Every so often, someone will invent a form of technology that dramatically changes our day to day lives.
In 1971 a 25-year-old software engineer named Ray Tomlinson created a system that allowed messages to be sent between different users on different computers. It was called e-mail (note the hyphen) and Ray used the (until then barely used) ‘@’ symbol to indicate that the recipient was at a different location from where the message came from. In that way the e-mail used a person’s name, then @, followed by the computer they were sitting at. In that one move he plucked the humble @ symbol from insignificance and thrust it into the spotlight.
Ray did this as a side project and years later he couldn’t remember the content of his first successful test email, mainly because he didn’t think what he was doing was particularly momentous. It’s clear he had little idea of the potential impact of this work, yet from that point on email went from strength to strength until it became the goliath of communication it is today. The recent passing of Ray Tomlinson - the man who created email - presents a timely opportunity to reflect more on this impact.
Email is hugely influential and permeates all areas of business in the 21st century. Marketers claim that it is the most important route to communicate with customers and there are plenty of figures out there to justify this statement. Email is the most important channel as it’s used so heavily and almost universally adopted. The majority of people have at least one email address and most people have multiple addresses.
In a typical business environment, email plays a vital role in communications. It presents significant advantages over other forms of communication - it’s free, practically instant and it’s easy to review what’s been sent and received.
Its innate measurability is what makes email so appealing to marketers. It’s very easy to monitor and tinker with clicks, open rates and conversion. This means marketers will always know what levers they are pulling and what those levers do.
There is no doubt that email is here to stay, yet Ray Tomlinson’s legacy is not simply about instantaneous electronic communication, it has also played an important role in shaping the nuances and characteristics of the email. Until the early 70s you could only send ‘mail’ to users on the same machine, but the US Government’s development of ARPANET changed things.
Yet Ray Tomlinson is not a name that’s recognisable outside of the digital marketing industry. He didn’t launch a company, create a product or even become that involved with email when it took off, and therefore hasn’t become a household name like some others.
Although Ray never benefitted personally from his role in the creation of email, he is said to have regretted not foreseeing the rise of spam and wished he’d come up with a way of getting senders to authenticate their identities. When he looked at two computers communicating with one another, he never even thought that this communication would be abused in some way.
However, with internet service providers taking ever more care over this issue, I think he would be reassured that this is being addressed. While email will continue to be dominant across all industries for the foreseeable future, the longer term protection of the inbox from spam and irrelevance is critical. Only by ensuring that customers are targeted with relevant and timely communications can marketers ensure email remains the number one favoured deliverability method.
By Tom Corbett, Experian
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