Email marketing is a practice that is quite old and probably precedes the actual high-rate growth period of the internet. While internet advertising is something that has been around for a large part of the existence of websites, few people remember that the internet was once a place where there were users just in their hundreds. With the public release of the internet or the start of the World Wide Web, more users came into the fold; however, since the big world of business never considered this medium to be really a starter until the dot com boom days. In the background, email as a medium of communication existed long before the release of the internet to the world; with the massive explosion, some small entities started to use this medium to advertise this space; these were email marketers.

With the dot com boom, the world of advertising and email marketing really took off. This lasted for at least two years, in which time the online world saw its boom and collapse as well. Email marketing never saw a dip in traffic. Spam, incidentally, is also a form of marketing through email. Spam has historically been the bane of the bulk email marketing industry. There are two types of marketers: those that will follow certain business practices and those that behave like mavericks. Spammers are the latter. Spammers work by sending unsolicited mail to a bulk of mailbox owners in the hope that one or two will open a mail and transact based on the information in the mail – basically, relying on pot luck.

Bulk email marketers, on the other hand, are reined by the laws of the land on spam, and also reined in by ISPs and other entities. Briefly, bulk email marketers have to follow rules that do not allow them to harvest email IDs, buy email addresses from spammers, use open relays, and promote false advertising. Spammers, as can be guessed, don’t follow any of these rules. To understand how odd spamming is, as a fruitful exercise, consider this: the open rate of spam mail in the world is fifteen mails opened per million sent. How many more go on to actually purchase something is not really known. Bulk email marketing is a bit more fruitful because people have signed-up voluntarily for mails from this type of marketer. One can actually consider this a regular type of business.

The future for email marketing seems bright but that is probably more because of the impending death of spamming. Ever since spam filter technology has reached the highest levels of excellence, people don’t ever get to see spam anymore and this has caused spammers to start abandoning the trade; to the point that 2009 saw the first dip in spam traffic after years of meteoric rises. The other aspect of email marketing for the future lies in the result of the pollination between social networking and marketing through email; this will herald a historic step for the trade.