Top 20 Email marketing jargon phrases
Email Marketing has become the first choice for more and more businesses to use as their principle marketing method. So, if you are responsible for the email marketing for your business, the chances are you’ll have heard lots of jargon along the way.
So, in order to get ahead with email marketing you need to talk the talk. So, in order to get and up and running quickly, we’ve put together a quick list of our top 20 email marketing phrases and what they mean.
#1 DKIM
This stands for Domain Keys Identified mail. If you are sending out email marketing via third party software then your emails will appear as being from you, but are sent via your software supplier’s network. So, adding a DKIM to your sending domain adds a seal of authenticity - this means better delivery rates
#2 SPF
Adding verification to you sending domain is a two part process, with DKIM being the first and SPF the second. SPF stands for Sender Policy Framework. Your email marketing software supplier may ask you to add an SPF record to your domain for optimum delivery rates.
#3 Blacklist
A blacklist is a list of servers or senders that have been reported as previously sending unsolicited email. These lists are kept and maintained by spam filtering companies, when you send an email, your recipient’s mail server will check your sending details against one or more of these blacklists. If your company is on one of these lists, your email could be blocked or sent to your recipient's junk.
#4 Hard bounce / soft bounce
If your email didn’t reach your recipients, then it’s likely that it will have ‘bounced’, a bounce is effectively a failure. There are two types of bounce; these being hard and soft. A hard bounce is a permanent failure (such as the domain not existing). A soft bounce is a temporary failure, this could be that the domain exists but the mailbox is not accepting incoming emails for example.
#5 Single Opt-in and double opt-in
Opt in is used to describe how your recipients asked to join your database of email addresses. Typically there are two main types, single and double. A single is used to describe the method of the recipient being added to your list when they put a tick in a box on a web form. When they click submit, their address is added.
Double opt in takes things one stage further, when they click ‘submit’ they are then sent an email asking to reply to confirm their subscription. This two stage process is referred to as double opt in.
#6 Legitimate interest
This is one of the phrases used in the new law, GDPR. This law is the new data protection regulation. Legitimate interest means that you can continue to email people who have a legitimate interest in receiving your mailer, this could be because they are an existing customer of yours. These people do not need to be re-opted in, you can continue to email them under the banner of ‘Legitimate Interests’.
#7 Domain
The phrase ‘domain’ refers to the address that your company’s web services operate through, this could be the address where the company website lives and the part after the @ symbol in the email address.
#8 List health
When people talk about the health of a list, they are referring to the quality of the email addresses contained within. A Poor quality list could be old, it could be receiving a high bounce rate when emailed to, this would be referred to as a poor health list.
#9 Segmentation
The term segmentation is often used when talking about email lists, it means to split the data into smaller lists, depending on how these people have interacted with your previous sends.
#10 Spam
This phrase is one of the oldest phrases associated with some forms of sending emails for the purposes of marketing - unfortunately, not in a good way though. Spam means sending emails to people who didn’t ask to receive them, spam is the universal phrase used to describe emails of this nature.
#11 Conversion rate
Your Conversion Rate is the percentage of people have followed through with a specific action. This is often used to show the number of people who have made a purchase by clicking through from a mailer or from a certain page on your website
#12 Social Card
Email marketing software now has the ability to sync with your social media, So when you send out email marketing, the software used can also post a copy of your send to your social media feeds.
The information that can be posted to your social media feed is contained within a ‘card’, this card is what is posted to your social media wall.
#13 Sender reputation
When you send out email marketing, you will start to build up a record of how people have interacted with your send. These interactions are positive if people click on your links, or negative if they click unsubscribe. This positive or negative data is used to calculate a score - referred to as a sender reputation
#14 Spam trap
A spam trap is an email address used by anti-spam organisation. The organisation may create a dummy email address and float it on the internet. Bots of harvest emails from the web will then suck them up, anyone that emails the trap email address is then blacklisted.
#15 I.P address
IP stands for ‘Internet Protocol’ - IP address is the location of your sending server, typically an IP address will be a numeric string. This is used to record the physical location of the server that sent your email. Think of it as like the postal address of your house, it is an address to quickly find the house/or server.
#16 Click through rate
Your Click through rate is a percentage showing how many subscribers clicked on a specific link inside your mailer.
#17 Open rate
Open rate is simply the percentage of people who have received and then opened your mailer.
#18 A/B testing
This refers to the practice of testing different variants of your email marketing to small sample lists of email addresses. The results of these tests are used to decide which version of your email marketing template should be sent to your whole database.
A/B testing is incredibly effective and has been used by email marketers for a long time in market testing different versions.
#19 Call to action
A Call to action is an incentive to get the reader to complete a certain action. An example would be having a button that links to your website upgrade store and on that button you would say “buy now”.
#20 SMTP
SMTP stands for “Simple Mail Transfer Protocol”, this is part of the process of setting up your email address. It is one of the main methods used for sending out emails from your account to somebody else's.