Short History of Targeted Ads
Electronic mail is the most widely used tool for communication with around 2.5 billion active users and around 4.5 billion accounts. It is by far the current most relevant internet tool for fostering a positive consumer and business relationship.
Email was another early internet invention. In fact, in the 1970’s Ray Tomlinson developed the ARPANET’ network email system, and for most early internet users electronic mail was probably the first practical common application. In 1993 the public lexicon had adopted the word email to replace electronic email and the race was on for companies to develop free and easy to use email addresses for the common household.
AOL, Yahoo, Echomail, and Hotmail were some of the first large companies that offered this amazing widespread technology to businesses and consumers.
As soon as society embraced email as a popular and effective way to interact online, we experienced new phenomena of targeted email campaigns to inform, interact, and reach potential consumers. Businesses quickly came to the conclusion that email was a great avenue for advertisement. They could easily send out a message to an infinite number of potential consumers timely and cost effectively. The different unsolicited email campaigns, even then, immediately gathered distaste while also tagged as junk, spam, and other not-so-attractive titles. It quickly became apparent that most customers treated these unsolicited emails the same way as unsolicited advertisement through the postal system.
It is critical to understand that although email was a great way for consumers and businesses to find each other, the spam emails are generally not mutually wanted by the consumer. A consumer could get very frustrated with inboxes filling up with unwanted email. This negative feeling from a consumer to a business is not what is needed when trying to foster a mutually beneficial consumer and business relationship.
It became apparent that email needed a way to filter out spam mail and only deliver wanted communications to consumers. In 1996 the Mail Abuse Prevention System or MAPS was started to build software to fight against unwanted mail. During the last 20 years several systems were developed to filter out negative email that was getting sent out.
In year 2000 Justin Mason created a program that was called the SpamAssassin to combat spam email.
Spam or unwanted email became such a problem for email users that in 2006 in the United States President Bush passed a law called the “Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing” also known as CAN-SPAM. Other countries had or quickly responded with similar type of laws.
As a quick overview a sender must do the following to be in compliance with email laws.
1. Received permission from a consumer to send them an email
2. Don’t use misleading header lines
3. Identify the email as advertisement
4. Include a postal address to allow a consumer to get a hold of you
5. Tell consumers how to opt of receiving emails
6. Honor opt out requests promptly
These international accepted laws are currently what have been used to define the consumer and business relationship with emails. It is very common to be asked by a business to join their newsletter or subscribe to their reward program. Often times businesses incentivize consumers to sign-up now so that businesses can receive a consumer’s permission to add an email to their email list.
During the early 2000’s a new internet technology was beginning to take off called social media. Social media was a centralized platform that would allow consumers to follow another person or entity and receive messages from that person. This seemed to be the answer for the consumer and business relationship as businesses would be able to build a following and reward consumers for purchases and loyalty.
This has not been the case and email is still the most widely used platform for continuing to develop the consumer and business relationship and allowing growth from the business and consumer through loyalty.
In a report called “Email Marketing vs Social Media Performance (2016–2019 Statistics)” by Mary Fernandez on November 8, 2016 she clearly shows that email marketing is winning the battle over social media except in one category.
(https://optinmonster.com/email-marketing-vs-social-media-performance-2016-2019-statistics/)
The results of this research are very convincing that although social media should have overthrown email in online marketing the current social media platforms are failing to create a thriving customer and business relationship and businesses are stuck with utilizing technology of the past, email.
Although business to consumer emails are beautiful email pages the main technology behind an email has not changed.
The Vocit platform combines this amazing technology of email with social media to push the business and consumer relationship onto grounds that are typically only seen with mom-and-pap type of stores. The communication is wanted and allows for growth within both sides.