RESOURCES

Email Marketing Glossary

Stay up-to-date on email marketing key trends and find definitions for important terms.

A

A/B Test

A series of scenario-based analytic methods that uses a baseline control sample that is compared to several single-variable test samples.

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Absolute Cost Advantage

In the world of consumer goods, an absolute cost advantage is used to describe a profit or cost break that one company has over another.

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Accepted Rate

The accepted number of emails reported by ISPs and email providers is commonly referred to as an Accepted Rate.

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Accessibility

In the context of the Internet, the word “accessibility” means that people with disabilities can perceive, understand, navigate, interact, and contribute to websites.

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Account Penetration Ratio

It is used to measure or evaluate either the success or limitations of salespeople. It take into account the percentage of accounts from which each person on a sales team is able to secure or close a sale.

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Action Plan

It is a detailed plan showing how major marketing tasks will be managed and implemented by designating who will do them – also known as an ‘action program’.

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Actual Product

It is a consumable product, which can also be a service or idea a customer is purchasing.

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Adaptive Selling

This is a highly customized approach to sales that has been used in high-end retail locations very effectively but in recent years has been employed in e-commerce on websites and in email newsletter marketing.

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Advertising Effectiveness

It is the term used to identify the process by which the overall efficacy of an online marketing campaign and if all objectives of the effort have been achieved in regard to sales, brand awareness, and in some cases brand preference.

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Advertorial

It is a lightly veiled advertisement that is presented in print, television, and on blogs as an editorial or information piece. The term first officially appeared 1946 in the Merriam-Webster dictionary.

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Affiliate Marketing

It is an Internet marketing strategy, designed as a purely performance-based system that rewards an individual or entity with a share of profits after a sale.

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Alexa

Formally known as Alexa Internet, Inc. is a subsidiary company of Amazon.com provides commercial web traffic data that collects browsing behavior is transmitted through their toolbar to its site.

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Ambient Intelligence

Also known by its acronym, AmI, refers to software/hardware environments that are designed to be responsive to a human presence or assists with human interactions.

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Android

Android is the wildly popular, Linux-based operating system used on touchscreen mobile devices because of Google’s open-source code that allows modification and integration for countless applications and innovative functionality.

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Application Service Provider

ASP is an on-demand software or software as a service (Saas). Growing complexities and cost associated with maintaining specialized and complex software has given rise to specialized on-line services that provide businesses with cost effective solutions for a wide range of customer relationship management and marketing functions.

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Autoresponder

Quite simply, is a computer program that automatically answers email sent to it. These can be set up for email newsletter subscribers after they have filled out a subscriber form to begin receiving email marketing newsletters from a company or an organization.

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Above the Fold

In today’s heavy technology environment, “above the fold” has been used to discuss not only newspapers and physical documents, but also soft copy such as web pages.

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Absolute Costs

Marketing a product or a service successfully should include deciding what media or direct to consumer advertising outlets will work best. This includes projecting absolute costs and comparing ROI for each.

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Acceptable Spam Report Rate

For email marketers the best acceptable rate would be zero but realistically, at least for those just entering the online marketing arena, there will be some higher numbers reported regardless of how carefully email addresses are gathered.

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Account Manager

This is a person or persons whom have been charged with the responsibility for a major customer account or group of major accounts. In some businesses, these people are given the title of account executive.

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Acquisition Cost

It is a term used for investments and capital purchases within a company and also is used as a term to describe investments made to acquire and retain customers.

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Action Program

It is a detailed and well-documented plan that should be created, managed and implemented for all major marketing promotions, especially those that encompass website, email newsletters, direct mail, traditional media, and social network integration.

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Ad Swaps

Ad swaps are a valuable way to increase the size of an email newsletter mailing list. Consistently adding to the number of e-newsletter recipients is key to maximizing an online marketing campaign.

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Added Value

It is the concept for encouraging consumers to pay extra for an elevated element of service and which may include perceived, tangible, and intangible goods or services.

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Advertising Platform

In the world of online and social media marketing, new advertising platforms have emerged to increase revenue for both the major search engines and for new internet marketing companies.

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Affiliate

It is the term used for a business or individual and is the key component of an affiliate-based internet marketing approach.

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Affirmative Consent

This term refers to user permission. In the current email marketing environment, affirmative consent is both a best practice and required by law.

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Alias

This is a shorter or more specific email address that provides an alternate way to reach a single account.

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Ambient Media

It is a form of advertising that we have come to accept as it surrounds almost every aspect of our daily lives. These advertisements can be found on shopping carts, public transportation, and cars and trucks as we navigate our normal daily routines.

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Application Program Interface

API is quite simply, is a standardized set of specifications that allow a variety of software components and/or applications to interact, share data, and communicate.

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Association of National Advertisers

(ANA) was established in 1910 in Detroit, Michigan, by 45 companies in order to safeguard and advance the interests of both advertisers and consumers and is the oldest trade organization in the United States.

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Average Recipient Render Rate

This is a term that describes a metric, expressed as a percentage, that email marketers leverage to measure the efficacy of their email newsletter marketing campaigns.

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Average Response Value

Average Response Value is another user-generated performance metric that email marketers can use to measure the success of their campaigns.

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B

B2B

B2B refers to business-to-business marketing and transactions. The term is now used in industry forums, describing capital goods marketing to enterprises or large organizations.

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Back-end

Back-end is a generalized term used in reference to the functionality of a website that is ‘transparent’ or unseen (back-end) by a visitor versus what a user sees when they access a web page (front-end).

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Bayesian Filter

Bayesian filter, also known as Bayesian spam filtering, is a statistic-based process of email filtering that is employed to identify either wanted communication or as spam.

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Bitcoin

Bitcoin with a capital “B” is the term used for a digital currency system created by pseudonymous developer Satoshi Nakamoto.

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Blacklist

The original definition of a blacklist was a collection of entities or names that, for a specific, or a variety of reasons, may be denied a privilege, service, access, or mobility.

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Boilerplate

Boilerplate is a term used for text, document layout, computer code, or language that is used as a standard and included in its application with little or few alterations or changes.

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Brand Awareness

Refers to the extent a consumer is familiar with the distinctive qualities, goods, or services of a brand or organization.

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Broadcast

In terms of mass emails and email marketing, refers to email messages that are sent by an individual sender to a large audience. Broadcasting simultaneously sends the same message to everyone in a network.

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Buyer Resolution Theory

It is a marketing theory that states buyer purchase behavior relies on an individual’s mental process that involves resolving five specific issues – need, product, source, price, and timing.

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B2C

B2C is the acronym for the business-to-consumer relationship and describes relationships and communications between an enterprise or organization and the individuals who make up its client base.

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Battle of the Brands

Battle of the Brands is a term used to describe brand competition for the prime real estate on retail store shelves and other locations for product displays.

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Benefit Segmentation

It is another type of marketing strategy that formulates campaigns based on consumer benefits from the purchase of goods and services and in turn, concentrating efforts on communicating with and engaging specific consumer targets and niche’ demographics.

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BITNET

BITNET was derived from the catch phrase “Because It’s Time NETwork” and began as a university computer network.

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Blog

The word “blog” has come to describe a website that is used to promote an individual’s views on life, politics, social issues, and in more recent times where professional information is shared and when authorized participants can contribute with comments or more information for readers and/or authors of the blog.

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Bounce Rate

Email marketing professionals review their bounce rates because these are an important element combined with other metrics when calculating marketing analysis equations.

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Branding

In its simplest terms, a brand is the recognizable name or symbol used to identify a company and its products, and more importantly, to separate the company and products from its competition on the market. Branding grants an organization quick recognition.

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Bulk Email

There are two kinds of bulk or mass emails – the legitimate bulk email, and the unsolicited bulk or commercial email.

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BuzzNet

BuzzNet is a photo, journal, and video-sharing social media network, owned by Buzz Media. This social media platform is predominantly centered around music, celebrities, and media events.

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C

CafeMom

CafeMom is a social networking site that limits users to mothers and mothers-to-be. Men can read CafeAnswers but are not allowed to be members or participate in order to create a safe place for women to share experiences and opinions with each other.

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CAN-SPAM Act of 2003

This acronym represents, Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing Act of 2003.

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CAUCE

A non-profit, all-volunteer advocacy group that works to reduce the amount of unsolicited commercial email, or spam, via legislation.

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Challenge Response System

These systems are commonplace programs that verifies email messages from unknown senders.

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Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing is a term that describes a wide range of online services and may have originated as a description of stylized “clouds” used to illustrate network system diagrams.

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Common Gateway Interface

Often notated as CGI, describes a standard method used by web server software to generate web content into executable files.

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Content

Information presented to a consumer in a variety of forms. Blogs, social media posts, newsletters, photos, video, podcasts, white papers, ebooks, case studies, how-to guides, and infographics are all types of marketing content that organizations and businesses commonly offer to their audiences or customers.

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Content Marketing

A strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing relevant and consistent content to attract and retain a targeted audience.

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Conversion Rate

Quite simply a conversion rate is measured by the percentage of email subscribers who respond to a call-to-action in an email marketing campaign or added value promotion by clicking on the link provided.

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Cross-Campaign Profiling

This is a useful practice for email marketers or a business with multiple products or campaigns.

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Cross-Sell

In cross-selling, a sales associate or customer service agent is able to combine the original sale with other products.

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Customer Equity

It is the expected or projection of the total worth or what future revenues will be realized from a company’s customer base.

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Customer Relationship Management

CRM is based on the careful organization and maintenance of managing company interactions with clients or customers and sales prospects.

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Customer Value Pyramid

It is a term used for a specific structured techniques for analyzing and the utilization of attracting and maintaining profitable customer relationships.

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Call to Action

Call to action is a marketing term that describes the banners, buttons, graphics or text on a website which prompts users to continue through a “conversion funnel.”

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Catch-all

Catch-all is a simple email address that is created to simply “catch all” of the emails addressed to a domain that are not cataloged in the mail server.

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Churn

Churn simply describes the percentage of users that unsubscribe, or bounce, from an opt-in email list during a set period of time.

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Click to Open Rate

CTOR and other variants are terms used to determine how effective any given email marketing campaign was and what if anything needs to be changed in order to increase conversion rates and profit.

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Comma Separated Value File

(CSV) This type of file stores alpha-numeric tabular data in plain-text form, which is simply a sequence of characters saved as binary numbers.

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Confirmation

Confirmation is a best practice step in the opt-in subscription process. After users subscribe to an email newsletter or other regularly delivered mass emails– including coupon offers– a confirmation email is sent to the new subscriber.

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Content Header

The three components of an email are the envelope, the content header and the body of a message.

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Convenience Products

Convenience Products are those that consumers are likely to purchase, to make a daily task, or chore easier, and helps to lessen the length or intensity of repetitive tasks.

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Co-registration

This term sometimes referred to as co-registration marketing, which allows one company to leverage a partner company’s subscriber base or newsletter base to gain new subscribers or customers for their own mailings and products.

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Cross-Posting

Cross-posting is simply the practice of broadcasting the same message to multiple information channels.

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Customer Engagement

A connection,response,or experience customers have with one another, with an organization, or with a brand.

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Customer Experience Management

(CEM) is the active monitoring of awareness, discovery, attraction, interaction, purchase, use, cultivation and advocacy.

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Customer Retention

The ability of a company to keep its customers over a specified time period (i.e. annually, quarterly, monthly).

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D

Data Matrix

This term preceded the now popular QR Code that is used for a variety of data sharing purposes. These codes consist of black and white geometric elements within a square or rectangular box.

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Demographic

In marketing, this term refers to the statistical characteristics of a segment of society or population.

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Digital Marketing

Digital Marketing is also called online marketing, internet marketing, or web marketing. Digital marketing is an umbrella term for all online marketing efforts using digital technologies, especially the Internet, mobile, and display advertising.

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DomainKeys

It is a simple email authentication system that was designed to verify an email sender’s domain and the integrity of the message.

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Drag and Drop

Within a graphic user interface, drag and drop is the ability to use your finger, mouse, or similar digital device to move an image, folder, application or text from one part of a digital screen to another.

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Demand Generation

The marriage of marketing programs with the sales process in order to build brand awareness and drive demand for a company’s products and/or services.

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Denial-of-Service Attack

Sometimes abbreviated DOS, are an outside user’s attempt to make a machine or network resource unavailable for its intended users.

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Direct Delivery

This is a method of email communications, in which an email program is able to deliver messages directly to a recipient’s email server without having to relay through an intermediate mail server.

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Double Opt-in

A double opt-in subscription method is the recommended process by which users subscribe to an email newsletter subscription list.

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Dynamic Content

This is important to the process of personalizing mass email messages. This content allows a sender to deliver unlimited variations of a single email message, personalized to meet the criteria of an individual recipient.

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E

Early Adopters

Also known as a lighthouse customer are people who help to launch new products, technology, and also in politics, fashion, art, and other fields and online services.

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Ecommerce Trustmark

E-commerce Trustmark has become more important to businesses who open virtual storefronts, and is a simple badge, image or logo that is displayed on an e-commerce website to indicate that the business is trustworthy according to the regulations of the issuing organization.

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Email Action Rate

This is one of the original metrics used that helped to determine the success or failure of an email marketing campaign.

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Email Blast

Typically, an email blast is a carefully designed and targeted email sent to a large number of recipients containing sale announcements or promotions.

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Email Certification

Email Certification is a white-listing technique that is used by a company or organization who sends out a large volume of email newsletter marketing emails.

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Email Domain

In the simplest terms, the email domain is the web address that comes after the @ symbol in an email address.

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Email Friendly Name

It is the display name or nickname from the sender and is displayed in a recipient’s email inbox in the “From” area.

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Email Marketing

The use of a plain text or HTML based email for the sole purpose of conveying a targeted message to a predetermined list of subscribers that is created to render an organized display of text, images, links, audio, and video content.

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Email Marketing Software

Over the last 10 or so years, the availability of software applications for creating, sending, and tracking subscriber responses for email marketing purposes has been growing rapidly.

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Email Prefix

Email Prefix is the information that comes before the @ symbol in the email address.

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Email Spam

Refers to unsolicited email also known as “junk” mail or UCE/UBE (Unsolicited Commercial/Bulk Email).

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Emotional Branding

It is a term that is used by marketing communication professionals and refers to the practice of using the emotions of a consumer to build a brand.

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Enterprise Marketing Management

A type of software that provides, monitors, and maintains complex, end-to-end marketing operations across a large organization.

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Event Triggered Email

This is a message that is sent to mailing list subscriber based on a particular event’s occurrence.

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Ezine Marketing

As described previously, an Ezine is an abbreviation for an electronic magazine and in some cases is used interchangeably with email newsletters, although not as common as the former use.

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E-commerce Hosting

E-commerce Hosting is becoming almost a necessity in today’s marketplace. Businesses that sell their products or services online require e-commerce hosting to power their websites.

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Electronic Commerce

Electronic commerce is more commonly known today as eCommerce, refers to the buying and selling of products and services using electronic systems.

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Email Appending

Email Appending is the practice of adding email information to a simple database that is based on subscribers’ or customers’ first and last name and postal address.

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Email Broadcast Service

Email Broadcast Service aka: web-based email newsletter software, email newsletter software. Sending marketing emails has become standard for organizations and commercial providers of products and services to communicate with supporters, customers or future clients.

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Email Change of Address

Email change of address, sometimes noted as ECOA, is used to find the most recent mailing address for an individual.

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Email Filter

A technique used to organize incoming (and in some cases outbound) emails and to block email based on the IP address, specific and identifiable senders, keywords in the subject line, or by the quality of the content of an email.

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Email Harvesting

This term has come to describe a process of collecting large numbers of email addresses from various sources for the purpose of profiting from the selling of harvested lists.

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Email Marketing Campaign

Email Marketing Campaign aka: email marketing, e-marketing, e-mail marketing is a term used to define a targeted and comprehensive plan that begins with a concept, and evolves into the presentation, delivery, and various reviews of the efficacy of the initial plan.

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Email Service Provider

An ESP is a company or an organization that provides an internal mechanism to send, route, accept, and manage the receipt of email messages.

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Email Sponsorships

As an advertiser or email market specialist buying banner ads or contributing an article to another email marketer’s newsletters is one way of expanding your message to a new and targeted audience.

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Enhanced Whitelist

This is an all-inclusive whitelist that is maintained by AOL (America Online).

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Ethical Positioning Index

(EPI) is an index or guide that specifies or may indicate if a brand or product is considered overall to be ethically superior to other similar products or services.

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Ezine

This is a term that is used for a magazine that is published online and/or sent to a subscriber’s email via an HTML or plain text email.

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F

Facebook

Since its launch in February of 2004, and until May of 2012, Facebook was privately owned and operated as a single entity as Facebook, Inc.

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Feedback Loop

Feedback loop is a term used to describe a section of a control system. This section allows for feedback and self-correction.

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Flame

Flame is a modular form of computer malware that was recently discovered in 2012.

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Flighting

Flighting is a term used to describe advertising frequency and a method of timed communications with a consumer base.

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Foursquare

Foursquare is a web and mobile application that allows registered users to post their location at a venue “check-in” and connect with friends.

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Freudian Motivation Theory

Named after the famous nineteenth century psychologist, this term is used to identify human behavior when it comes to purchases.

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Full Service Provider

Full service Provider, also called an FSP, is an Application Service Provider (ASP) that markets and provides a wide range of services to other companies.

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False Positive

When discussing email spam filtering the term “false positive” refers to a permission-based email newsletter message that is incorrectly tagged or marked as spam and reported as such.

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Feedly

With the recent demise of Google Reader, Feedly is poised to become the next user-favorite that will deliver their daily dose of news, videos, and blog feeds on one single user-organized browser page.

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Flickr

Flickr is an image and video hosting web service that was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and one year later was acquired by Yahoo.

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Forward to a Friend

In most email newsletters, it refers to a link that allows the original recipient of an email newsletter to resend that message to additional people they think would like to have the information or sale, even though that person isn’t on the originators subscriber list.

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Four Utilities

In the context of business relationships, the term “Four Utilities” refers to the four elements needed in order for a purchase or exchange of value to take place between a business and their customers- and when all are used successfully create customer satisfaction.

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Fully Qualified Domain Name

FQDN is sometimes referred to as an absolute domain name. This type of domain name specifies its exact location in the tree of hierarchy of the domain name system (DNS).

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G

Gateway

In terms of networks, a gateway is a single node on a network that serves as an entrance to another network.

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Graymail

Graymail is a term used to describe unwanted email messages but do not qualify as spam messages.

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Goodbye Message

For email marketing campaigns, this is an email message sent to list subscribers when they unsubscribe from a mailing list.

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Guerrilla Marketing

This is a type of promotion that uses atypical tactics to achieve the attention of a the general public but most specifically potential customers.

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H

Hard Bounce

A hard bounce is an email message returned to a sender tagged as permanently undeliverable.

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Honeypot

This term is adapted from the name of the sticky and sweet substance that can be used to lure unsuspecting prey.

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House List

House List or Retention List. Every business who primarily conducts sales and marketing online and through email campaigns wants to build a viable house email or subscriber list.

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Hardlink

Hardlink is one of several methods of object hyperlinking that includes graphical tags or most recently promoted QRCodes, SMS (sinple message service) tags and RFID (radio frequency identification) tags.

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Horizontal Diversification

Horizontal Diversification is a growth strategy in which a company seeks to add to its existing product lines with improved versions of the originals or with new products that add value and appeal for its current customers.

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HTML Email

Hyper Text Markup Language. Using HTML code makes it possible to create email marketing newsletters that deliver eye-pleasing layouts to customer’s email in-boxes.

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I

Impression

Impression is a term used in the online marketing world to describe the number of times that a banner or display advertisement is viewed.

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Inbox Placement

Inbox Placement aka: Inbox Placement Rate. Inbox Placement / Total Sent = Inbox Placement Rate which is another metric which is a way for email marketers to determine deliverability based on inbox placement instead of on email bounce rates.

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Infographics

Infographics or as known by its long name, information graphics, are visual representations designed with the goal of simplifying complex information or concepts.

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Integrated Marketing Communications

(IMC) is an emerging marketing approach to establishing a brand with messaging that conveys a seamless tone and style across many social networking platforms and with direct to consumer email marketing newsletters.

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Inbound Marketing

The newer, innovative marketing approach which aims to pull potential customers toward a company, a company’s website, and a particular product or service the company offers.

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Incentive

Incentive is a word that is used widely in the world of marketing and basically indicates when something of added value is combined with the sale of a product or service to make it more attractive to a potential or existing customer.

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Instagram

The site was launched in October of 2010 as a free social network based photo-sharing program that enables users with a valid account to immediately take, apply a digital filter or hastag, and then instantly share a photo on their profile page.

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Internet Message Access Protocol

Internet Message Access Protocol often identified as the acronym IMAP, it describes the standard method for accessing email from a remote server.

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J

K

L

Landing Page

This is a dedicated website destination, or a home page of a website where users are led when they click a link in an email newsletter.

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Lead Scoring

An objective system for ranking leads to determine which ones are ready to convert immediately, which ones need further nurturing, and which ones are highly unlikely to buy.

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Lead Scoring

An objective system for ranking leads to determine which ones are ready to convert immediately, which ones need further nurturing, and which ones are highly unlikely to buy.

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List Broker

This is a person or firm that sells categorized lists of people and their contact information for use in direct mail, telemarketing or email advertising campaigns.

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List Host

This is a web-based service that provides marketers with the tools necessary to manage large email address databases and to distribute high volumes of emails.

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LISTSERV

It is the abbreviation for software that was written and registered as a trademark by L-Soft International.

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Law of Demand

Law of Demand states that when market situations remain constant and when prices fall the quantity demanded of a good increases and if the price increases or never falls then the demand for a good falls.

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Levels of Authentication

This term is used to describe the technology standard established to pinpoint the true identity of an email sender.

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Like other social networking services, this is an internet location for connecting with like-minded people, sharing ideas, and for collaboration.

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List Fatigue

It is a term that refers to a waning of responses and results from email lists.

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List Segmentation

For email marketers, dividing email subscriber lists into various interest or demographic based sub-lists, is a way to reach more customers that are more likely to respond to offers or other requests for participation.

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Long Tail Keywords

Long tail keywords are strings of three to five or more keywords separated by commas and are used to help refine and define content on a webpage in an attempt to draw users who are looking for specific or unique information.

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M

Mail Bomb

Mail Bomb is a term used to describe a large number of unwanted email communications sent to a single recipient, or to a group of recipients.

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Mail Exchange Record

Mail Exchange Record is often noted as an MX record, and is a resource record located in the domain name system (DNS).

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Mail Service Provider

Also called email service providers (ESP), are available to both individuals and commercial-level email users.

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Marketing Automation

A means of leveraging technology to make up for deficiencies in the traditional, manual process of marketing.

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Marketing Experimentation

It is one of the buzzwords, that are being used to describe marketing techniques designed to test a consumer market segment with new branding, products, or services before launching a more widespread campaign plan.

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Mass Email

Mass email is created and sent to a considerably large group of recipients that may or may not be targeted to any certain demographic or group.

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Multi-Channel Marketing System

Multi-channel marketing is a system, or method of marketing that uses more than one means in which to reach current or potential customers with product or service messages.

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Mailer-Daemon

Mailer Daemon is a notification of a failed email delivery in the standard SMTP protocol.

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Mail Loop

Mail loop, also referred to as an email loop, is a simple infinite loop phenomenon.

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Mail Transfer Agent

Mail Transfer Agent or (MTA) may also be referred to as message transfer agent or mail relay.

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Marketing Ethics

It is a standard by which moral principles are considered within the marketing profession and execution of an advertising campaign or overall strategy for a business and/or organizations.

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Marketing Mix

Comprised of essential elements: product, price, place, and promotion, the “4 P’s of Marketing.”

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Meetup

Meetup is an online social networking portal that was inspired by the September 2001 attacks.

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N

Naming Firms

Naming Firms specialize entirely in the linguistic art and science of creating product and company names.

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Nichemanship

Nichemanship is a term used to describe the marketing strategy that positively positions products and services in the psyche of consumers.

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Near Field Communications

(NFC), is a set of standards for smartphones and similar devices to establish a connection that facilitates the sharing of data by touching or bringing them into close proximity.

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Niche Market

Niche Market is a subset of a consumer segment on which a specific product or brand’s marketing efforts are focused.

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O

Object Hyperlinking

Object Hyperlinking is a newly coined term (or neologism) that usually refers to extending the link between information offered on the internet and both objects and locations in the real world.

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Online Marketing

Any tool, strategy, or method of building brand awareness about a business or organization by using the internet.

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Open Relay

Open Relay is a simple mail transfer protocol (SMTP) server that is configured to allow anyone using the Internet to send email messages through it; some servers are configured so that only known users can send email messages.

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Opportunity Analysis

Opportunity Analysis is the systematic examination and evaluation of external environments in order to identify market acceptance, needs, desire for, and economic factors in the creation of a new product or expansion of existing products and the profitably or lack-thereof.

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Opt-out Unsubscribe

This happens when a subscriber requests that a sender no longer send them any future email communications.

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Outbound Marketing

A traditional marketing approach which aims to direct potential customers to a business or organization by using techniques such as broadcast emails, advertising, telemarketing/cold calling, or direct mail.

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Online Catalog

For many companies this has fully replaced printed merchandise catalogs due to the convenience and fairly secure way of purchasing for a growing majority of consumers worldwide.

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Open Rate

Basically there are only a few elements or indicators of an Open Rate. These are: Total Confirmed Accepted = Open Rate and Total Confirmed Opens Accepted = Open Rate

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Operations Oriented CRM

It is the process by which automation, improvement and enhancement of business processes are offered for some or all of customer relationship, to include sales, conflict resolution or other support functions.

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Opt-in Subscribe

To opt-in or subscribe to an email list a user is required to request or signup to receive email communications by supplying an email address to a particular company or organization, website or individual thereby giving them permission to send communications.

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Organic Ranking

Also known as “natural” ranking, is both a designation and method to bring user traffic to any web site without the use of pay-per-click, or any other type of paid advertising that places a company or organization at the top of a search results page.

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P

Pass-Along

Pass-Along or pass-along email, refers to a viral email that is sent rapidly from person to person.

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Personalization

With the onset and widespread acceptance of commercial email marketing newsletters streaming out to millions of recipients on a daily basis, the practice of personalizing these messages has become almost standard and a necessity.

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Physical Address

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The new social network photo sharing service is a pinboard-style website that allows users to create a theme-based image collection of their choice.

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Planned Obsolescence

Planned or ‘built-in obsolescence’ in industrial design is the expectation of a product’s limited useful life- whether that is due to it falling out of consumer favor or fashion or its functional life.

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Postmaster

As may be expected in email and computing, the postmaster is a title identifying a mail server’s administrator.

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Pre-existing Business Relationship

For email marketing, a preexisting business relationship is one that exists between the initiator and the recipient of email messages.

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Privacy Policy

All online entities that gathers information from their visitors, customers, or members, is required by the Privacy Act of 1974 to provide a clear description of a website or company’s policy on the use of information collected from and about website visitors and what they do, and do not do, with the data.

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Product Strategy

Product Strategy is the formal process for research, development and for adding new consumer goods or services to the target marketplace.

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Post Office Protocol/POP3

In email and computing, POP and POP3 refer to the Post Office Protocol.

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Psychographics

Psychographics is simply, the study of personality, values, attitudes, interests, and lifestyles, and is now being used widely by marketers to create both branding and product-specific advertising campaigns.

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Perceptual Mapping

It is a diagrammatic technique or process used in marketing research for charting the way a sampling or selection of individuals taken from a target market perceive different companies, products or brands, also called ‘position’ mapping.

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Phising

A series of scenario-based analytic methods that uses a baseline control sample that is compared to several single-variable test samples.

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Piggyback Email

Piggyback Email in the context of email marketing, this term refers to messages, which transfers third-party advertisements to a subscriber list.

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Plain Text Email

No matter how sophisticated email newsletter design coding becomes in the future, it seems that the tried-and-true plain text email format is here to stay.

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Podcast

Podcast is the term used to describe digital media that is usually presented as an episodic series of audio/radio, and/or video files.

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Predictive Analytics

A type of advanced analytics which uses data to make predictions about unknown future events.

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Pretty Good Privacy

PGP software is used to encrypt/protect email as it moves from one computer to another. PGP, is the name of a computer program created in 1991 by Phil Zimmerman.

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Preview Text

Text that appears after or below the subject line in an inbox and helps indicate what the email is about.

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Proactive Marketing Strategies

Proactive Marketing Strategies is essentially an offensive marketing strategy that factors in future competition with current data and consumer trends.

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Promotional Objectives

Promotional Objectives is part of an overarching marketing strategy.

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Protocol

Protocol is a common function or a means for unrelated objects to communicate with each other in object-oriented programming.

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Push-Pull Strategy

In marketing this is the interactions and communication between seller and buyer.

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Q

QR Codes

These simple black and white squares are a type of matrix or two-dimensional barcode.

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Queue

In computing, a queue refers to a sequence of work objects that are waiting to be processed. Email also features a queue which follows this principle.

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Qualified Available Market

It is the overarching term for consumers who are interested in a product, can afford it, and who are not prevented from purchasing by any access barrier or legal restriction.

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R

Reach and Frequency

It is a marketing strategy that basically weighs the elements of brand message frequency against estimated consumer reach.

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Read or Open Length

Although this term appears in glossary term lists on a few websites, it appears to be a misleading term.

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Relationship Email

In email marketing, this is a communication that refers back to a commercial action that occurred between a business and a customer, which may have included a purchase, a complaint or a customer service or support request via email.

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Render Rate

Render Rate or Renders is a relatively new industry-wide term used to describe a metric created to measure the initial level of email engagement more consistently and more accurately than a simple open rate.

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Return On Investment

Commonly noted as ROI, is a performance metric that can be used to evaluate the efficacy of a certain investment, and to compare the cost effectiveness of multiple investments.

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Reverse Marketing Channel

This term describes the backward flow or process by which used goods, that will be used in the recycling and repurposing of those goods as raw materials, come from the consumer.

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RSS Feed

RSS Feed or Rich Site Summary or Real Simple Syndication. RSS feeds are actually a collection of web-feed formats used to publish articles and posts from blogs or websites that can contain text, images, and video. These feeds can be full articles or summaries.

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Reactive Marketing Strategy

A Reactive Marketing Strategy is some form of active marketing action plan. It is found in almost all business models.

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Real-Time Marketing

Dynamic marketing that interacts with a target audience or specific customer at a particular time and place.

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Relevance

In email marketing, this term refers to a single message or series of email marketing newsletters that target a specific interest group or demographic.

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Rental/Acquisition List

These lists are extremely tempting for new email marketers. Growing a viable subscriber list through opt-in methods can take time and effort.

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Reverse DNS

In computer technology, reverse Domain Name Server (DNS) lookup or resolution is used to determine a domain name that is associated with an IP address using the Internet DNS lookup service.

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Rich Media

It is also referred to as interactive media, is used to describe computer-based systems which respond to user’s actions by presenting new information.

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S

Seed Emails

In email marketing, this term describes an email address that is placed on a list — often secretly — to track delivery rate, and to assess the visible appearance of delivered email messages.

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Semantic Web

It is the name for the collaborative movement and the goal of the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium), which is the lead organization for the inclusion of semantic (or standards across all web platforms) content for all web pages. Its aim is to convert the current web dominated by unstructured and semi-structured documents into a web of structured data.

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Sender Score

Return Path provides a free service that distributes publicly-available scores for every IP address sending outgoing mail.

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Signature File

A signature file, once configured by a user, provides an automatically inserted tagline or short block of text at the end of an email message.

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Social Media Marketing

Social media has changed how marketing and communication professionals build and promote their brands while carrying out their daily tasks.

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Solo Mailing

In terms of email marketing, solo mail refers to a single communication to an opt-in email list that is separate from regular newsletters and promotions.

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Spamhaus

In the world of email marketing, Spamhaus — also called The Spamhaus Project — is an international organization that actively tracks email spammers and spam-related activities.

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Suppression List

In email marketing, this is a collection of valid email addresses whose users have signed up for and opted-out of regular email communications.

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Sell Sheet

Sell Sheet can be a printed page, usually a standard letter or legal size sheet that includes detailed information on a given company, product, or service.

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Sender Policy Framework

SPF is simply a validation system in the form of a DNS record that identifies on whose behalf an IP or domain sends email.

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Shared Server

For email marketing, a shared server refers, simply, to an email server that is used by more than one company or sender.

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Social Media

This term encompasses six different types: social networking sites and microblogs (e.g., Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter), video content sharing (e.g., YouTube), collaborative information or instructional projects (e.g., Wikipedia), virtual game worlds (e.g., Runes of Magic and World of Warcraft), and virtual social communities (e.g. Second Life).

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Social Network

Social Network is a term used for the theoretical concept as used in social/behavioral academic sciences.

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Spam Complaint

For email, a spam complaint refers to when an email user flags a message as “junk” or “unsolicited.”

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Subject Line

A Subject Line is the introduction that identifies the emails intent.

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Spoofing

Spoofing is an email marketing practice in which the sender will change their name, or other parts of the header, in an email message so that the message appears to come from another address.

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T

Targeted Email

This method of email marketing is a solid and proven promotional technique that pays off with a little prior planning and email list segmentation.

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Teaser

Teaser or tease message, can be used as the front-runner of an email marketing campaign.

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Tests

Testing is an important aspect of any email newsletter marketing campaign. One of the simplest email tests is the review email.

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Throttling

Throttling describes the process of regulating email send rates. Throttle limits the number of email messages that a broadcaster can send to a single ISP or mail server at one time.

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Transpromotional

It is a compound term from the combined words of “transaction” and “promotional” and describes the adding of relevant marketing or business related messages on unrelated transaction documents like invoices, cash register receipts, and statements.

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Tumblr

As a social network based on the microblogging format, Tumblr allows registered users to post both text, images and other multimedia content.

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Targeted Marketing

This term refers to an advertiser or company that examines an existing market and breaks it down into segments.

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Terms and Conditions

These are the agreements that a user assumes by identifying they have “read and agree” when they sign up for email newsletters or regular email promotions via a company’s mailing list.

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Thank-you Page

It is the web page that visitors are automatically directed to after they submit an order or any other form online.

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Transactional or Relationship Email Message

Using this method of communication, a recipient can complete a transaction in the body of the email itself and is not redirected to a webpage that is instrumental to completing the transaction.

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Twitter

Twitter is a micro blogging and online social networking service that allows registered users to send and read text-based posts, which are limited to 140 characters.

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U

Unique Selling Proposition

(USP), also known as a unique selling point refers to a marketing concept that was put forth in the early 1940s to understand the patterns associated with successful advertising campaigns.

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V

Value Added

It refers to a physical or imagined perception of a bonus that is applied or combined with a product or service with little or no extra cost involved with the purchase.

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Viral Marketing

It is a term or buzzwords that refer to the use of existing social networking websites for the purpose of increasing brand or issue awareness.

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Verification

It refers to a physical or imagined perception of a bonus that is applied or combined with a product or service with little or no extra cost involved with the purchase.

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Viral Responses

This term refers to email marketing newsletter subscribers who receive a referral or forwarded email, open the message and click on a link.

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W

Web Bug

Web bug is a simple 1-pixel-by-1-pixel image tag that can be added to an HTML message.

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What’s In It For Me

Also identified as WIIFM, is a simple way of factoring in a user’s mindset when visiting a business’s website.

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Worm

It is a malicious code that is delivered via an executable attachment in an email or over a computer network.

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Web Friendly Fonts

Web friendly notes are those that are most commonly able to render correctly on every browser or email inbox.

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Whitelist

A whitelist is exactly the opposite of a blacklist. As a noun, whitelist has become a generic term for either an e-mail and/or IP addresses that have proven themselves as trusted sources.

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WYSIWYG

It is an acronym for ‘what you see is what you get’ and is now considered a universal term for describing a computer program that allows users to edit in real time and on a computer monitor display that closely resembles the printed or screen rendering of the finished product.

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