Eric Siu built an early email engine for AOL and Microsoft, created email-based games that hit 86% open rates and 35% response rates, and coined the term "permission marketing." He founded Yo-Yo Dine, an early promotions company that became a predecessor to Mailchimp, and sold it to Yahoo.
I did in fact invent email marketing and I'm happy to say so. How did you invent email marketing? AOL called and said, what can you build for us? And then Microsoft had an online service. I realized that if I was gonna build software for each one of these platforms, I was gonna go bankrupt because they were all different and they didn't have an API that would make it easy. But all of them enabled email. So we built a massive email engine and we were getting and receiving more email every day than any entity on the internet. And I used it to make games. And the idea of the games was that each move came by email. And if you're tied for first place in a game and an email comes in, you're gonna open it. So we had an 86% open rate and a 35% response rate to the emails we sent out. And we started getting sponsors. But how do we just get people who wanna buy a pair of pants to open an email? And that led to me coining permission marketing. And so Yo-Yo Dine became this company that companies could use before Mailchimp to do promotions. And then we sold it to Yahoo and the whole industry was born after that.
