How to Sell Out Your Next Ecommerce Product Launch: Copy this Template from a $175 Million Shopify Store
by Ezra Firestone
“If you want to scale your ecommerce store, you need to expand your product catalog.”
I learned this strategy directly from the experts behind fast-growing brands like Dr. Axe, Harry’s Razors, Allbirds and Organify.
These brands are generating $50 - $100 million per year by rapidly expanding their product catalog so they have more products to sell their existing customers.
No matter the size of your ecommerce business, launching a new product is a reliable way to generate extra revenue and grow your brand. That is, if you can do it well.
I just developed a new product launch strategy for my $175 million ecommerce brand... And using this campaign, I sold out of 3,794 units of my new facial cleanser in just 9 days and generated $253,452 for my business. That’s double the amount of units sold in any of my previous launches.
This campaign was so successful, we’re using it as a template for all our future product launches.. And to help you sell out your next launch, I’m giving it to you.
The template has 6 parts:
In this article, you’ll get the sales page template, emails, Facebook ads, ManyChat broadcasts and project timeline you need to copy this product launch for your store.
Let’s start with how to get early reviews for your new product.
Step 1:
How to Collect Pre-Launch Reviews
(30 Days to Launch)
As soon as the new product is available from the manufacturer, we start collecting product reviews. Here’s how we get them. One month before the start of the sale, we send the following email to 10 past customers asking for a video review testimonial.
Of the ten women we emailed, eight agreed, which was the number we wanted. (The other two wanted to be paid for their review.)
I rely heavily on customer videos throughout my sales funnels, so the ROI of these video testimonials goes way beyond the product launch.
Some of my best Facebook ads still use video testimonials I collected years ago.
How to Build Anticipation & Sell More Units
(30 Days to Launch)
Most people know that building anticipation before a launch is important, but many of us — including myself — don’t always have time to do it. This template will help.
Two weeks before the sale starts (while reviews are starting to come in), we announce to our Facebook fans and email subscribers that a new product is coming.
Here is the Facebook ad that I ran pre-launch:
When someone clicks on this ad, they land on this simple email opt-in page to join our waitlist:
The goal of this campaign is to get my Facebook fans to opt into an email waitlist, so I can communicate with them more directly (and more affordably) about the launch via email and Messenger.
It’s an easy ad campaign to set up, and when paired with the emails I’m about to show you, it built enough anticipation in our audience that I sold an extra 30-40% during my last two product launches.
Start Leveraging These EXACT TEMPLATES on Your Shopify Store
Start your free 14-day trial to Zipify Pages and you can leverage the exact pages we're showing you to sell out your next product launch.
Step 2:
Early Bird Emails & P.S. Reminders
The same day I launch the two Facebook ads above, I send out this anticipation email to our subscribers and past buyers asking them to join the waitlist.
And I also add P.S. reminders to the footer of every email we send during the launch period.
This way, I continue to build anticipation with every email I send, even non-sale emails like blog posts which have the highest engagement rates for my brand.
Now that you’re generating leads from email and Facebook, the last audience we want to reach is our Messenger list (for us around 12,000 people).
Step 3:
The Stacked Sales Page
(AKA, “The Minisite!”)
I built this collection of sales pages using a Shopify sales funnel builder called Zipify Pages. This exact template is available right now inside the app, but if you’re not a Zipify Pages user yet, I’ll walk you through each of the landing pages so you can build them yourself.
Instead of using a traditional long-form page, the sales page I used for this launch is actually a collection of 5 short pages, each one focusing on a different benefit of the product: the sales video, the story, the ingredients, the social proof and the FAQ.
That’s why I call it a “minisite” because to your customers it feels like a store within your store that’s dedicated to selling just one product.
After two sold out product launches, this minisite template is the most successful sales page I’ve ever created for a product launch. A huge reason why is because it was designed from the ground up for greater mobile performance.
Minisite Conversion Rates
36,131 total visitors viewed this page and 77% were mobile devices!
- Mobile Conversion Rate = 6.0%
- Desktop Conversion Rate = 12.26%
“When most of your traffic is mobile, get a mobile sales page.”
85% of traffic to our store is mobile, and I’d bet this percentage is even higher for you. (Our customers are age 55 and over.)
That’s why for over a year I’ve been obsessed with mobile optimization and improving the mobile experience of my store. Mobile-friendly elements — like an easy-to-navigate drop-down menu, fast load-speeds, and a buy box that’s optimized for mobile traffic — are critical to a successful sales page.
Here’s how the minisite looks on mobile:
Good mobile design and smart mobile navigation encourage people to explore more pages and consume more of your sales content.
The mobile version of this sales page is the reason why time on site for this launch soared to 2 minutes and 35 seconds.
You may not realize the crazy difference mobile navigation makes, but I’ve literally doubled my mobile conversion rate on my store this year mainly by focusing on its mobile header.
That’s why it’s so critical to have a header and navigation menu that are optimized for mobile, with easy-to-click links and behavioral triggers like auto-scroll.
This mobile header and navigation is already built into
Zipify Pages, and if you’re a customer you can use it to optimize any existing landing page on your Shopify store.
Here’s the new mobile header for the minisite.
Start Leveraging These EXACT TEMPLATES on Your Shopify Store
Start your free 14-day trial to Zipify Pages and you can leverage the exact pages we're showing you to sell out your next product launch.
Step 4:
Mobile-Friendly Buy Box
The product offer page is the most important page of your product launch.
Actually, product offer pages are the most important pages of your entire store, since these are the pages that usually close the sale. It’s especially difficult to convert mobile traffic on these pages, unfortunately, because the buy box is limited by smaller screen sizes and the page is typically designed for desktop.
That’s why my team spent a year developing a mobile-friendly buy box for Zipify Pages that converts better and loads faster on smartphones.
Here’s how the product offer page performed on desktop and mobile.
27,917 of visitors — or 77% of all traffic! — engaged with this mobile offer page during the launch.
The conversion rate on this page was 6.0% for mobile and 12.26% for desktop.
And in the end this mobile page alone was worth $146,907.
The first minisite sales page took me a month to design and code, but now it’s easy to duplicate for all of our future sales. You can get this minisite template and mobile header from Zipify Pages in the Shopify App Store.
Step 5:
The Early Bird Sale
(1 Day to Launch)
Now that your sales page is published, it’s time to officially kick off the launch and monetize all the anticipation you’ve created over the last two weeks.
To start, I like to reward the waitlist by giving them access a day early. This is called an early bird sale, and it’s an easy way to motivate your most excited shoppers to buy.
Here’s the early bird email and Messenger broadcast we sent to the waitlist:
And if you look at the Klaviyo data for this email, you’ll see that building anticipation paid off:
36% of people opened the email, 21% visited the minisite and 4% bought. That’s an excellent conversion rate — but something was wrong.
Unfortunately, there was a hiccup with the opt ins we generated from our Facebook traffic, and none of those fans got added to the waitlist. So instead of having a waitlist of 6,000 like our last launch, we only had 1,610. That means our next launch should beat these numbers by 3–4x.
Now I’m going to show the highest-earning emails from my $250,000 sale, so you can copy them and use them as templates for your store.
Step 5:
The Official Launch
(Top Performing Ads & Emails)
We sent 11 emails over 8 days, with the most successful days being the first and last day of the sale (by far).
I’m going to show you the 4 top-performing emails to copy, which also served as the opening and closing sequences of this launch.
Here’s the first email from day 1, sent at 7am. It generated $44,746:
And here’s the Facebook ad sent on the same day:
Here’s a piece of advice for your product launch: Email your entire list on the opening and closing days — not just your ordinary list of engaged subscribers (who, for us, are people who have opened in the last 120 days).
I know this goes against email best practices, but I also know that some of these people will become buyers. As long as we do this sparingly throughout the year, our unsubscribe rates don’t suffer.
Now let’s jump ahead in the sale to the three closing emails sent on the final day.
Start Leveraging These EXACT TEMPLATES on Your Shopify Store
Start your free 14-day trial to Zipify Pages and you can leverage the exact pages we're showing you to sell out your next product launch.
Step 6:
The $100,000 Closing Sequence:
(Emails, Ads & ManyChat)
We sent 3 emails on day 8 to close the sale, with heavy focus on the deadline.
That’s why the final day was the highest-grossing day of the launch, with the first email of day 8 being the most profitable of the entire campaign.
Here is the first email of day 8, sent at 7am. It generated $48,113:
Here’s the Facebook ad that launched on day 8:
Deadlines are strong motivators in a sale, and we’re leveraging two different deadlines to close this launch: limited time and low inventory.
Low inventory doesn’t apply to every sale we run, but it works for new product launches.
In fact, after we sold out of this product, we waited a couple months to restock then ran the sale again with the same limited inventory deadline. It was very successful.
Here is the second email of day 8, sent at 3pm. It generated $29,513:
And here is the third and final email of day 8, sent at 9pm. It generated $22,038:
Create a Custom Thank You Email:
As a final touch, I also sent a custom Thank You Email specifically for the launch. This email wasn’t designed to generate revenue, but it got great engagement from our buyers and added extra value to their experience with our brand.
Here’s the custom Thank You Email for the launch:
Copy My Product Launch Strategy
There you have it. That’s my complete product launch strategy, and the templates for every landing page, top-performing email and Facebook ads...you need to copy it for your store.
I showed you how to collect product reviews before the launch, how to build anticipation and create a waitlist, and how to build a mobile-optimized sales page that converts more mobile traffic.
You can copy this minisite sales page template and mobile navigation — along with other high-converting landing pages from my $175 million Shopify store — at ZipifyPages.com
Add it to your store today and get 14 days to try it out for FREE!
