No matter what happens in the immediate future, small businesses who survive the economic storm of the century and sail unscathed into the future will need to adapt their marketing to keep sales from sliding into oblivion. More and more businesses are panicking and sliding into the darkness. The time to act is now. As the nation holds its breath to see what happens next, nothing needs your attention more right now than your marketing strategy.

Talk of economic crash has consumers worried. The pool of available buyers has shrunk overnight. There is something you can do. Something simple, powerful and wickedly effective to side-step the current danger. You can learn from the $36 billion mistake Google is making.

Consumers and businesses are cutting back. Businesses cutting back on advertising and marketing are in grave danger. Don't make that mistake. When you cut back on marketing and advertising you are leaving your customer vault open for your competition to steal more business from you. You can cut your marketing cost without cutting your marketing reach and results. Without hurting your sales even more.

Tough times demand you wake up your marketing and send it to boot camp. You need every marketing move you make to work tirelessly to protect your sales. And you need to be able to measure it. It's time to break the emergency marketing glass. It time to pull out the big guns, the game-changers, the soldiers of marketing fortune.

The most powerful tool that fits this description to increase sales is email marketing. This is where Google is missing out. They are not using email marketing effectively. The lowly little email is mighty powerful when you do the math. Google is not alone. More that 98% of all businesses who market via email do not apply key strategies to their email campaigns. Not to mention many small businesses don't do email marketing at all.

Even start-up businesses with $20 a month marketing budget and no website have access to Fortune 500 email marketing tools online. Small businesses who miss this opportunity because they don't understand the sheer magnitude of email marketing's "destiny-changer" status will miss out on the ability to take control of their business in economic storms.

If you don't know exactly how to use email marketing, or you scoff at it for any reason, take notice, or put your small business on the chopping block now. Preconceived ideas, misinformation or simple lack of understanding of the power of email marketing could keep you on the outside looking in - while your competitors clean out your sales vault. Not only can email marketing done right change your business destiny, it could change the destiny of a nation.

An email marketing mistake is at the core of a staggering $36 billion sales bleed draining shareholder profits at Google. Google can handle it, they are doing a lot of other things right. The mistake: a lack of effective email marketing to contacts and customers may give Google shareholders pause and, it is more serious when small businesses make it. Even the Presidential candidates are making email marketing gaffs that could determine who wins the election.

Still not convinced you need to do email marketing?

5 Reasons You Need to Use Email Marketing

1) 96% of Internet users access email - Scarborough (2005)

2) 87% of Consumers online time is spent reading their emails - Jupiter Research (Dec. 2007)

3) 85% of business professionals sign up for email programs - Return Path (2007)

4) 60% percent of business decision makers say the Internet and email are the best ways for advertisers to reach them - Jupiter Research (2007)

5) 66% of Consumer surveyed said they have purchased because of marketing message received via email - ExactTarget (2008)

You don't have to be left behind. You don't have to be helpless in the face of national economic misfortune. Email marketing gives you control over your marketing and sales results. There are excellent, free and low-cost professional email resources you can harness to put your marketing on steroids and keep your sales growing and from going to the competition. Make no mistake, you need to harness email marketing as a fundamental method to market your business, product or service, or be left behind.