As a small business owner, a big part of your success relies on maximising your sales while minimising your expenses. Email marketing can be a great vehicle to do both.

A good email marketing campaign can help you:

- Increase your sales conversion
- Generate repeat sales
- Up-sell and cross-sell products and services
- Gain valuable feedback from your visitors
- Drive web users to make offline purchases

1. Increase Your Sales Conversion

Regardless of how good your product or service is, in reality most visitors to your site won't convert into sales on their first visit.

In fact, research indicates that it takes the average shopper up to nine visits before they'll make a buying decision. In other words, every effective sales process requires an element of repetition.

Think about the times when you've picked up a new product at the supermarket after seeing it advertised on TV a dozen times. Or a time where you've visited a new local restaurant after driving past it every day on your way to work.

That's repetition in action, but unlike a 'bricks-and-mortar' retail store, there is no 'drive-by' traffic on the Internet. In many cases when someone clicks on the little 'exit' button in the top right hand corner of the screen... they're gone forever.

On top of that, there are numerous ways someone can get distracted while visiting your website. For example, let's say you run a website selling baby prams.

A mother is surfing through your site and finds a product she likes - but before she gets a chance to add the item to her shopping basket ....

- The phone rings
- The baby starts crying
- She accidentally closes off the web browser
- She receives an email that requires attention
- A delivery man rings the door bell

Regardless of the reason - if she leaves the site there's a 90% chance you've lost the sale... unless you've managed to capture her email address.

If you've got her email address, you get a second chance. You can email her with:

- Your monthly newsletter
- Your free report on 'How to Choose the Perfect Pram'
- Information about new models

The bottom line is, capturing an email address gives you a 'Plan B' and allows you to follow-up with someone after they've left your website.

2. Generate Repeat Sales

Getting new customers is hard work - it's also really expensive.

In fact, it can be up to eight to ten times more expensive to acquire a new customer than to sell to an existing one. To acquire new customers, you have to factor in the cost of advertising, educating and selling to them.

Therefore, a big chunk of the initial sale is simply recouping the costs you've outlaid to get the customer in the first place.

And while new sales are great, we can't emphasize strongly enough the value of repeat sales. Too often, businesses focus only on the initial sale and forget about the lifetime value of a customer.

Keeping in touch with customers on a regular basis via email allows you to generate repeat sales which can be up to four times more profitable than the initial purchase.

A good email marketing campaign will increase the frequency of repeat purchases from your existing customers.

3. Up-sell and Cross-sell Products & Services

"Would you like fries with that?"

McDonalds makes billions of dollars every year from this basic up-sell.

When appropriate, email provides a great opportunity for you to up-sell and cross-sell your products and services.

For example, if you run a website that sells tennis gear, someone purchasing a new tennis racket might also be interested in tennis balls and other accessories.

By using simple email marketing software, it's easy to create a series of email messages (called 'Auto-Responders') that will automatically follow-up with offers on tennis balls, tennis shoes, tennis clothes and so on.

If you're selling a service, like dry cleaning, once a customer has made an initial purchase you can use email to follow up with related services, like ironing business shirts and stain removal.

This basic technique by itself can easily add an extra 30% to your average order value and is used by almost all major companies online.

Amazon.com uses up-selling and cross-selling extensively on their site. If you buy a book about 'home renovations', they'll follow up with a list of other books on the same topic.

Dell Computers offers printers and other accessories as up-sells to people purchasing computer systems.

4. Gain Valuable Feedback from Your Visitors

Customer feedback is an invaluable tool for any business. This feedback allows you to determine:

- What products and services to provide
- Who to target
- What the market is willing to pay

Email in particular provides your customers with a unique opportunity to give honest feedback. Unlike face-to-face interaction where people can be shy about voicing their true feelings, email allows them to get right to the point.

By using email as a feedback tool you can adapt to what the market wants and improve your business.

5. Drive Web Users to Make Offline Purchases

Surprisingly, email marketing is often a catalyst for web users to go and make a purchase offline. When surveyed, 59% of email users said that they have made a purchase offline after receiving an email promotion.

Why? Sometimes a user will find something they want online but they need it straight away and can't afford to wait for delivery. Other times, the product might need to be demonstrated (like a treadmill) and they want to see, touch and feel the item.

If you run a conventional offline business you can use email marketing to drive foot traffic through your door.

Final Thoughts

Because email marketing has such low overheads, every sale generated from your campaign is pure profit.

Regardless of the product or service you sell, if you're not taking advantage of email marketing, you're losing money.

So what are you waiting for? Start building that list now!

Adrian Mullan is the author of 'The Internet Demystified' and founder of http://www.webdummy.com/ WebDummy.com - a popular Internet marketing resource for small business owners.