The history of email marketing

Email marketing is an approach used in the advertising industry where email is used as the primary means of reaching the consumer, sending promotional messages and more. A target group that we aim to reach with our message is defined in advance. This could be all of our current customers that we want to communicate with on a daily basis, or it could be potential customers that we want to attract to increase our revenue.
The main idea of this kind of campaigns is to maintain long lasting and close contacts with customers, to build trust, to send a variety of content, and to spread an advertising message in order to make a sale.
In the beginning, advertising messages were disseminated in two ways – by phone or by sending by mail, through physical delivery, but eventually new channels started to be organised for easier and cheaper accessibility and communication.

In 1991, the free platform Hotmail was created. By then, the Internet had already been invented, but it was mainly used by students or employees of certain companies. The platform created provided marketers with a completely new and inexpensive way to reach a huge number of customers, as well as serving as a field for experimentation and refinement of this type of advertising.
In the mid-1990s, more and more companies began to use email marketing as a means of doing business, with the volume of emails being sent increasing. Internet providers began to feel that spam was not working well for consumers, and so by the mid-1990s, many initiatives and ideas emerged on how to regulate and reduce spam mailing.
As technology evolved and followed current trends, email marketing was refined and developed further. In 2012, the so-called “modern email marketing” emerged, which continues to evolve in the direction of innovation and improvement to this day.
Today, a very large number of companies that work with clients mainly use email as a channel for daily communication with customers and partners, discussing any tasks, as well as sharing work already done. Often companies use email for promotional purposes to attract new customers, to distribute advertising information, and to offer services and products to current and potential customers. Email marketing is one of the successful marketing techniques and helps many companies to promote their business and sell their products effectively.

Benefits of email marketing:

– Cheap to implement

A useful marketing ploy that a company can use is to start with a few inexpensive advertising options and, once it has gathered more financial resources, invest in more expensive forms to promote its products and services. In this respect, email marketing is a very budget-friendly option as it requires almost no expenditure and through it, advertising can reach a large number of current or potential customers.

– It is interactive

It has been proven that very often the visuals attract the users initially, whereby there is an interest and incentive to get more information about a product, service, etc. It is because of this that newsletters are highly interactive and effective. Modern mailing is based on the idea of a magazine or an advertising booklet, but it’s actually all online. Emphasis is placed on large and small visuals that grab attention instantly, and text can be added below each one or even within the visual itself to explain more about the benefits of the given services. In this regard, the creative part of any advertising team can allow themselves more freedom and create not one, but several designs that revolve around the core idea – an interactive presentation of a product or service in order to sell.

– Instant result

It could be argued that these types of campaigns are truly instantaneous, as very often people who have signed up to receive information from certain companies, even if they don’t look at their emails, receive one in their inbox each week with a relevant advertising headline to remind them of the company in question. The instant effect is also derived from the fact that this kind of information can be sent to a huge number of users at the same time and in email marketing there is no time for advertisers to wait for the information to reach their target groups. With this type of advertising, the information reaches the desired audience immediately.

– Information is delivered ready-made

Another advantage is that the information is served ready-made. With this type of advertising, no one makes it difficult for their customers to engage themselves in making themselves aware of various activities that would be beneficial to them. All the information regarding a product or service is contained in the email.