For any business whether offline or online you need customers. It's much easier to get potential customers into your online store, or business website, by a number of different means, search engine traffic, adverts of many kinds, or from links on other sites. It doesn't matter how they got there in the first place, as long as they buy, you can capture some details then and send them updates on your later offers or deals. But what about if these visitors don't buy, how do you bring them back again if you offer a better deal in the future, or have new products they may be interested in?

That's where an email list becomes your best friend, and online businesses biggest asset. You need to capture those email addresses before the visitor leaves. This is so important that the big name online marketers make building a subscriber list one of their main activities. Some of the figures bandied about concerning email lists may be erroneous, but from my own personal experience, they're not too far out, so I will repeat them here.

Figures quoted for the value of each subscriber range from 50 cents to 1 dollar per subscriber per month, so the larger the subscriber list you have the more you can make each month, you do the maths for yourself. There is a caveat to this, your subscriber list needs to be targeted, ie it's no use trying to sell high heeled shoes to a predominately male audience, or sending your best ad for gardening tools to people who sign up on a site about rap music, if they have little interest you won't make anything. It's also claimed that sales increase after the potential customer has received several emails from an online business, and the extra sales are in the order of over 50% of customers purchase when they are more comfortable with the seller following receipt of the emails.

So now we know the value of having an email list, how do we start to build our own subscriber base?

The easiest method is to use an online "autoresponder" such as getresponse.com which you can preload with messages ready to send to anyone who signs up. Then you will need a way for your website visitors to subscribe to your newsletter or sales letter series, all good autoresponders will give you some html code ready to paste into your webpages into which visitors can place their name and email address as a minimum, and some will allow you to include boxes for more information should you require it.

You now need to post this code into a visible spot in your webpage(s) and make it as easy as possible for your visitor to sign up for your email subscriber list. Now you have a way to capture contact details to give you a second chance at making a sale even after your visitor has left your site. So that's it sit and wait for those subscribers to sign up.

Hold on a minute, why would they want to sign up for your newsletter, or email series?

You need to give the visitor a good reason to subscribe to your list, after all they probably already get enough emails from spam, friends sending them the latest joke, and other online businesses who have their address, so you need to sweeten the deal in their favour. One of the easiest ways to attract subscribers is to offer a free gift for subscribing. The gift can be as simple as making the emails a course to teach them something about the topic of your website, a free ebook (there are plenty available on a variety of subjects if you don't have one to give away already, search in your favourite search engine) or you could offer a competition where subscribers can win one of your products. Whatever you do, try to make it an offer the visitor will find it hard to turn down,and they will subscribe to get it.

So these are the reasons to start your own subscriber list, and an overview of how to start getting subscribers, but what sort of emails should you send as your list grows?

Obviously if you are just selling something, and want to remind visitors why they went to your site in the first place, then send them some information about your product(s) in a series of emails, and include a reminder of the original link so they can go back to review the salespage and hopefully buy. There is a more subtle way though. Information is why most people are looking on the internet, so it makes sense to make your emails informational, and gently bring your sales pitch to the subscribers as part of the information. If you don't have time to write your own informational articles, you can search in article directories for ones written on the topic your site and newsletter deal with, just follow the directories terms for using the articles. These articles can then be preloaded into your autoresponder along with your additional promotional text, ready to be sent. Once it is setup, it can be all left to run automatically.

Hopefully you will now see the benefits of using email newsletters to increase your online business, or website visits, and see that it's not too difficult to get started. An article of this type can only give you an overview of the basics of email subscriber lists for online businesses, but there is plenty more available online, and I'd recommend you to find out more about it, especially how to avoid spam complaints. But most importantly, start your own email subscriber list today, and watch your business grow.