History Of Email Marketing

Email is probably a necessity to you, but there was a time when there was no email! Today email is considered the backbone of all digital communications. Just like the printing press 500 years before it, email is an effective and efficient means of mass distribution. Email also provides an easy way to conduct personal one-on-one dialogue.

Email is a way of sending messages or data to other people means of computers connected together in a network. Email actually predates the Internet, and was first used as a way for users of the same computer to leave messages for each other all the way back in 1961. Ray Tomlinson is credited with creating the first network email application in the year of 1971. He initiated the use of the @ sign and the address structure that we use today (username@domainname.com). Email was used to send messages to computers on the same network, and is still used for this purpose today.

It was only in 1993 that large network service providers, such as America Online and Delphi, started to connect their proprietary email systems to the Internet. This began the large scale adoption of Internet email as a global standard. Coupled with standards that had been created in the preceding twenty years, the Internet allowed users on different networks to send each other messages.

The first email spam dates back to 1978. Spam is defined as unsolicited commercial or bulk email, and today is said to account for 80 to 85% of all email (Waters, 2008). Direct marketing has long played an integral part in marketing campaigns, but the high cost meant that only large companies were able to pursue this. However, with the growth of the Internet, and the use of email to market directly to consumers, marketers have found these costs dropping, and the effectiveness increasing. That is the born of direct email marketing.

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