerce store. You’ve got the guys
pre­purchase, and the gals lets not be chauvinists. You’ve got the guys and
gals who are pre­purchase, who have not actually bought something from you
but have hopped on your email list because there was an incentive on your
website. You’ll notice all the big sites are starting to do this, putting off these
little pop­ups that say, “Hey, get 15 percent off your first order, enter your
email address here.” They understand the value of a lead even in the physical

5. product world the value of a lead is so, so high because people leave. They
come they check out the products and they take off. If you can capture that
lead, if you can incentivize them to opt in for some level of discount on the
products, you’ll generate often and you’ll be able to followup with them and
make sales, which is what it’s all about.
You’ve got your pre­purchase, before they actually purchase, we’ll talk a
little bit about that, you’ve got your cart abandon. These are the people who
made it all the way to the shopping cart, they searched your products. They
were searching somewhere, Amazon, Google, who knows, they ended up on
your website, they took a look at some products, they actually added one to
their cart and then they dipped out and said, “You know what, I’m bailing on
this transaction, this isn’t for me, not right now … back off.” Maybe they
didn’t say all that, but … you get people who abandon your shopping cart and
that’s sort of another segment of people who you deal with and a little
different fashion when it comes to email marketing.
Then we’ve got our third segment of people, which are post purchase people
who have actually bought from you, people who have engaged with you and
purchased from you. Those are really the three main segments of user who
you are communicating with and as we know and as I’m sure you talked
about in previous podcasts, when it comes to email marketing it’s all about
knowing who you’re communicating with and why.
We look at email marketing as a form of communication with another person,
not as just an email to some random thing that they want to buy from you, but
an actual communication to another human being who is considering doing

6. business with you. When you frame it that way you’re now able to write
emails that are really person to person, which is what it’s about.
John: Absolutely. Before we go on, I always bring this up with people when
they mention it. I think it’s one of the key elements of good marketing is that
it has to be relevant but you just have to understand exactly who you’re
talking to. You don’t send a cart abandonment email to a pre­purchase
customer or vice versa. The reason why is that you have to have that baseline
level of empathy where you understand what the person wants, because
everyone wants to feel understood. I just think this is such a core issue and if
people can nail this part of it, it’ll make all the other parts work properly.
Ezra: It really will. While we’re on the subject of what people want from you,
we can break it down … I’ll break it down for you right now.
John: Let’s do it.
Ezra: Here’s what people want. Attention and approval. That’s what they
want. They want to know that you’re paying attention to them, that you have
noticed them, that your attention is not just on trying to sell them stuff, but
you’re actually paying attention to them as a person and that you approve of
them. People want to be approved of. If you can do those two things in your
marketing, you’ll be very successful.
Let’s talk a little bit about pre­purchase email marketing when it comes to
e­commerce, when it comes to physical product, e­commerce businesses.
Someone has come to your site, they’ve opted in, they’re on your email list,
what now? You don’t freak out, you don’t get scared. Some people do,
they’re like, “Oh my God, I have these people on my email list, what do I

7. do?” That’s totally righteous because it is scary to think about
communicating with people with the goal of selling them stuff, but with
e­commerce it’s mostly about relationship building. For the most part people
know what your products are. Physical products are not particularly difficult
to understand. This is a salt shaker and I understand that.
It’s not a lot of education around the product line. It’s more communication
with a customer … I’ll just give an example with Boom by Cindy Joseph,
which is our skin care company. We are selling organic skin care but our
emails and our marketing are not talking to people about that skin care line.
Sure we mention it, but mainly we’re talking to people about things like
menopause, sliver hair and aging and wrinkles and all of the experiences that
our customers are having. If you know who your customers are, for example
if you’re selling pacifiers, you’re customers are probably parents.
If you’re selling man­scaping kits, your customers are probably metro­sexual
men who are interested in grooming themselves. You know who your
customer is based on the product that you’re selling and you can then craft
messaging that’s relevant to that customer’s life that isn’t just specific to your
product.
Pre­purchase is all about relationship building, education about the product
line, about who you are; just a little back story on that. My wife is here, she’s
in the kitchen, she’s not actually listening in, but she always gets on my case
for the fact that I always say, “So and so around this topic”. It’s not proper
English. You should be saying, “About this topic”. I continually make that

8. mistake and she’s right here so I have to be in good form because this is
going out to the public audience.
What was I saying? I completely forgot … I got flustered because I knew she
was listening to that. (Laughs) I know what I was saying, education about the
topic, education about the product line, your viewpoints and opinions. I’ll
give you guys practical examples in a second. Your viewpoints and opinions
on topics and conversations that are relevant to the community. If you’re
selling cycling gear, you’re going to be talking about Lance Armstrong and
the fact that he’s a dope fiend and all this stuff. You’re going to be having
conversations like that in your emails that are topics that are relevant to your
community.
What do these emails look like? We do them in the form of video blogs or
product guides or top 10 lists or really any kind of educational content that’s
geared toward building a relationship with the customer. The best is if you
can get face time with your community. That’s the funny thing, email
marketing is now turning into sending people emails, trying to get them to
watch a video of you talking. You don’t have to actually be an expert
copywriter; you can write three sentences, “I created a new video for you.” It
can just be you on video, or you could do blog posts. People still do read, it’s
not out of style.
Really, our approach to the pre­purchase segment is essentially video blog
where we create blog posts that are topically relevant like I just mentioned
and then we make a series of them, we send one every three days after
someone after someone opts in that builds some kind of a relationship or has

9. some information or is relevant in some way and then also mentions our
product and does a soft sell. They’re really, really soft sells all geared toward
building a relationship with the customer and getting them to know us and
our brand and getting them to watch our videos and letting them know our
unique selling propositions, why it’s good to buy from us, why we’re a good
company … all that kind of stuff. All the stuff that you do in your marketing,
we do in our email marketing but our pre­purchase is really all about
relationship building.
Any questions on the pre­purchase?
John: No, I think it’s very straight forward. It’s a bit different standard email
marketing. You’ve already brought that up, the whole idea that … it’s not
about educating them or just talking and telling stories, you could do that, but
it’s really just getting that connection going. One thing I think is interesting
there, it’s kind of like a read between the lines kind of thing. When you put
out content like you just talked about, like the old people, the skin care
people. You don’t have to talk about the skin care …
Ezra: (Laughs) The old people … no. Let’s hope none of the Boom people
are listening to this. They’re lovely. Yes, for the most part, they’re
baby­boomers and they are getting on in age but that’s … we should not refer
to them as “the old people”.
John: Okay, okay, the people with beautiful skin people.
Ezra: Yes.
John: When you put out content … a lot of people therefore think you’re
going to talk about skin care or whatever it is and I think what’s important is

10. you’re getting a certain type of attention and it’s their attention. To do that,
all you need to do is just put out content that’s relevant to them and it comes
back to understanding the customer.
That’s what some people struggle to understand sometimes is that you don’t
always have to talk about the product. As long as you keep the attention of
the target people you want, you can talk about anything.
Ezra: Yeah, absolutely. Most people get really hung up on that. They say,
“What more can I say about my products? What more can I really talk about?
I don’t want to just sell super hard. I don’t want to just keep talking about
these products.” It comes up a lot on group phone calls and when I do … it
came up on this training I did this afternoon. People have a hard time being
pushy and selling and you don’t have to do that. It’s really about relationship
building. You don’t have to push your product super hard. Of course, if
you’re smart you’re going to mention your product. You’re going to soft sell.
People understand that you’re an e­commerce … they do not think that you
are not a store that doesn’t offer product. You want to be true to who you are
and you definitely want to do soft selling and mention your products where
relevant but it’s on the main focus of the communications pre­purchase.
John: Okay. Let’s get onto cart abandons. What do you do there?
Ezra: Cart abandonment is … I’ve got a whole little sequence and I’ve got a
slide deck, I don’t know how we can make it available, but …
John: We can easily put that on the post.

11. Ezra: Alright, let’s do that. I’ll put up a little slide deck that I did with a guy,
how to structure seven­day cart abandonment sequences but it’s pretty
straight forward.
The first email is kind of like, okay we see that you are sort of standard cart
abandonment, we see that you were in our shopping cart and the cool thing
about e­commerce is there is a lot of technology available for this these days.
It’s kind of been built in where you can scrape the images for the items that
were in their cart, scew number, the price of the cart itself and then you can
send them an email that has the actual products that they were looking at and
based on the value of the cart, you can give them a discount. If it’s like a
$100.00 cart, you can give them a five percent discount. If it’s a $200.00 cart
you can set that dynamically. You can do some really, really fancy stuff. You
can send them an email and say, “Hey you were thinking about buying these
products and here they are”, reminding them these are the products you were
looking at.
We find with cart abandonment you can pick up to 25 percent of the
abandons, which is just phenomenal. When you think about the fact that eight
out of ten people abandon your cart on average, you can pick up two out of
those eight with a strong cart abandonment sequence. Essentially what that is,
it’s kind of a reminder email the first day with no offer, just saying, “Hey, we
noticed you tried to check out and you weren’t able to complete your order.
We are sorry that you had a problem with our order system, here is where
you can go back and complete it.”

12. The second email is more of a social proof that comes a day or two later, “We
noticed that you still haven’t completed your order. Here’s all the unique
selling propositions, here’s all the reasons you should buy from us. Here’s
why we’re good.” A, B, C customer service, quality, shipping; basically
testimonials telling them why they should buy from you again and reminding
them that they have a cart; social proof.
Third email would be some kind of scarcity; “Hey you know, your cart is
about to expire. Here it is again.” They’re kind of all … I don’t have this in
my head, the whole sequence, but they’re all basically just reminding people
the fact that they were going to buy from you at one point and then
re­enforcing why they should with testimonials and social proof, unique
selling propositions and all these different things.
The fourth email and onward, you offer some kind of incentive, five percent
off, ten percent off, et cetera. It works extremely well. Really, it’s about the
followup. I’ve seen some really terrible cart abandonment sequences that
convert ten, fifteen percent … any cart abandonment sequence that’s done
half­way decent will convert a solid amount of cart abandons into buyers. It’s
going to vary depending on market, depending on value of the products being
sold, average order value. There’s a lot of variables that will tell you what
percentage you will pick up, but if you put in a cart abandonment sequence it
does not matter if you’re not a good copywriter, if you’re not doing anything
fancy, you will sell more product.

13. John: Okay. It sounds like there’s a best way to do it. The people have kind
of figured out I guess over … maybe they haven’t, but you send one the first
day, one a day later and a one a few days after that.
Ezra: Yeah, we do it every couple of days; we do about seven of them.
John: Wow.
Ezra: There’s so much information on … cart abandon is such a big problem
in e­commerce, it’s such a big topic of conversation because of how many
people abandon shopping carts because of how high that ratio is. It’s such a
huge topic that there’s been so much time and energy dedicated to solving
this problem, there’s so many pieces of software out there that help with this,
it’s really becoming an industry standard thing. You can just Google it and
you’ll find more information than you can possibly want from fantastic
marketing blogs, like practical e­commerce and getelastic.com; all about this
topic. We don’t have to spend a ton of time talking about it here, but it’s a
topic of discussion that’s completely relevant for physical product business
owners.
John: Okay. Let’s keep moving then. What about the post purchase:
Ezra: Post purchase. Essentially with post purchase you’re doing a mix of
content marketing and selling. Post purchase you can be so much more
aggressive because they already bought from you, which means they already
liked you enough to buy from you one time. All that stuff I was talking about
from a content marketing perspective, pre­purchase; video blogs and
educational guides and educational webinars and blog posts, interviews and
all this kind of content that’s geared toward educating your customer is a

14. very, very good idea to do post purchase. It’s good to have some kind of
regular schedule.
We do things like “Saturday’s with Cindy” or a story that I consult with,
“Sundays with Sarah”. Some kind of regular, education/entertainment
relating to the brand and relating to the product line because it gets people
used to seeing you ever week. Then we take those emails that we send out
and we promote them on Facebook to our Facebook community and we
basically just make sure we are engaging. We email it out to our subscribers,
we post it to Pinterest and we put it everywhere. We syndicate it so that
everyone in our community is seeing content from us on a regular basis so
that when we do make sales offers, we get a much higher take rate on those
offers because we’ve been in constant communication with our customers
each week for the past month and most e­commerce stores just send out a
sale email once a month.
You will see a significant boost in revenue from those sales emails and the
conversion rates in those sales emails if you’re sending out content on a
weekly basis. I recommend at least on a weekly basis; we do it on a weekly
basis that you do a content email of any kind and then you do sales emails.
This can be everything from liquidations, discounts on a certain product line,
holiday sales. You can just make up … there’s thousands of holidays people
don’t even know about. A lot of people in the e­commerce base do sales
emails for every holiday for, for Easter, Man’s Chest Hair Day, for Beard
Day, for all kinds of crazy stuff, holiday’s you haven’t even heard about.

15. Essentially, post purchase is very simple. Its consistent content marketing
mixed in with a monthly or bi­monthly sale and there’s got to be some excuse
for the sale. It can’t just be, “Hey we’re doing 20 percent off.” “We’re doing
20 percent off because of X, Y, Z”, you’re giving some reason why you’re
doing the sale. That’s really it. It’s pretty straight forward stuff.
I’m not the world’s foremost expert on email marketing for e­commerce.
These are just the basic strategies that work quite well. There’s not a whole
lot of sophistication to email marketing for e­commerce. It’s not a huge topic
of conversation within the community. A good solid 10 to 15 percent of your
sales will come from email marketing if you have a legacy store that’s been
around awhile that has a bunch of customers that are doing well. You’ll see a
good chunk of your sales coming from email marketing, but 80 to 90 percent
of your sales are not coming from this avenue. Most people are only seeing
like three percent because they send that monthly sales email. They’re not
doing pre­purchase relationship building. They’re not doing cart abandons
and they’re not doing post purchase relationship building and offers.
John: Okay, that’s really interesting. The whole content marketing thing gets
me sometimes because people are doing all this content stuff, but they’re not
selling, which is what they really should be doing. It sounds like in this
situation content marketing can really work. It just keeps you on their radar.
Ezra: Exactly.
John: When you’re finally up for that sale it’s just going to do so much better.
Ezra: Exactly, it really does. The think about the content each week is you
end up selling. We make as much sales from our weekly content as we do

16. from our sales emails because we’ve got soft sells in there. “Hey we’re doing
a blog post on how to make a felted Easter egg. Buy the way, if you want to
buy the felt to make this Easter egg, you can click right there and do it. Its
education but we are working in the ability for people to purchase. Every
time someone sees your stuff, they’re going to your website, which means
they might be, “Oh yeah, I wanted this thing” and go buy it.
John: Before we go, I have one more question. I remember talking to you and
it might have been on this podcast actually, Amazon had done something
really tricky and what they did was they’d obviously put a cookie on … this
guy I was talking about, on his computer and he had been to Amazon, he had
his video camera. He clicked on a link, went to Amazon and checked it out.
He was logged into his Amazon account. He already had it but basically
Amazon tagged him as he’d been to that page. He left the page and half an
hour later or something he gets an email from Amazon saying, “Hey, we
noticed you checked this out” and then tried to get him to buy it. It’s kind of
like a bit more advanced …
Ezra: I was going to mention … it’s kind of a combination of retargeting and
email marketing. If you have a sophisticated re­targeting platform, something
like Ad Maisley or some of these more sophisticated retargeting platforms,
what you can do is … Amazon’s got a special ability to do that because they
have the email of their users. Right?
John: Yeah.
Ezra: They way you’re doing that from a physical product, the way that
you’re kind of doing that on a sort of lower level e­commerce store is through

17. cart abandons. You don’t have the emails of your customers so you can’t just
… when someone checks out an item on your store, you can run retargeting
ads which you absolutely should be doing through networks like Google and
Ad Role and Ad Maisley and things like that and retargeter, but you don’t
have the benefit of having the … for the most part, most of your people are
not going to be logged in users. You won’t be able to just shoot them an
email over. You do get to accomplish that a little bit through cart
abandonment. It’s like Amazon’s got most of their users logged in and
they’ve got a custom built tool to be able to do that. If you have someone’s
email … there are no products out there that I’m aware of that allow a small
scale merchant to pull that off, but it’s a very cool thing.
John: I think it’s awesome. It’s kind of creepy but it’s cool.
Ezra: It really is. It’s freaky what they’re doing. They’re just unbelievable.
It’s like that article about how Target predicted this teenage girl’s pregnancy
before her dad knew she was pregnant. Have you heard that, have you read
that?
John: Yeah, what book was that in?
Ezra: It was just an article on Huffington Post or something. We should find
it and link to it because it’s unbelievable. It won’t be hard to find that one.
That got a lot of press.
John: They basically talked … they had Algorhythms crunching data for
people who bought products and based on the products that this girl had been
buying, they were then …

18. Ezra: They knew she was pregnant and her dad didn’t. Her dad flipped out
because they sent her a card. It was like, “Here buy these Pampers for your
kid” and whatever and her dad was like, “Why in the world would Target be
sending this to my teenage daughter?” He was flipping out and he found out
she’s pregnant. They were able to work out she was pregnant before he was,
which is so scary.
John: Yeah. (Laughs) It’s a cool story. I’ll see if I can find it and link to it.
Ezra: Yeah, if you can’t find it, I’ll definitely find it. It’s out there. It’s easy
to find.
John: Cool man. We have time so before we go, give yourself a plug and tell
them where they can find you.
Ezra: Smartmarketer.com. You can find me, I publish blog posts and
podcasts and content relating to e­commerce, marketing and traffic and if
you’re interested in lifestyle and mindset, finding out more about me and
checking out my blog, I’d love you to do that. I’d love to hear from you.
Smartmarketer.com
John: I also … I’m listening to a few episodes but “Think, Act, Get” is your
podcast.
Ezra: Oh, dude, definitely check out “Think, Act, Get.” It’s not specifically
relevant to …well it is, it’s more a lifestyle mindset, talking about how you
be in the world relationship to yourself and other people and how you behave
and act and how you think. It’s about more than just marketing and
entrepreneurship. If you’re interested in that kind of stuff, it’s getting a lot of
positive feedback so check it out.

19. John: Alright man. I really appreciate you giving your time and to chat about
email marketing for e­commerce stores.
Ezra: Thank you so much. I appreciate you having me on the show.
John: Hey everybody, thanks for listening. If you want to discover more
insider tips, tricks and secrets about driving sales with email marketing, sign
up for daily email tips from the the autoresponder guy, to go
updatecopy.com/podcast, sign up, confirm your email address and I’ll send
you daily emails on how to improve your email marketing and make more
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letter word that underlies all effective marketing and much more.
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