14 Terms You Should Know for Email Marketing Success

Email marketing is widely regarded as a modern business necessity in order to keep your position in your prospects’ and clients’ minds. The world of email marketing is rich with terms and definitions that are important for markets of all levels of experience to understand. 

We’ve created a glossary of these terms for your reference—but if you want more context into any of these terms, you can always reach out to us.

Essential Email Marketing Terms You’ll Encounter

A/B Testing

This is effectively a means of determining your most effective approach to a given process… in this context, which tone and message will make your email marketing efforts optimally effective. Let’s say you wanted to send an email promoting your backup and disaster recovery services. You could run an A/B test—sending similar audiences different emails to see which gets the most response—to determine which message is the most effective tactic to use.

Acceptance Rate

This refers to the total number of emails that you send that don’t bounce back. Keep in mind, this doesn’t mean it reached an inbox, it just wasn’t rejected. 

Bounce Rate

So, what do we mean by “bounce?” Simple—some emails simply aren’t accepted by the email servers that deliver your messages to your recipients. The percentage of emails that are rejected—bounced back—is known as your bounce rate. Naturally, you want this percentage to be as small as possible.

A hard bounce refers to  an email that is sent back due to a permanent error, such as an invalid recipient address, causing it to be rejected by the receiving server. Alternatively, a soft bounce refers to those emails that did reach the server, but were rejected due to a more temporary, technical problem. 

CAN-SPAM

Enforced by the Federal Trade Commission, the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of 2003 outlines the boundaries that businesses need to abide by as they send out emails. This includes accurate and transparent means to unsubscribe from ongoing messages.

Click-Through Rate

One of your metrics for success, your CTR is the percentage of email recipients that used a link shared in your email to navigate somewhere online. This is one percentage that you want to be as high as possible.

Conversion Rate

Whatever the purpose of your email, be it to have someone download something, navigate to your website, or make a purchase, your conversion rate is the number of people who follow your call to action and do so.

Customer Acquisition Cost

Speaking of your conversion rate, how much did you need to invest in order to generate that conversion? This is your customer acquisition cost, and it is important to track so that you aren’t spending too much on each lead.

Email Deliverability

Your email deliverability refers to how successfully your emails reach their destination, avoiding bounces or being classified as spam. The better your deliverability, the more likely your email is to be opened.

Engagement Rank

While engagement is frequently a metric tied to marketing efforts, there are various variables that come into play when it ties to your email marketing specifically. Open and click-through rates are important to keep track of in order to accurately measure your success as you’re communicating with your contacts.

List Segmentation

When you sort through all your contacts, chances are that they will want different things from your company, meaning that some of your messages will apply more to some than others. This means that dividing up your list of contacts into separate, smaller lists is a worthwhile endeavor, as it will allow you to direct more customized and directed messages.

Marketing Automation

Rather than it falling to you or one of your team members to manually send messages as part of a dedicated email campaign, it can be much more effective for your emails to be sent automatically, as certain triggers are met. This greatly simplifies your processes, and makes it far less likely that any opportunities will be missed, to boot.

Open Rate

Simply put, how many of the emails you send are clicked on and opened? Your open rate is this value, presented as a percentage, and it can help inform a few of your email-centric efforts. For instance, a poor open rate suggests that your subject lines aren’t as effective as they need to be.

Opt-In/Out

To support your marketing efforts, you should be enabling your prospects to subscribe to your marketing emails, and in order to remain compliant, you likewise need to give them the capability to unsubscribe. 

Spam

At best, the junk messages of email, and at worst, active threats, you don’t want your business’ communications to be marked as spam and filtered out of inboxes. This makes it important that you abide by best practices so that you can pass by the spam filters unobstructed.

This is Just a Brief Sample of the Terms You Need to Know, Concerning Your Marketing Emails

We can be here to help you with the rest of your marketing needs, from these emails to all of your other efforts. Give us a call at 888-546-4384 to learn more today.