When did email marketing start?
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Email marketing as a deliberate business practice kicked off in the 1990s, when companies realized they could reach thousands of people for almost nothing. This was spam's golden age (cost of sending: $0, cost of pissing people off: also $0).
The real shift came in 1999 with Seth Godin's book "Permission Marketing." Godin argued that sending to people who actually wanted to hear from you wasn't just polite, it was better business. This introduced the concept of opt-in marketing, the idea that you ask permission before sending. That concept eventually became the double opt-in standard we use today (and that laws like CAN-SPAM and GDPR now require).
Why this matters now: permission-based sending isn't just history, it's how modern deliverability works. Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo look at engagement (opens, clicks, replies) to decide if your emails are wanted. If people didn't ask for your emails, they won't engage, and spam filters will notice. The 1990s taught us that blasting everyone is cheap. The 2000s taught us it doesn't work. And the 2020s taught us it'll get you blocklisted.
Commercial ESPs like Mailchimp, Constant Contact, and SendGrid started appearing in the late 1990s and early 2000s, which made it easier for businesses to send at scale without running their own mail servers. But they also enforced anti-spam policies from the start, which helped legitimize email marketing as a real channel instead of a nuisance.
If you're starting email marketing today, you're inheriting this history whether you know it or not. Spam filters remember the 1990s, even if you don't. That's why explicit opt-in (and proof of it) is the foundation of everything else.
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