Email Marketing: Past, Present and Future

As a businessperson, it's quite possible that you use email every day, but have no idea about why email was invented or how it came about. Keep reading to find out more about the origins of this rich, popular technology.

Email was originally invented in the mid 1960s as a way for employees on a mainframe computer to communicate with each other. It pre-dates the Internet because people used it to communicate before the Internet was even invented. Ironically, even though anyone with Internet access can use it today, email itself was critical in the invention of the Internet. Shortly after its invention, email was used in offices as inter-office communication. A man named Ray Tomlinson started to use the “@” symbol to separate names and domain names, a system still used today.

Soon after that, it became the way to communicate because it was cheaper and often faster than making a telephone call. It was also global. As the Internet itself gained popularity, email took off just as quickly, before you knew it, spam started appearing in people's in-boxes. In 1990, filters were invented to stop this huge flow of unwanted mail. Email service providers are still trying to figure out how to block the bad stuff without the good stuff.

The email technology of today is quite sophisticated compared to how it was at its inception. Many people discovered that email works well as a business application and started using it to promote their goods and services. Using email for business, called email marketing, has proven to be a great use of the technology to bring in good return on investment. So while many people get friendly emails from their families and colleagues, they're just as likely to get as much mail about the latest products and services.

With email marketing, there are many rules to follow to preserve a business person's on line reputation. The most reputable email marketing campaigns are completely permission-based, with lists carefully grown through sign ups on Websites and other methods. The top retailers in the country rely on an Opt-In (permission-based) system, because it lets email service providers and Internet service providers know that the email campaigns are going to someone who truly wants them. If you're an email marketer and you want to avoid being labeled as a spammer, you must build a permission-based campaign. If you buy or rent lists, or scrape email addresses off Websites, you'll get marked as a spammer and your delivery rates will plummet to nearly zero. In addition to a general code of contact, US-based email marketers must follow the federal CAN-SPAM ACT, a set of laws and guidelines that regulated all email marketers. By ignoring these rules and sending out unwanted email, businesspeople can face stiff fines and even jail time.

Although many ESPs and ISPs still have some difficulty separating good emails from bad, many email marketing companies have taken the matter into their own hands, developing sender authentication strategies and technologies to show ESPs and ISPs that the emails are coming from a reliable source. One of these technologies is SPF, also known as Sender Policy Framework, which gives the ESP a message that the email is coming from the appropriate domain name, and has not been hijacked by a spammer

Although today's email marketers struggle to get their mail into the inbox, the future email marketers will have no such problem. With the development of SPF and certified email, the future is bright for email marketers.