Glossary of Terms for Email Marketing

Opens – Even though this one is pretty self-explanatory, it’s an important indicator to watch. Opens show you how many times your email was opened. Based on that you can determine multiple factors like for example the quality of your email list. Open Rate – A percentage which indicates how many of those who successfully received the email, opened it. If you know that your email list is of high-quality and you observe a strong open rate you can assume that your subject line works like a charm. Remember though; don’t base success on the open rates only as this is an easily distorted statistic. Unique Opens – The difference between unique opens and opens is that we only measure the number of people that have opened your email rather then the number of times your email was opened. This is important because some people may open your email multiple times. To get a full picture of your email’s performance, make sure to look at both stats. Unsubscribe/Opt-in – When a prospect decides that they doesn’t want to receive your newsletter anymore they unsubscribe. For you this means that you’re no longer allowed to email them and the prospect needs to be taken off your email list. Most importantly though, it is your duty to allow people to unsubscribe. Usually marketing emails contain those ‘Unsubscribe” buttons at the bottom. Remember to include those in your emails and the system will prevent any emails from being sent to them! Clicks – This tells you how many contacts clicked (interacted) with the content of your email. Say, you send out a newsletter to your subscribers and there is a link to your newest blog post. Clicks will show you how many people clicked that link. Clicks tell you how good and relevant your content is. An important metric to monitor! CTR (Click-Through Rate) – expressed in percent, shows you how many recipients clicked on a link out of the total recipients who opened the email. Sales Funnel – This is basically your action plan. It is a plan of the customer journey and all the interactions you will have with a potential customer. Also called sales process, it refers to the buying process that every customer will go through before the purchase. Sales Funnels are a crucial component of your digital marketing strategy. Sales Pipelines – is a visual representation of your prospects and their place in the Sales process i.e. sales funnel. Well-organised pipelines are important because they allow effective CRM. This gives you a true insight to where your customer are in the sales cycle and when they are integrated with Email Marketing it is an excellent way of driving targeted sales. Landing Pages – a landing page is a page on your website which is purely for lead generation. It usually contains a little bit of information about your business and a sing-up form/contact form with a name, email and company fields. You can put links to your landing page in your email campaigns. Well-designed and thought of landing pages are crucial nowadays for generating leads. Popcorn gives you the ability to create an editable pages that looks exactly like your website and have personalisation in just a few clicks. You can then add contact forms to create powerful lead funnels that drive enquiries. List Verification – a process during which you clean up your email list. There are multiple tools available online which do that for you. By verifying your list you can get rid of fake email addresses and those that don’t exist anymore. List verification is extremely important if you want to keep your sender score high (see below). Sender Score – Every outgoing mail server IP or Domain has its reputation measured. You can have a score ranging between 0 and 100. The higher your score is the higher the deliverability of your emails. If your sender score is low it is very likely that your emails won’t be delivered to the recipients i.e. they will land in the spam folder. Not good. Blacklist – if your sender score is too low your IP address / Domain is likely to get blacklisted and you won’t be able to deliver your emails to recipients’ inboxes. Greylist – if your sender score is becoming low your IP address / Domain is likely to get greylisted and you will see more of your emails going into the SPAM filters. WhiteList – if you sender score is rated as high, your IP address / Domain will not automatically be flagged up by SPAM filters, so your deliverability should be good. Bounce Rate – this indicator shows you how many email didn’t end up in the mailbox. There are two types of bounce rate: soft and hard. Soft bounce rate occurs when there is a temporary problem with the recipient’s mail server e.g. a full mailbox. Hard bounce rate occurs when the recipient’s email address doesn’t exist anymore. High bounce rate leads to a low sender score. CTA (Call to Action) – this is what you use to encourage the recipients of your emails to undertake a specified action. For example, if your goal is to drive traffic to your website your call to action could be a big button saying “Learn More”. You can also get creative. In fact, creative call to actions have proven to be significantly more effective. Prospect – a contact in the database that shows behaviours such as clicks, opens, website visits etc. A prospect is actively interacting with your content and is very likely to become a lead. Contact – a contact is simply a name and a surname in your database.