1. It Can Increase Your Conversion

Let's face the fact. Most of your site's visitors usually don't purchase at their first visit. Not everyone that comes to your site is an impulse buyer. Most of them may need to be followed up before they make their buying decision.

Also, most people prefer to buy from people they trust. This means that you may need to build a relationship first with your visitors to earn their trust before you start seeing some sales from them.

Now if you're just generating traffic without building your opt-in e-mail lists, you don't have any means to contact your visitors. You can't contact them with your website, because a website is a passive medium.

But if you capture your visitors' contact information and turn them into subscribers, you'll have the ability to contact them, follow them up, and build rapport with them, thus increasing your chance of getting sales from them.

2. It Can Give You Ongoing Profits and Repeat Business

Let's say that you have 500 people subscribing to your e-course that pre-sells some relevant products. From those 500 subscribers, 25 bought your products. Is that means your efforts to get the other 475 subscribers are wasted?

Off course not, because you can always market to your subscribers again and again with other relevant products and/or services. And this is actually the number one benefit of having your opt-in e-mail lists, namely ongoing profits and repeat business.

One thing that you may want to do though if you plan to send ongoing content and/or offers to your subscribers is to express it explicitly in your opt-in form or page. In this way, they know what to expect when they subscribe to your list, thus reducing the risk of SPAM complaints.

3. You Can Leverage Your Subscribers to Promote Your Business

This is perhaps one of the most neglected functions of an opt-in e-mail list. Many people only see their lists as a means to generate direct sales. They fail to see that they can actually leverage their subscribers to become their partners in promotion.

And I don't only mean recruiting joint venture partners or affiliates from your opt-in e-mail lists. There are various other ways to leverage your subscribers to promote your business. And you can always leverage even if you're in a business-to-consumer market.

Let me give you one simple example. For every newsletter that you send to your lists, there is a chance that your subscribers will pass it to their friends or acquaintances. And if your newsletter contains links to your website, opt-in page or sales pages, you may get some visitors, subscribers or even sales.

Now to increase the chance of your subscribers passing your newsletter, you can encourage them to do that. It's a no-brainer and it won't cost you any money or much time to implement. Just add a postscript in your newsletter that asks people to forward it to their friends or acquaintances.

Final Words

If you're still generating traffic without having any list building mechanism in place, then you're making a big mistake in your Internet business. This is especially true if you're still pushing for traffic. Come on, you've worked hard, spent your time or maybe paid some money to generate your traffic, why let most of them leave empty-handed?

Even if you're already in the level of enjoying tons of free, perpetual traffic, there is no reason why you should not have a list building mechanism in place. Because it will enhance your business, giving you the ability to actively engage your prospects and recycle your traffic.