Email Marketing Glossary

Here are a list of useful email marketing glossary items that are often used in describing email marketing: 

• Application Service Provider (ASP): An establishment which provides the technology to broadcast an email campaign but the client company is required to carry out the broadcast by accessing the technology via the web.
• Blacklist: An access control mechanism that allows everybody except messages arriving by members of the blacklist. The opposite is a 'whitelist', which means, allow nobody, except members of the white list.
• Bounce: An email that is unable to be delivered because of a temporary problem, such as a full mailbox ('soft bounce'), or a permanent error, such as an incorrect email address ('hard bounce').
• Bounce management: The process of tracking emails that bounce and identifying why in order to attempt redelivery.
• Challenge Response: Anti-Spam authentication process which requires the email sender to prove their legitimacy before being added to the recipient's Buddy List for simple delivery of subsequent emails.
• Clickthrough Rate (CTR): The quantity of people who click on a link in a marketing email or on an online advertisement, to take them through to a website, expressed as a percentage of the total number of people the email was sent to, or the number of people who viewed the advert.
• Cookies: A cookie is a small text file that gets entered into the memory of your web browser. There are many reasons a given site would wish to use cookies. These range from the ability to personalise information (like on My Yahoo or Excite), or to help with online sales or services (like on Amazon Books or eBay), or simply for the purposes of collecting demographic information (like DoubleClick). Cookies also provide programmers with a quick and convenient means of keeping site content fresh and relevant to the user's interests. For more information please visit www.allaboutcookies.org
• Data Profiling / Segmentation: The process of analysing a database to identify people with similar characteristics (age, income, number of children etc.) in order to break the database down into segments that can be targeted with different marketing messages appropriate to each segment of the database.
• Deliverability: The success rate at which a company or an email broadcaster is able to deliver emails to the intended recipients.
• Domain Name Server (DNS): A process for translating easy-to-remember domain names into numerical IP (Internet Protocol) addresses.
• Double Opt-in: Where a user gives their explicit consent for a company to send them marketing emails and is then required to confirm that consent by replying to the first email sent to them by the company.
• Dynamically-generated Content: Email content that is amended according to rules which have been set up relating to the recipient's previously expressed preferences or past online behaviour. This makes the content of the email more relevant to each individual recipient.
• Email Broadcasting: The practice of sending an email to multiple recipients, simultaneously or in staggered batches.
• Email Service Provider (ESP): An entity which provides the technology and bandwidth for broadcasting an email campaign, and carries out the broadcast. Can also be called a Managed Service Provider.
• Frequency: The length of time between each of several pre-planned mailings, such as a daily, weekly or monthly email newsletter, for example.
• Hard Bounce: An email which is unable to be delivered because of a permanent error, such as an incorrect email address.
• HTML: The language used to create web pages and many marketing emails.
• HTML Validation: The process of assessing HTML code for errors which would prevent a web page or an HTML email from rendering correctly on a user's PC.
• IP Address: A method of identifying the location of a computer on a TCP/IP network. In email broadcasting, the IP address is used by the ISP to identify the sender of the email.
• ISP: Internet Service Provider. An entity which provides access to the Internet.
• Landing Page: The page on a website to which visitors are taken when they click on a link in a marketing email inviting them to register their name and email address details.
• List Hygiene: The process of evaluating the names and email addresses on an email marketing database for address accuracy, and correcting any errors, at the same time as suppressing any incorrect addresses that cannot be fixed.
• List Management: The process of maintaining, updating and cleansing a mailing list.
• Microsite: A small website to which people are invited to click through to register their name and email address details by means of an incentive, such as a prize draw or money-off offer, promoted on a website via a marketing email or by other methods.
• Managed Service Provider (MSP): An association which provides the technology and bandwidth for broadcasting an email campaign, and carries out the broadcast. Can also be called an Email Service Provider.
• Open rate: The quantity of people who open a marketing email, expressed as a percentage of the total number of people the email was sent to.
• Opt In: Where a consumer consents to a company sending them marketing emails.
• Opt Out: Where a consumer receives marketing emails because they did not opt out of doing so. Best practice, and new regulations which came into force in December 2003, suggest that all new email addresses should be collected on an opt in, rather than an opt out, basis.
• Seeding: A process of including known names and email addresses on a rented list of email addresses in order to check that the renter is not using the list more times than they are entitled to use it.
• Sender ID: Anti-Spam technology relying on the sender of the email to identify themselves as a legitimate sender in the message headers of the email.
• SMTP: Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. A protocol for emailing from one server to the next, but one with significant drawbacks for use in multi-client, multi-campaign broadcasting.
• Soft Bounce: An email which is unable to be delivered because of a temporary problem such as a full mailbox, or an overloaded server.
• Spam: Unsolicited bulk email sent out randomly to people who have not given the sender permission to communicate with them via email.
• Spam Filter: Method used by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to identify commercial email that looks like Spam by the content of the email, in terms of specific words or phrases used in the subject line, body copy or graphic images.
• Tracking and Analysis: Monitoring the performance of an email campaign to see if open and click through rates are at the expected level.
• Unsubscribe: The means by which a person can ask to be removed from a company's email marketing list. By law in the UK, every marketing email sent to a consumer must carry clear, easy-to-follow instructions explaining how the consumer can unsubscribe from the mailing list.