hard sales page or sell thru email?

in the same position here. studies say that a sale in one online is very hard to get. You must get at least 8 interactions with the brand. having various remarketing solutions you can achieve this.
send mail
people open mail and click (already challenging)
add a remarketing tag on your landing page (facebook, adwords)
repeat the visual on the other media.

I did a launch this way 2 weeks ago and the signups I received were all after 5 remarketing displays.

I'd go with the email method. People need time to build up the right emotions to buy a product. Even if a single page sales copy is brilliant, if the emotional leap required to buy the product (whether that's due to price or the nature of the product) is too much, it will unfortunately turn of the customer. You want a gradually lead the customers around your marketplace so they know what options they have when buying your product.

My opinion is that changing people's emotions about your product is key, and to do that, it usually requires that people sleep over it and think about it in the heads, which a email will do better from repeated market entries into the mind with several repeat emails, rather than one big bloated sales copy that is really tough for the mind to absorb, even if its good.

Just my 2 cents. Thanks for the question, I love answering these with my own 2 cents. Cheers!

Faulty logic.

You can never be sure that a subscriber will purchase after 10, 20, or 30 emails. What I am sure of is this: prospects that have been nurtured on an email list and want to receive your communications are much more likely to buy than hitting random prospects cold to make a purchase.

Since you can send an email to your entire list and it's no more effort than sending one email to one person, building a list makes way, way more sense than always marketing to new random prospects.

Your list is an asset and you can market all sorts of offers to them. Doing it the other way, the "cold call" way, means you're constantly fighting the battle of new cold traffic. I'll take email list marketing over that any day.

Steve

The list building route might work out better. It gives you multiple chances to try to sell them instead of just once on a page visit.

Building a list helps to keep your prospective buyers warm and prepared towards purchasing not just one product but other related products.

Do both of them, if they don't want to read through a long sales letter, hit them with the sales angles through emails until they open one with a headline that resonates with them.

Back when I still had my insurance license, one of my trainers used to say that the worst thing about making a sale is that you just lost your best prospect.

Going hard for one-off sales of an ebook or course is much the same way. You might skim off a few impulse sales, but unless you have a household name or a hell of a demonstration (like the old time pitchmen who worked that fairs and boardwalks), you will have a tough row to hoe.

Getting the email lets you build your case in pieces, especially if you can augment the emails by sending subscribers to online elements like videos.

That said, there's another sales cliche that fits here.

Don't stop people from buying just because you aren't done selling.

Which brings us to the "do both" answer.

Get the email.

Send them to the sales letter.

If they buy, move them from the prospect list to the buyers list. The buyers list is the real asset.