Understanding Email

Email marketing means different things to differ-
ent people. Some see it as a critical communication
link between consumers and the brands they trust
and love; others see it as a thinly veiled, intrusive
marketing tool. Either way, the email marketing
you conduct today faces stiff competition from the
email communication that is now the backbone
of our digital lifestyles. This chapter starts with a
brief history of email marketing and then looks at
the value email marketing offers companies today.

How We Got Here
In the early 20th century, noted English mathematician and philosopher Alfred North
Whitehead said, “Fundamental progress has to do with the reinterpretation of basic
ideas.” The progress in communication, both in scope and velocity, that is embodied
by the prevalence of email is at its core a reinterpretation of a new way to communicate
through the written word.
Email is progress. It is an integrated and indispensable part of all our lives. Its
widespread distribution, made possible by the advent of the Internet, lowered the eco-
nomic barrier to global communication and has made it a vital link to our families,
friends, and communities. Just like the printing press 500 years before it, email is an
effective and effi cient means of mass distribution. Email also provides an easy way to
conduct personal one-on-one dialogue


Write This Down: Today email is considered the backbone of all digital communications.

Email is the most popular form of asynchronous communication; it touches hun-
dreds of millions of people around the world every day. Consider for a moment that, as
of 2008, 73 percent of the North American population has email. In the United States,
consumers spend as many hours online as they spend watching television. And out of
all the many benefi ts that such pervasive Internet connectivity affords us, the primary
activity that individuals use the Internet for is communicating with others via email.
According to the JupiterResearch/ Ipsos Insight Individual User Survey (July 2006), 87
percent of consumers in the United States cites email as the top reason for connecting
to the Internet.


Write This Down: In 2007, 234 trillion emails were sent.

Seventy percent of U.S. Internet users has two personal email accounts, indicat-
ing that we need more than one email address to keep up with the many benefi ts of
its purpose. The pervasiveness of email is underscored by the volume of messages a
person receives. On average, each day email users in the United States receive 41 mes-
sages in their primary personal inboxes, with 37 percent saying they receive 31 or more
messages daily. Based on the composition of messages they receive in these accounts
(Figure 1.1), email users get an average of 10 promotional messages per day in their
primary personal inboxes. These numbers are in addition to hundreds of email com-
munications that people receive each week at work.
o summarize those statistics, the share of opt-in permission email in the con-
sumer’s primary personal inbox is increasing, and the amount of spam in the inbox is
decreasing. According to JupiterResearch, opt-in permission email—mail that consum-
ers have explicitly signed up for—accounted for 16 percent of the email in the consum-
er’s primary personal inbox in 2003 and increased to 27 percent in 2006. During that
same time period, the share of spam decreased from 44 percent to 31 percent.
Email has brought tremendous effi ciency to our lives. For example, it lets us
confi rm our purchases and it enables us to communicate with merchants. Spending in
online retail in the United States will grow at a combined annual growth rate (CAGR
of 11 percent to reach $215 billion in 2012, which will generate 5 billion pre- and post-
sale email contacts for U.S. retailers by that same year. Consumers can easily archive
their transactions, and email can be a more effi cient form of customer service than
calling a merchant and sitting on hold. The value that we place on email cannot be
dismissed.

Write This Down: In 2006, 49 percent of all personal communication in the United Kingdom was
written via email. (Source: Forrester)

With the massive amounts of email that we now receive and rely on daily to
communicate, you might wonder, How did we get here? How did email become so
powerful that it has changed the way the world communicates?
It did not start with Al Gore creating the Internet; he simply brought the U.S.
Congress’s attention—and funding—to this new communication medium when it was
still in its infancy. Email originated with a group of inspired and hardworking indi-
viduals as a forum where professors, technology luminaries, and government offi cials
could share ideals and conversations. As with all great ideas, their efforts started small
and have now created a connected, global, worldwide society.
We can trace the roots of the commercial Internet and email marketing to 1969,
during the Cold War, when the U.S. Defense Department created ARPANET, a com-
puter-based messaging system designed to survive a nuclear attack. In its earliest form,
this network was nothing more than what is commonly known as a fi le system where
one person could post a note for another person to see in a folder.
By the early 1980s, the network had expanded to a small group of universities,
all sharing the power of connected digital messaging. Getting connected to an early
Internet service like Usenet was no simple matter (Figure 1.2). The computers they
used in those early days were “mainframes,” much bigger but much less powerful than
the desktops and laptops we have today. At about the same time, the development of
increasingly smaller and more powerful microprocessor chips was beginning to make
the fi rst personal computers available to the masses. As we all know, the PC quickly
became essential to businesses of all kinds, as modern user-friendly software was devel-
oped. In the late 1980s, the fi rst commercial providers emerged, such as CompuServe
and MCI, and the consumer face of what would be forever known as the Internet soon
followed.
This new phenomenon in personal connectivity quickly resulted in conversa-
tions around the water cooler such as, “Are you online?” and, “You can fi nd me in the
moondance Usenet group.” This created a new world of communication, opening the
Internet up not just for personal communication but for businesses as well. Email mar-
keting soon emerged as one of the most profi table and effective forms of marketing.

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