How We Use Our Ebook To Lead With Our Marketing

Dear All

I've just been doing my year end statistics and in an email discussion with Debbie, I told her what they were, and she asked me to let you know how I'm using the ebook version of The Money Gym book to lead our entire marketing campaign.  We are creating cashflow AND long term recurring income. 

My mate Andy Shaw gave me the idea of leading off all my marketing with the Money Gym ebook, bundling a one month Silver membership of http://www.TheMoneyGymClub.com onto it.  He does this with his property book and he pointed out that while some people would see the benefit of a membership site, many more people know what a book or ebook is, so it's easier to encourage someone to buy an ebook, than to join a membership site.

Also, while an ebook is instant income, if you can get folks trying and liking your membership site community, it's recurring income from those who stay.

So, when Bookshaker gave us back the right to sell the ebook on the site, I wrote a sales letter, split-testing three headlines while we got Alan Forrest Smith to write a professional sales letter.  Not cheap at several thousand pounds and a recurring commission deal, but boy! Did it make a difference.  Started selling every couple of days what I had been selling in a month with mine!!
 
We tried running initially with Alan’s suggestion to give the ebook / Silver membership combo away on a 30 day "try before you buy" offer, where they could download the ebook and try the membership site without paying anything for 30 days but they had to give us their credit card details and agree to pay for the ebook in 30 days (converted at around 0.50%) but our merchant account / shopping cart setup couldn’t handle it (we didnt' have the right kind of merchant number yet apparently), so we took it off again, for now, while we sort the issue out. 

We are currently converting cold traffic to sales of the ebook/Silver trial at 0.28%.
 
I then bundled an upsell page on, so when they click to buy the ebook they get offered a “one time offer” of the ebook, a paperback copy (which we have to buy wholesale from Bookshaker so it's helping our sales there too!) and 90 days of Silver membership.  Cost to the customer £79.50, perceived value £150.  Cost to us £5 plus postage and packing.

We convert 57% of initial ebook sales to the upsell so that’s nice.  Interestingly, while we were selling / converting more cold traffic to the initial ebook sale, while offering the "try before you buy" option, less of those took us up on the Silver trial offer.
 
We now convert around 50% of total initial ebook sales sales (what I'm calling "decisions to buy") to Trial Silver members of which 50% stay past the first 30 days.  I’m just waiting to see what our retention is like in Month 2 and Month 3.

I'll update you as we go!

Warm regards
Nicola

Money Gym: The Wealth Building Workout author: Nicola Cairncross asin: 0954568184