In this current economic climate when businesses in all kinds of different industries are struggling to stay afloat, there is a real need to look for and identify additional ways of increasing overall profits. One of the best ways, in my opinion, is simply to look at incorporating email marketing into your business.

A lot of companies are leaving a lot of money on the table by not making full use of email marketing. For the sake of a small monthly autoresponder fee, you could easily have a large list of email subscribers at your disposal. You could then promote your products to this list or contact them every so often and let them know about any special offers or promotions you are currently running.

The options are endless but the point is that you have to generate a list of potential customers that you can sell your products to, even if it\'s just a small list of customers that have bought from you in the past.

It doesn\'t matter if you have your own shop or whether you are an online retailer, you really should be making full use of email marketing in order to make as much money as possible. Just look at two of the online retail giants Amazon and Ebay. I know from my own experience that both of these companies are using email marketing to regularly promote special offers because I\'m on both of these companies\' email lists.

People don\'t generally mind receiving emails from you as long as you don\'t bombard them with messages and you always give them the option of unsubscribing at any time. Your only real cost is the email autoresponder that you use to build your list and send messages, but this is generally no more than around $20 per month for a modest sized list, and even if you do build up a large list, the additional cost will be dwarfed by the profits you will make from your promotions.

Of course email marketing may not be appropriate for every type of business, but I think most businesses could certainly benefit from this cost-effective method of marketing. Even if you are a one-product company you can still use email marketing because you can schedule a series of emails to be sent to potential customers that continually highlight the main benefits of your product.

Therefore to sum up, it\'s always worth collecting the name and email address of your customers (or potential customers) because you can then make long-term sales through additional sales promotions rather than relying on a one-time purchase through your retail outlet or website.