I don’t know about you, but last week I sent nearly 200 emails. Maybe I should adopt Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy, “to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book”? I must have written a whole book worth of emails in my lifetime! With so much email rabbiting, I was ashamed to realise I hadn’t the first e-clue about where emails had come from…

With a little digging, I discovered that email was invented in 1971 by Roy Tomlinson, whose company was developing computer networking technology in Massachusetts. The project his team was working on would later become, um, the Internet. Tomlinson had the bright idea of combining two of his own projects and, voila, the first email message was sent. At first, Tomlinson kept the lid on his invention because email had been a pet project he’d done when he should have been doing, you know, work. Today, 87 million people use email to communicate every day.

Some of those people use email marketing as a clever promotional tool, bypassing the letter box (pricier, since the increase to 50 cents to send a standard letter) and going straight for the cyber inbox. With email marketing you can:

• Increase sales and bring customers back for more
• Get useful feedback from clients
• Reach people through one of the most popular applications on the Internet today
• Save money (no print or postage required)
• Get your message out there quickly

Beware though, New Zealand’s anti-spam legislation comes into force on September 1st 2007, so be sure to get up to speed on the new laws and get permission from all those on your mailing list.