You want to see results if you put significant resources into your company’s email marketing efforts. However, many companies that pump out masses of emails to potential customers reap limited results that don’t seem to justify the effort.

The business mantra of “build it, and they will come” tends to be a hit-or-miss proposition. For example, Ford Motor Co. released its vigorously marketed Edsel “car of the future” in late 1957. Sales were so bad that Ford lost the equivalent of $2 billion in today’s dollars within two years and cemented the Edsel’s reputation as the still-held biggest failure in American marketing. Failure so bad that, along with reference to being a car, Edsel is defined by Webster’s dictionary as a product that “fails to gain public acceptance despite high expectations, costly promotional efforts, etc.”

Digital marketing has made tremendous advancements since 1994, which featured the first-ever clickable web-ad banner, the alleged first-ever online sale, and the creation of the first-ever online market, NetMarket. That year, less than 0.4%—15 million people—of the global population was connected to the Internet. Today, over 70% of the world’s population—six billion people—has Internet access, marking a tremendous 29-year increase in the digital marketing customer base.