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At its core, email marketing is a tool for customer relationship management (CRM). Used effectively, this extension of permission based marketing can deliver one of the highest returns on investment (ROI) of any eMarketing activity.

Simply put, email marketing is a form of direct marketing which utilises electronic means to deliver commercial messages to an audience. It is one of the oldest and yet still one of the most powerful of all eMarketing tactics. The power comes from the fact that it is:
 - Extremely cost effective due to a low cost per contact
 - Highly targeted
 - Customisable on a mass scale
 - Completely measurable 

Furthermore, email marketing’s main strength is that it takes advantage of a customer’s most prolific touch point with the Internet… their inbox.

Email marketing is a tool for building relationships with both existing and potential customers. It should maximise the retention and value of these customers, which should ultimately lead to greater profitability.

History

Email is probably ubiquitous to you, but there was a time when there was no email!

Email actually predates the Internet, and was first used as a way for users of the same computer to leave messages for each other all the way back in 1961. Ray Tomlinson is credited with creating the first network email application in 1971. He initiated the use of the @ sign and the address structure that we use today (username@hostname) (Crocker). Email was used to send messages to computers on the same network, and is still used for this purpose today.

It was only in 1993 that large network service providers, such as America Online and Delphi, started to connect their proprietary email systems to the Internet. This began the large scale adoption of Internet email as a global standard. Coupled with standards that had been created in the preceding twenty years, the Internet allowed users on different networks to send each other messages.

The first email spam dates back to 1978. Spam is defined as unsolicited commercial or bulk email, and today is said to account for 80 to 85% of all email (Waters, 2008)!

Direct marketing has long played an integral part in marketing campaigns, but the high cost meant that only large companies were able to pursue this. However, with the growth of the Internet, and the use of email to market directly to consumers, marketers have found these costs dropping, and the effectiveness increasing.