You may be afraid about asking your potential customers for their email addresses. And this is quite understandable. I was the same way. Like you, I didn’t want my visitors to think that I was snooping into their privacy. And these days, people are becoming increasingly wary about handing over their email addresses to just anyone.

But there's a gold mine of opportunity in those e-mail addresses, and many marketers don't take the time to look for it. In this article I’ll show you why an opt-in email list is so important to your business.

So many unsuccessful websites simply do not mess with creating an email list. And this is why a lot of them fail. It’s sad to hear about a business owner who spent a small fortune driving traffic to their websites but the sales just didn’t come like expected.

It’s a fact that hardly anyone ever buys anything the first time they visit a web site. Studies have determined that it takes a typical Internet customer about five to seven visits to a single website before they buy anything. If you’re just depending on hits alone, you’re in trouble.

The number one reason for collecting e-mail addresses — and using them — is for establishing an electronic, permission-based, relationship with loyal visitors and customers. It would seem that the practical benefit of collecting e-mail addresses is obvious. Yet conversations with novice marketers indicate that many not only do not collect them but hardly use them even when they do. That's a shame.

Collecting e-mail addresses should be a no-brainer in an Internet-enabled market. E-mail is so commonplace and pervasive that its existence and use are many times taken for granted.