It's always important to understand the history of something to understand why it's important!
Today I will talk about how email marketing has evolved and what the outcome of the challenge has been between offline marketing communications and those sent via direct emails to the consumer or between companies.
Remember the days of marketing through your snail mailbox?
Take a minute and take a stroll down to your regular inbox.
No, I don't mean going to your computer to check your email inbox.
I mean a walk to your actual physical mailbox where people mail you paper letters and packages.
Now collect and put in order the mail you will find there.
You are likely to find several promotional or marketing flyers that are trying to sell you localized services.
However, you may also find catalogs and promotional postcards for global brands.
Consider for a moment what the world would be like if mail in your physical inbox was the only way to send you personalized communications to market products and services.
It would be a highly inefficient system.
In fact, postal items must be printed in bulk to reduce costs, and perhaps the message you received is not even personalized with just your name.
Therefore, anyone who wants to advertise you would have to pay not only for the printing of the postcard, flyer or catalog to be sent, but also all the stamps or postage costs for sending the shipment.
Finally, the marketer who sent the mailing should wait a period of time before you receive it.
It may take several weeks for the post office to deliver it, and it may take even longer for you to remove the message from your inbox and read it.
Because of that timing, the offer the marketer was sending you may no longer be as specific and relevant to your interests.
Finally, the marketer would have no way of even knowing if the mailing had an impact on you unless you used a specific promotional code included in the mailing.
There was no way to even know if you had looked at or received your snail mail!
Does this sound like an effective way to market your products or services to a mass consumer audience?
Well, until the 1990s, it was largely the only way to get a marketing communication into the hands of a specific individual.
Marketers came up with many ways to try to make postal marketing mailings more personalized and better track their response rates, but the truth was that once a mailing was sent, figuring out whether it worked or didn't work was more guesswork compared to the real facts.
The entire process was, and is, expensive, time-consuming, and difficult to examine for success.
Luckily for you and your consumer or business-to-business marketing needs, the 1990s arrived and the Internet was born.
Soon after, email began to become the primary personal form of business communication.
Not long after personal email exploded in popularity, email marketing became an area of specialization for those with marketing experience due to its improved ability for personalization, segmentation, frequency, relevance of communications and, most importantly, tracking capabilities.
1991: The “birth” of the Internet
While there are many people who "claim" to be the founders of the Internet, experts say that the Internet as we know it now began in 1991 when CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) publicized a document known as the New World Wide Web Project.
Although it was a British scientist, Tim Berners-Lee, who created it, he actually founded html, http and the very first web pages in the world for CERN already two years before the official document, the publication of which is considered the " birth" of the Internet.
Not only has the Internet changed life as we know it, it has also changed marketing as we know it!
Over the next decade, many experts estimate that the Internet grew by as much as one hundred percent per year in terms of bandwidth used.
The greatest growth peaks were recorded in 1996 and 1997.
Today, of course, you would be hard pressed to find anyone who does not admit that the Internet plays a key role in their daily lives, from gathering information to processing communications, primarily through the use of email and, more recently, social media.
1996: Hotmail becomes the first Web-based email service.
One of the biggest benefits of the creation of the Internet was the ability to use email to communicate with people.
Email was fast, free, and could speed communications around the world in a way that most people had never previously imagined.
However, during the early years of the Internet, email was only available to people who fell into specific groups: college students who used their college-dependent email address, which they were enrolled in, or employees who were able to use company email addresses.
The second group typically had significant limitations on how to use email and who to communicate with.
While some people may also get email services provided by their Internet Service Provider (ISP), those services typically required that you check your email specifically from the computer supported by your ISP.
Email was not a type of communication with which you could respond from anywhere on the globe.
Then, in 1996, Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith launched what was then called HoTMaiL (with the letters referring to html).
It was the first web-based email system, and suddenly email was available to anyone with access to the Internet.
This didn't just mean people who had home computers connected to the Internet.
It also meant anyone who could use a public computer in a library or shopping mall had the ability to send and receive email.
Suddenly, email was no longer limited to a small group of people who needed to communicate primarily with each other.
Email was out of the box for the public and anyone who wanted to communicate with anyone else could do so through HoTMaiL.
Unsurprisingly, people loved the service and queued up for it.
A year later, in 1997, Microsoft purchased HoTMaiL for four hundred million dollars and renamed it MSN Hotmail.
How many people use email today?
Today, Hotmail is still technically a large Web-based email service in terms of end users, according to the most recent data from comScore.
Hotmail is said to have around one billion users.
However, it has been overtaken by Google's Gmail, which has around three billion.
As for Yahoo! its email services rank third with around 800 million reported users.
The birth of email marketing.
While email began as a communication tool for academic and business purposes, it quickly became a tool for personal communications between friends, family, and even people who had never met in real life!
As people began to spend more and more time using email as their primary communication tool, marketers realized that email communications were the future of marketing communications and switched to using of email as a means of communicating effectively with customers.
Email marketing, even in its early days, had a number of advantages over both postal marketing and telesales as a form of direct-to-consumer or business-to-business communication.
We'll look at these benefits in detail in the next section of this book, but today email marketing is a solid part of any comprehensive marketing plan and has entire industries built to help businesses of all sizes effectively market themselves.
SergioTraversa.com would, of course, be an example of what you will find on this site.
SergioTraversa.com works to develop useful email strategies that make it easier to email consumers or business contacts with personalized messages and complete tracking.
In addition to companies that focus mainly on the development of email marketing solutions, online commerce has seen the birth, especially in the 2007-2008 crisis years, of home based businesses, i.e. small companies created by students, the unemployed and housewives , due to the small investments required by the type of business.
Even individuals can therefore become email marketing experts.
Most medium-sized or large companies employ at least one email marketing specialist and can have up to several employees who focus solely on creating effective email marketing strategies and campaigns.
Of course, you may not even need an entire staff, but you need to understand the basics of email marketing strategies, the benefits and tactics of email marketing.
We will cover all these topics in this book to make you an expert in email marketing.
A further in-depth study relating to email marketing is constituted by my Advanced Course on Online Follow-up Marketing, which is essentially based on the use of an autoresponder and your email marketing campaigns relating to your newsletter.
In my Advanced Course on Blog Marketing, in addition to learning how to build a blog, you can learn how to integrate email marketing into a blog through my two courses, which the first is this Advanced Course on E-mail Marketing, and the second is the aforementioned Advanced Course on Follow-up Marketing On Line.