One time offer -or- The value of an email address

I've been aware of a growing trend in the online marketing industry called "The One Time Offer".  I was first exposed to it on Mark Joyner's site Simpleology.  You're promised (and should be given) a great free info product that really excites you.  Upon your first login, you're offered - one time only - an upsell of incredible value.  The offer will never be valid again, you only get one chance at this.  Buy it now, or forever suffer the consequences.  I listened in on a call with Merlin & Harris about this very topic.

Interesting, I thought.  It's worth a try - hell - I'll try anything once.

So I converted one of my ebooks from pdf format into html and put it in a password protected folder.  Now, instead of paying $29.95 for the book, I was giving it away for FREE.  That's right folks, you get this ebook that hundreds of people have paid $29.95 for absolutely free.  All you need to do is give me your name and email.

This particular ebook is out of season, and doesn't sell very well right now anyway.  I'm launching an e-store in about a month that should make a nice splash in the same industry, so getting email addresses (for the site launch) is more important than selling a few ebooks anyway.

Once the person gives me their name and email, I take them to the one time offer page.  Here's the sales pitch:  Buy this ebook that you're about to read for FREE for $9.90, which is 66% off the original price that everyone else has purchased it for.  If you don't purchase the ebook at this special price NOW, you'll never be able to get it for this price again.  If you want the book in the future, you'll have to pay the full $29.95 for it.

Pretty weak sales pitch, if you ask me, but in all fairness the pdf version allows you to print it out, and perhaps reads a little easier than the html version.

So, what are the results?  The first round of ballots are in.  I track every visitor that comes to every one of my sites, so I have pretty good stats reporting.  The number of visitors to the new offer are still low, so don't put too much stock in this.

Sales Letter Version	Splash	Scroll Down	Scroll Down %	First Chapter or Signup	First Chapter or Signup %	Sale	Sale %
12	461	234	50.76%	42	9.11%	4	0.87%
11	3459	1547	44.72%	342	9.89%	13	0.38%

Here are the columns in the above table explained:
Sales Letter Version: This was the 11th and 12th time I'd modified the sales letter in greedy attempts at grabbing more money from people.  This is sorta my test bed for new ideas...  Version 11 is the traditional long sales letter to buy the ebook.  Version 12 is the free ebook in html format, with one time offer to buy it in pdf format.
Splash: How many people landed on the front page, the sales letter page?
Scroll Down: How many people actually read the sales letter?  I have a javascript file that tracks the mouse.  If it gets down past a certain point of the sales letter, I submit a form in an iframe that tells the database this person scrolled down.  Pretty cool, huh?
Scroll Down %: What percentage of the splash viewers scrolled down and read the sales letter?
First Chapter or Signup: This is the only confusing part of the numbers.  Before I converted the book into html, I had a few images of the first chapter of the book for people to read.  Total rip-off of the amazon book "preview" service.  Now, I'm using the same columns to show me how many people actually gave me their name and email to view the html version of the ebook.
Sale: Number of people that actually purchased the book.
Sale %: Percentage of people that bought the book.

This book is in a highly competitive, but niche market.  There is a lot of free information available on the Internet.  It's quality information, though, compiled by a real guru in the field, so it's sellable.  It's in the off-season right now, so the conversion numbers suck - I don't want any comments about my general crappy conversion rates!  Focus on the change between pre and post one-time-offer conversion rates.

As you can see, although still low, the one time offer has more than doubled the sales conversion.  Yes, people are actually buying something that they're one click away from getting for free.  ha!