The Email Marketing Glossary

Eighteen terms you need to know to make the most of all the rich data your email marketing platform will give you.

\If hard bounce sounds like something you’d find on a basketball court and, depending on your age, you’re pretty sure you put SPAM in a sandwich, this blog is for you. 

Digital marketing jargon can fill even the most experienced marketeers with dread and it can seem like a foreign language in meetings, especially if someone is trying to sell you a service. Maybe Later was launched to empower you to take control of your digital marketing options, I don’t believe in smoke and mirrors, just arming you with the right information so you can spend less time online worrying about what the numbers mean, and more time being brilliant at everything else. Let's dive in!

Click Through Rate (CTR)

The click-through rate measures the number of times a person (or user) clicks on a given link or button compared to the number of people who view it. It's an important metric for evaluating the effectiveness of digital advertisements, emails, or website content. A higher CTR indicates greater engagement and interest from your audience which is good news all round. 

Open Rate

The open rate measures the percentage of recipients who opened your email and helps assess the success and relevance of your email campaigns. A higher open rate indicates that your subject line, timing, and email content are capturing attention and are interesting enough to your reader that they want to find out more.

Click to Open Rate (CTOR)

The click-to-open rate evaluates the percentage of recipients who not only opened your email but also clicked on a link or call to action within it (something like ‘sign up’ or ‘find out more’). This data provides insights into the effectiveness of your email content and helps you to identify where there might be opportunities to generate more actions from your audience. 

Reply Rate

Don’t get left on read! Your reply rate measures the percentage of people who respond to your email. It is particularly important for personalised and targeted communication and a higher reply rate indicates that your emails are engaging and encouraging a two-way conversation with your audience.

Unsubscribe Rate

The unsubscribe rate indicates the percentage of recipients who opt out of receiving emails from you after a certain piece of communication. While it's natural to want to keep everyone engaged, this metric helps you understand if your content, frequency, or targeting needs adjustment to reduce unsubscribes or if the people who unsubscribed are maybe not your target audience anymore and it’s time to part ways. 

Hard Bounce

We’ve all done it – you make a typo in your email address when signing up to a mailing list, or maybe even make one up altogether. A hard bounce occurs when an email fails to be delivered to a recipient due to a permanent error (something like an invalid or non-existent email address). Monitoring hard bounces helps maintain a clean email list and ensures effective delivery of your campaigns.

Soft Bounce

Unlike a hard bounce, a soft bounce indicates a temporary deliverability issue. It may occur when an inbox is full, a server is down temporarily, or a message exceeds size limits. This might just be a temporary hurdle and your next campaign will deliver, but it is worth keeping an eye on. 

Spam

Not to be confused with the 80s sandwich meat, spam refers to unsolicited and often irrelevant or unwanted emails that clutter up in-boxes and make you unpopular. Effective email marketing practices involve getting permission from recipients (opt-in) and providing valuable content in your emails to avoid being labeled as spam.

Domain or domain name 

Your ‘domain’ refers to the unique web address associated with your website or email. It's the part following the "@" symbol in an email address or the URL of a website. Establishing a reputable domain and using it consistently builds trust with the people you are connecting with.

Call to Action (CTA)

A call to action is a prompt or instruction designed to encourage your audience to take a specific action, such as clicking a button, signing up for a newsletter, or making a purchase. Strong CTAs are clear, compelling, and help users understand what you would like them to do next (very important in a noisy and confusing online world). 

Conversion Rate

The conversion rate measures the percentage of users who complete a desired action, like making a purchase or filling out a form, compared to the total number of v recipients of your email. It helps determine the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and website performance and can be a good way of assessing if your content is working.

A/B Test

An A/B test, which is also sometimes called split testing, involves comparing two versions (A and B) of a marketing element, such as an email subject line or website layout, to determine which one gives better results. By testing different variables simultaneously, you can make data-driven decisions and optimise your campaigns accordingly. 

Audience Segmentation

Audience segmentation involves dividing your community into distinct groups based on specific characteristics or behaviors. By tailoring how you speak to each segment based on their needs and preferences, you can deliver more relevant and personalised messages which should lead to better engagement and conversions.

Platform Integration

This is the ability of different software or tools to seamlessly connect and share information (like your email marketing platform and sales system to each other for example). Integrating your platforms enables you to synchronize your data, automate tasks to give you more time off-line, and streamlines workflows, ultimately enhancing your efficiency and effectiveness. Win win!

Customer Journey

The customer journey is the whole experience that a person has with your brand, from initial awareness of who you are to any interactions you have after they have had an interaction with you (such as buying a product or making a donation). Understanding each customer journey helps map out touchpoints and allows you to design a seamless and satisfying experience for everyone in your community. 

Email Automation

If you have ever received a discount code after putting something in your basket online and not buying, that’s an example of email automation. Email automation involves setting up predefined triggers or sequences that automatically send targeted emails to prospects or customers based on their behaviour or actions online. This allows for much more personalised communication without manual effort, which is the dream, really. 

Personalisation

Personalisation refers to tailoring content, offers, or experiences to match an individual's preferences, needs, or characteristics. By using data from your campaigns, you can deliver more relevant and targeted experiences, creating a deeper connection with your online audience and making them feel like you value them as a person, not a number. 

Dynamic Content

Dynamic content involves delivering unique, personalised content based on specific attributes of the reader. For example, this could include dynamically changing images, text, or offers within an email to cater to the recipient's interests. Clever stuff. Building dynamic content into your campaigns enhances engagement, lets people know that you are listening to their needs and resonates with your audience much more than generic content. 

So, that was a whistle-stopemail tour of some of the most common digital marketing terms, and hopefully, you now feel more prepared to take your online campaigns to the next level, have meaningful conversations with your audiences, have more fun with the process and learn a little more from the data with each campaign. 

To have a chat about how you can start to create emails with purpose or have a no pressure natter, email Alex on alex@maybelater.uk