Email Marketing Glossary
Wednesday, September 19th, 2007Above the fold
When you launch your internet browser you will see a web page. The bottom of the window is commonly referred to as the “fold”. The areas on a web page that generate the most views and clicks are usually above the bottom of the window or the fold.
Auto Reply
When an email recipient is Out of the Office or Away on Vacation, often they set up a reply that automatically sends an email to the sender alerting them to this fact.
Bandwidth
The amount of information that can be transmitted over a network such as the Internet in a specific amount of time.
Bounce Back, Bounced Email, Bounce
When an email "Bounces" this indicates that an email has attempted to be sent to a particular email address but the message could not be delivered. This may result if;
1. The email address is no longer valid or
2. The intended recipient’s ISP and/or email servers were not functioning over a period of 3 consecutive days.
CAN SPAM Act
This federal law gave right of action to anyone for receiving an unsolicited email. The law states that;
1. Your email must contain a valid postal address of the sender
2. A clear and conspicuous unsubscribe link which continues to work for 30 days and
3. Address bar and subject lines should relate to whom the email is coming from and what the content is relating to.
Click Through Rate (CTR)
The click through rate is calculated on the number of clicks on a link divided by the total number of emails sent. This is a good performance measure for the success of your campaign.
Copy
Copy refers to the text that you provide in your email.
Database
A database is the software which holds your records or lists. The database can be in the following forms: MS Excel, MS Access, Oracle, SQL, Outlook Express, Netscape, and many other forms.
Double Opt-in
When a registrant signs up to an opt-in form on a website, they are opting to receive email, goods, services or something that the website if offering. A double opt-in is when an email is generated asking them to click on a link to confirm who they are. Many sites use double opt-in to protect themselves in the case where a registrant may give false information and use an email address belonging to another individual.
Email Campaign
When you build an email and send it to your recipients this is defined as an email campaign. Your campaign may be a newsletter or may consist of offers or a combination of the two.
Footer
Some emails include“footer”. This is the area at the foot of an email where you should include unsubscribe information and your address.
“From” Line
This is what appears in the “From” column in a recipient’s email reader.
Hard Bounced Email
A hard bounce is an e-mail message that has been returned to the sender because the recipient’s address is not valid. A hard bounce might occur because the domain name doesn’t exist or because the recipient is unknown.
Header
The header in an email is the part of the email that is not transparent to the recipient unless they have their “View Headers” turned on. This tells the recipient what servers the email is coming from and what programs are being used to generate this email.
HTML – Hypertext Markup Language
A markup language used to structure text and multimedia documents and to set up hypertext links between documents, used extensively on the World Wide Web.
HTML Email
HTML email is simply an email created with HTML so that you can use images. Ninety five percent of all email readers have the ability to display HTML emails, which are more visual than text and get your recipient’s attention.
ISP
An Internet Service Provider is a company that provides access to the internet. AOL, Yahoo!, MSN, are all considered ISPs.
Link Text
In an HTML email instead of having your link read http://www.usamn.com/landing/query=1 you can have a link attached to the text instead that reads “Click here for this great offer!”
Open Rate
A special tag is embedded within the HTML version of an email which keeps a record each time a unique email is opened/viewed. Therefore, this value is determined using the following: number of emails that have been opened divided by the number of emails that have been sent.
Opt-out
When a subscriber to your e-mail list chooses to no longer receive e-mail information and/or advertisements from your company or organization. Often this is accomplished by the subscriber clicking on a hyperlink to unsubscribe, or by replying to the e-mail campaign with the word "unsubscribe" in the subject line.
Personalization
When you use a recipients name, email address or any other personally identifiable information within the email to create more of a one-to-one relationship you are using personalization. For instance “Dear Mary” is an example of personalization.
Salutation
This is the area in an email where you address your recipient. Examples are “Dear Customer”, “Hello Larry”, or “Dear Member”.
Sender ID
In an effort to fight spam, major ISPs are pushing for an authentication technology that makes the sender of the email identify themselves and prove that they are who they say they are. That is, if you get an email from Company X you should be able to trace that back to a server that is owned and managed by CompanyX.com
Companies will need to publish the mail server IPs that they use to send mail from. This way, when a receiving server goes to process incoming mail, they can do a quick check and make sure that the IP is actually managed by the sender.
Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP)
Formerly Sender Permitted From, is an extension to Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), the standard Internet protocol for transmitting email. SMPT makes it easy to counter most forged "From" addresses in email, and thus helps to counter e-mail spam.
Soft Bounced Email
A soft bounce is an e-mail message that gets to the recipient’s mail server but is bounced back undelivered before it gets to the recipient. A soft bounce might occur because the recipient’s inbox is full and may be deliverable at another time or may be forwarded manually by the network administrator in charge of redirecting mail on the recipient’s domain.
SPAM, UCE
Spam or Unsolicited Commercial Email (UCE) happens when you send an email to a list of people who didn’t request to receive email from you.
Subject Line
The email subject line is the line which comes through to an email recipient’s reader notifying the recipient what the email is about. This is the line where you want to entice your user to click on your email and read the content.
Unsubscribe
When the owner of an email address unsubscribed, this indicates that the individual no longer wishes to receive emails from your organization. People can unsubscribe either by clicking the "Unsubscribe" link at the bottom of each email sent through our system, or by replying to the email with the word "Unsubscribe" in the subject line.
White Lists
White lists are lists of commercial emailers who have been approved to send mail through the ISP. The ISP requires a list of IP addresses that email will be sent from, and in some cases a test period where the commercial emailer will be approved or rejected.
