Back in 1978. Gary Thuerk inadvertently created email marketing as we know it today.
I mean he sent one email to 393 people and did over $13 million in sales, which is wild.
If you dig back into the internets early days you’ll find ARPANET was what all the cool kids were working on, and by cool, I mean nerds and It was a government funded network that connected universities and military research labs across the country…
Crazy thing is, back then only about 2,600 people on the earth had access to it and a guy named Gary Thuerk was one of them.
He was a marketing manager at Digital Equipment Corporation working out of their Boston office.
Gary needed to sell a new line of computers to potential customers on the West Coast, but they were 3,000 miles away.
And like me, the thought of making 393 individual phone calls sounded absolutely awful (visiting each in person would even worse)
So he grabbed a paper directory and started highlighting names in yellow.
Then he had his colleague type all 393 email addresses into the system one by one while he wrote one message inviting everyone to an in person event.
When he hit send it became the first mass marketing email in history. And just like most marketing emails sent today, the people receiving weren’t fans. ARPANET was supposed to be used for official government business only. An official from the Defense Department called Gary’s message a “flagrant violation” of network policy…
He also got in serious trouble with leadership and was forced to promise he would never do it again. But the crazy thing is the email actually worked…
The email went on to generate over $13 million in computer sales, which roughly works out to roughly $33,000 per recipient from a single email that was sent before the internet even existed.
So our boy Gary Thuerk now holds a Guinness World Record for sending the world’s oldest spam email and is known as the “Father of Spam” in marketing circles. You can thank Gary for all those marketing emails you get in your inbox each and every day. Especially the shitty ones where they try and sell you penis pills and crypto shit coins.
But off the back of that. When you do email right. You build an unwavering following of people who dig what you do, share and sell.
And so it is, like every year for the past how many years…
Email and email marketing is king.
So going into 2026. If you’re not building an email list and emailing it daily. You’re going to be missing out.
So if I can give you any advice going into 2026…
It’s build yo’ damn email list.
Stephen Walker.