The development of digital marketing is somehow related with technology development. Started in 1971, where Ray Tomlinson sent the very first email and his technology set the platform to allow people to send and receive files through different computers. However, it all started in 1990 as this was where the Archie search engine was created as an index for the FTP sites. In the 1980s, the storage capacity of computer was already big enough to store a lot of information about the customers. Moreover, companies started choosing online techniques, such as database marketing, rather than limited list broker. All these kinds of databases allowed companies to track customer’s information more effectively. This allowed the companies to transform the relationship between buyer and the seller. However, at that time the manual process was not as efficient as it is now.

The term ‘Digital Marketing’ was first coined in 1990’s. With the debut of server/client architecture and the popularity of personal computers, the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications became a significant factor in the online marketing industry. High competition forced vendors to add more service into their software which included marketing, sales and service applications. Now, marketers were able to own huge online customer data by eCRM software after the Internet was born. Moreover, the companies could update the data of customer needs and obtain the priorities of their experience. All this led to the first clickable banner ad being going live in 1994, which was the “You Will” campaign created by AT&T and over the first four months of it going live, more than 44% of all people who saw it clicked on the ad.

As time passed, the increasing numbers of Internet users and the birth of iPhone, customers began searching products and making decisions about their needs online first, instead of consulting a salesperson, which led to a new problem for the marketing department of a company. Furthermore, a survey in 2000 in the United Kingdom found that most retailers had not registered their own domain address. All these problems encouraged marketers to find new ways to integrate digital technology into the market development.

Marketing automation was developed in 2007 as a response to the ever evolving marketing climate. Marketing automation is the process which automates conventional marketing processes through a software. It helped companies segment customers, launch multichannel marketing campaigns, and provide personalized information for customers. However, the speed of its adaptability to consumer devices was not fast enough at that time.

Digital marketing field got widened enough in the 2000s and the 2010s, when the proliferation of device’s capable of accessing digital media led to sudden growth. The Statistics produced in 2012 and 2013 proved that digital marketing was still growing. Also, with the development of social media in the 2000s, such as LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, consumers became highly dependent on digital electronics in their daily lives. Therefore, they expected a seamless user experience across different channels for searching any product’s information. This change of customer behavior improved the diversification of marketing technology.