The history of digital marketing can be traced back to the 80s which saw computer technology advancing just enough to be able to sore large amounts of information about customers. The increasing sophistication in technology led to the mindset about marketing take a shift from being about pushing the product to making a connection with the customers. Marketers started to move on from their offline marketing strategies to database marketing which did not have as many limitations as list brokering.
The 1990s
Along with the 90s came the advent of CRM software. A system that could track interactions with current and potential customers and it blew up into something huge at that time. The massive overhaul that CRM saw in the 90s resulted in vendors expanding the services they offer to companies. They were now offering sales, service applications and marketing as well by that time.
The birth of the internet took it along to allow marketers to prioritize the experience of customers and update their customer understanding. The challenge was that they had a lot of data but not a lot of information. 1999 saw the birth of SaaS (software as a service) come forth in the form of Salesforce. It was the first company to actually deliver business applications from a website. We know it as cloud computing. This laid the foundations of future digital marketing technology.