You may have heard many web designers or even web design articles mentioning list building. But what exactly is list building? List building is the process of collecting email addresses also known as leads into an email marketing software from first time visitors to your site. Research has shown that you can only expect about 10% of the visitors to your website to become buyers or purchase on that initial visit to your site. About 33% would give you their email addresses. The rates at which a visitor makes a purchase is known as  your conversion rate while the rate at which visitors gives you their contact details  or email addresses is known as the opt-in rate.

Most times, a lot of first time visitors to your website do not intend to buy your products or services. They only want to check out some of the information you probably have on the subject. Studies have also shown that it usually takes seven straight messages or communication between both parties before a client would finally purchase a product. From my personal online selling experience, you rarely get a ‘‘yeah’’ sale on the first visit. People usually need a lot of information before they can be very confident and ready to buy from you.

If you intend to sell a product, then you need to give your prospects an awesome review or offer of the products they can't simply resist via their emails in order to be successful. A lot of people are usually careful about giving out their email addresses. Many others simply don't want to do that but giving out a free gift can easily break through all that. This is one of the reasons why you need to carefully choose a free gift. It can be a carefully planned mini-course or a mini report instantly delivered to their email boxes. You could even arrange to send a preview of the product you intend to sell - this is a great incentive that's enough to break that barrier.

A system that can help you collect email addresses is an autoresponder. This is a system that comes with a database that helps you store the names and email addresses of any visitor that subscribes to your offers. A follow up message or future message broadcast can be quickly sent to the email addresses of those people that have signed up for your offer.

These messages can be sent immediately and even customized at the time of set up. You can also schedule the messages to be delivered immediately the addresses enter the database, 2 days after, 5 days or even ten years after the initial email lead was collected. Autoresponders are very effective and powerful systems that can be used from any part of the world. With auto responders, location and time is not a barrier to your business. There are third party autoresponders that can sit and operate on servers. These days, they are the best systems one can use as they have been proven to be highly effective systems that can help you generate personal signup forms you could place on your websites.

If you choose to host a personal email database, you can also send an email to anyone on your database at anytime. For instance, if you have about 200 regular visitors to your website daily with a daily signup rate of 15%, it translates to 30 fresh email addresses every day. Within a year, this means you'll be having about 10, 950 email addresses. If you decide to send out a promo for an email course  you've probably created for $97 and only 3% of your database decide to sign up  for this offer. This is a total income of $31, 864.50 from just one broadcast.

This shows you the power and importance of an email list. With a real value adding product, you can make so much profit within a few days. So the next time you want to start a marketing campaign, make sure you ask for that email address. It would prove to be a valuable asset in future if you can continuously work out the kind of useful information you'll get to share with them regularly and make it available.Well if you don't know where to start with your list building talk to any of your local website designers to help you get started