History Of Email Marketing:
Email is probably ubiquitous to you, but there was a time when there was no
email!
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
1971. He initiated the use of the @ sign and the address structure that we
use
today (username@hostname) (Crocker). Email was used to send messages to
computers on the same network, and is still used for this purpose.
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 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 of 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.
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