Email Comes Of Age

At 12:33 EDT on 3 May 1978, Gary Thuerk sent an e-mail that later earned him the title “Father of Spam” (although understandably, he prefers to be called the “Father of E-marketing”). Thuerk, then a marketing manager for computer company Digital Equipment Corporation, sent a mass e-mail inviting recipients to one of two West Coast product demos for a new line of computers. By today’s standards, the send was hardly a mass mailing — just 397 accounts on ARPAnet, the U.S.

Today, 38 years after Thuerk’s first campaign, e-mail dominates marketing channels. It boasts the broadest reach, the lowest cost, the easiest measurability, and the highest conversion rates and ROI. Some 91 percent of marketing executives call e-mail the single most effective channel for driving revenue.

Email has grown up since then and if you're not already running a mature e-mail marketing programme, you can find out how to in this report. So if your e-mails can still be described as batch-and-blast instead of target-and-tantalise, you need to pivot.

• Rule #1: It takes a village to launch a campaign.
• Rule #2: Integrate cross-channel data for the best customer conversation.
• Rule #3: It’s not about you — it’s about your customers.

Give your customers the personal, relevant, realtime information they crave, and you increase their satisfaction and your revenues.