Business-to-Business Internet Marketing, Fourth Edition - Lifecycle ...

What the Internet Contains That Marketers Can Use
The Age of the “e” 9
E-mail
E-mail began, innocently enough, as a convenient electronic means of
communication between one person and another over a local area network.
It was largely restricted to, and intended for, internal use.
It was really such companies as America Online (www.aol.com),
CompuServe (www.csi.com), and Prodigy (www.prodigy.com) that popularized
the notion of e-mail communication outside the boundaries of corporate
networks. Seasoned Internet users may have learned how to send
and receive e-mail, but consumers and general business users needed both
Internet access and e-mail software to take advantage of electronic communications.
They got it through the private online service providers.
America Online (AOL), for example, recognized the true mass-market
opportunity early on, even though CompuServe and Prodigy got
there first. AOL used aggressive marketing tactics to saturate the market.
I would be surprised if any reader of this book has not received a
diskette from America Online at one time or another, either through
direct mail or as a result of buying a “bagged” magazine with a disk
enclosed. It was America Online that first told millions of young and
old alike “You’ve got mail,” a phrase so ingrained in popular culture
that it became the name of a Tom Hanks movie.
America Online, CompuServe, Prodigy, and a few other early online
service providers put their own marketing front ends on the Internet to
give it shape and make it palatable for “the rest of us.” While setting the
agenda, the online services were unabashedly self-serving and restrictive,
and as such, had to scramble and reinvent themselves when the
popularity of the Web in particular usurped them.
In late 1999, Prodigy and SBC, the nation’s largest local telephone
company, announced they would combine their Internet operations, with
SBC taking 43% ownership of Prodigy. This deal would immediately
turn Prodigy, a once-failing ISP, into a powerhouse with more than 2
million customers. More important, Prodigy would now have broadband
access to the 100 million people served by SBC.
AOL has managed to survive and succeed despite market pressures.
After going through a public relations battering over inadequately supporting
the service requirements of its burgeoning user base, AOL recovered
and is still going strong. By 2000, AOL had over 20 million
subscribers (today it’s 30 million) and reached a new level of promi-