Many businesses transform into turtles during economic downturns, pulling their heads into their shells and effectively retreating from the business community. If sales and profits are down, they cut, cut, cut.

Sure all the wasteful spending and some of the less critical expenditures must go -- and that's good. But many businesses slit their throats by slashing their marketing and advertising budgets to the bone. I've watched some businesses cancel ALL advertising in an effort to save money.

While cutting excess spending is always a smart practice, eliminating your means of pulling in new business (marketing and advertising) is just plain suicide. It might look good on a spreadsheet, but the outcome is doom.

So what can a business do if revenue is down and your marketing budget is putting a strain on your bottom line?

First, you need to reassess how you're spending your marketing dollars. Some advertising vehicles may not be the right ones for your business in this (or any) economy.

Simply put, you must demand the biggest bang for your marketing buck.

And that's why email marketing is...

Your Biggest Marketing Bang For The Buck

Because most businesses don't know how to use email properly, they often focus more on other forms of advertising, like Yellow Pages, print ads, and paid search (pay-per-click, like Google Adwords).

Experience tells us that most businesses can triple their website's sales performance by adding an effective email campaign to the mix.

It's the only way to continue the dialog that begins days, even weeks, after a prospect has visited your website.

Now, I'm not suggesting email should be your only marketing activity. You need to advertise and market yourself to get prospects into your email marketing system. Email marketing won't work without a mix of fresh prospects and active customers.

But, given the minuscule cost and effort needed to create and maintain a successful email marketing campaign, I can think of no other marketing method that offers a bigger bang for the buck.

Why You MUST Add Email Marketing:

1. Email costs next to nothing to send. No printing or postage costs. And email infrastructure costs (hosting and service providers) are very affordable when compared to alternatives.
2. Once established, it's easy to maintain an email campaign with as little as a couple of hours a week.
3. It opens a direct and immediate line of communication with your prospects and customers that is hard to achieve outside of phone calls and face-to-face selling.
4. Email is flexible and customizable. There are nearly no limits in how you can use email to persuade new prospects to buy and use it to create loyalty (and repeat sales) with your existing customers.
5. You can test and track your efforts to continually improve the performance of your campaigns.
6. Finally, do it because your competition probably WON'T be using email.

If you've never tried email marketing in your business before, you can't afford to ignore it in 2009.

If you've tried it in the past without the results you hoped for, take another look. I'll help.
And to help you get started or get back on track, I'm putting together a short course on email marketing, let's call it Email Marketing 101.

Sign up right now to be among the first people to get a copy. The cost -- nothing but your email address.

Email Marketing 101 will be ready by January 15, 2009.

Sign up here to be first in line to grab it:

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