95 Email Marketing Terms You Really should know Today
Are you looking to build your e-marketing fluency? An email marketing glossary of terms can help you like no other.
Chances are, you have come across a dozen of them already either in a social media post, blog, tweet or an ESP’s documentation. They are no alien terms, but just a branding lingo that needs a little professional navigation.
Email Marketing Terms to know

1.
Acceptable Spam Report Rate –
This rate, warns you against your chances of being reported as SPAM. For ex., more than 1 report out of 1000 emails is intimidating for your marketer’s reputation.
2. Acceptance Rate –
This rate tells you the quotient of your emails that are accepted by our chosen mail server.
Don’t confuse this rate with that of your emails that finally enter inbox.
3. ALT Tags
– This part of the code contains text that describes the image.
4. Ad swap
– This code basically talks about an agreement between publishers who run each other’s valued commercial add for no cost.
Here the value is acquired through rate card, brand fame, size and quality of list etc..
5. Autoresponder
– This refers to what can be called a “drip campaign”. It’s an automated message or string of messages.

6. A/B Split Test –
This code is used to optimize the conversion ratio of your email recipients. It works by splitting your contacts into two halves and sending different emails to each with a creative niche.
7. Above-the-fold –
This code points in the first crucial part of your email or a web page that appears to your target audience without scrolling. This word actually refers to the common printing term for the first half of a newspaper above its fold.
More often than not, folds are not predictable in emails, as they are determined by monitor resolution, size, preview pane or any particular header placed by email servers.
8. Blacklist
– This highlights the set of IP addresses that are spam listed and hardly have chances to get to their targeted mailboxes.
9. Block
– This code refers to a serious email delivery problem. This term is used when no email from the sender gets through.
10. Bounce Rate –
This code denotes to the delivery failures or bounces back quotient of your emails, soft or hard. A bounce rate of more than 5% is a matter of sheer concern.
11. Bulk Mail –
This term denotes an email blast that is shot to a group of recipients with the same subject.
12. Behavioral Email –
This code refers to a customization technique that optimizes the past behaviors of the recipients and sends bespoke messages to the target audience based on that behavior.
13. CAN-SPAM –
This is an abbreviated term for ‘Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing Act of 2003’. This law relates to the rules and regulations of email messages and the rights of receivers to opt for a non-compliance with the sender’s mail.
14. Clicks Per Open –
This refers to the percentage ratio that is derived by dividing the number of clicks by that of the opened emails.
15. Clicks Per Delivered –
This refers to the percentage ratio that is derived by dividing the number of clicks by that of the delivered emails.
16. Cost Per Thousand/CPM –
This term highlights the cost that applies to a list of 1000. This cost is basically set by the list owner who sells it to the sender.
17. Click-Through-Rate/CTR –
This measures the unique clicks of the recipients of a particular URL of your mail.
18. Conversion Rate –
This denotes to the numbers of recipients who respond to your CTA in a promotional mail campaign by completing a particular task or action.
19. Complaint Rate –
This show how many of your recipients have actually spam marked your emails.
20. Contact List –
This term points to your “mailing list” whom you mail with a subscription request.
21. CSS –
This code is an abbreviation for ” Cascading Style Sheets”. It is usually a markup language used for designing purpose for your emails and web pages.22> Confidence Level – This testing term shows up as a percentage ratio of your email marketing success milestone. It should vary between 95-99%.
23. Dedicated IP –
This is the address that sends your mails exclusively.
24. Double Opt-In –
This refers to a prescribed method of building a more genuine and cream email list. This method needs the subscribers to generally click or respond to a confirmation link to validate their opt-in.
25. Domain Keys Identified Mail/DKIM –
This is an authentication tactic to boost an email’s authenticity ratio and deliverability quotient by linking a domain name to an email message.
26. Deploy –
This is the technical way of saying “send” when you shoot a marketing email campaign.
27. Drip Marketing –
This term refers to the automated email messages that reach their target recipients inboxes over an interval.
28. Delivery Rate –
This denotes to the actual ratio of emails that finally get through the subscribers’ inboxes.
29. Dynamic Content
– This email branding technique takes into consideration the recipient preference, geo-location and their past responses for swapping and personalization of contents into pre-set sections of an email message.
30. Email Service Provider/ESP –
This is the company you choose to rely on for your email marketing hardware, software, contact list management, and email tracking.
31.Email Deliverability –
Just as it sounds, this code emphasizes the ability to deliver an email to a subscribers inbox. You can easily improve this ratio by choosing a reputed ESP with a high deliverability rate.
32. Email Whitelist –
This acronym simply refers to a list of approved IP addresses for delivering your emails. Just like the blacklist, a whitelist is too maintained by an ESP for blocking measure compliance.
33. ECOA –
This code refers to a particular service that keeps a full track of all email address updates.
34. Event Triggered Email –
This term is used for those marketing emails that are automatically sent to the potential subscribers based on a pre-scheduled event reminder.
35. Ezine/e-zine –

This term is not unusual,just another term used for the email newsletter.
36. Email Harvesting –
This term points to a robotic process of collecting email addresses from various electronic media and compiling them into a database for selling them for promotional uses. But due to an increasing unethical use of this database, harvesting is forbidden by the U.S. law.
37. Email Analytics –
This is a cluster of all technologies, algorithms, and metrics that together analyze email and its nitty-gritty.38> Email Sponsorship – This points to the particular space in a newsletter reserved by an advertiser for his/her paid ads.
39. Email Phishing –
This term refers to the fraudulent emails sent by spammers asking for sensitive and critical information from their unknown recipients for unethical vested interest.
40. Email Queue –
Ready and tailored mails waiting in the queue for their ESP to deploy are the code of conversation here.
41. False Positive –
This is a situation when a whitelisted permission-based email accidentally flagged or filtered as spam.
42. Forwards-
This code refers to the ratio of the times your subscribers forward an email you send them to their circles.
43. Google Analytics –
This term flags to the most widely accepted software from Google, which helps email marketers of all sizes track an mail interaction, recipient response and behavior on a particular website link.
And all for absolutely no cost.
44.
Gravestoning
This is an act of transforming the most inactive emails to the spam trap.
45. Gray Mail –
This term is politely used to point to those email messages that are no more the subscription choices of their recipients but still not unsubscribed or spam listed.
46. Goodbye Message –
This is the email message that automatically reaches every subscriber, who opts to unsubscribe from a particular newsletter. The adieu mail acknowledges the request and offers the last chance to subscribe in case the opt-out request was an accident.
47. Hard Bounce –
This term denotes to the irrecoverable email delivery failure that happens due to reasons like invalid, extinct or blocked email addresses.
48. House List –
Also known as the Retention List, this term refers to your permission-based list of email subscribers whom you can cross-sell, up-sell or market your brand. This is your permanent and priceless core list of clients whom you have acquired over a time-tested email marketing strategy.
49. Hygiene –
This term talks about the process of cleaning and validating your subscriber database.
50. Honey Pot (spam honeypot)
– This code refers to an email address that acts as a spam antidote and identifies every spam sender.
51. HTML Email
– This kind of emails with markup language allows ample scopes of creativity and design in your emails. For ex., video embeds and email carousels can be added to HTML5.
52. IP Warmup –
This means sending a deliberately increased number of emails from an IP address to build its reputation.
53. Impression –
This denotes to a single page viewed by a single subscriber. This calculation is mainly used for advertising rate analysis.
54. IMAP –
This code is the acronym for “Internet Message Access Protocol”. This helps access emails from an email server.
55. IP Address –
The unique placement of numbers separated by periods to identify a computer on a network of computers. This address helps identify email senders all across the world.
56. Internet Service Provider/ISP –
This is a company that sells internet access to company or individuals. It also offers email accounts and holds a bulk of mail addresses.
57. Inactives –
This points to the ratio of your email subscribers who neither clicked nor opened your emails in a month or beyond.
58. Inbox Placement Rate –
This denotes to a smart technique that reveals the percentage of your actual emails that really reach the inboxes of your subscribers.
59. Joint Photographic Experts Group/JPEG–
This is a file format of images of your emails.
60.
Joe Job –
This term is used to refer spam emails where spammers disguise their identities by faking an email address of a genuine sender.
– This is the lead-seizure page of your brand or service portal that is directly linked via your email’s CTA.

62. Linkrot –
This talks about a situation when a particular link in an email message no more serves the purpose. It’s either because the website is no more or the landing page is not anymore supported by the site.
63. List Fatigue
– This talks about the retiring engagement of your email list of subscribers who have been mailed too often.
64. Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions/MIME –
This refers to an extension that allows sending various file formats using both HTML and text-only versions using the parent email protocol. It’s also known as “email sniffer”.
65. Multivariate Testing –
This testing method puts variables in different combination to find out what works best to capture the audience through your email marketing venture.
66. Mail Bomb –
This is a condition when a mail server is attempted to malfunction and shut down with an overload of emails that crosses its sending capacity.
67. MUA –
This is an acronym for Mail User Agent.
68. MX –
This is an acronym for Mail Exchange Record.
69. Nth Name –
This term basically refers to a segmentation method of the main email list by its names for testing purpose.
70. Open Rate –
The actual percentage of the opened emails out of the total sent in an email marketing campaign.
71. Opt-In/Subscribe –
This refers to the decision of receiving emails from a particular brand by giving it permission and sometimes pre-defined areas of interests.
72. Opt-Out/Unsubscribe –
This does just the opposite of opt-in as every email must contain a transparent way to unsubscribe when the subscribers decide to step back from your newsletters or promotional emails.
73. Onboarding
his talks about a clever marketing technique of introducing your brand USPs to your new set of email subscribers. Welcome emails are an example.
74. Personalization –
Customization of your mail contents based on client data is crucial for the next level email marketing. For ex., including the subscriber’s first name in the subject line can increase the open rate.
75. Plain Text
– As this kind of formatting uses no markup in the email, the whole content of your mail comes in just the simple lines of texts.
76. Permission –
This denotes to an implicit consent when a subscriber has personally requested to add his/her address to a marketing email list.
77. Pass-along –
This term refers to an unknown recipient who receives your email newsletter forwarded from one of your subscribers.
78. Pretty Good Privacy/PGP –
This is a software that can encrypt and protect your emails when they move from one workstation to another. It can also be used to verify your identity as a sender.
79. Read or Open Length –
A method of measuring the time a subscriber takes to open an email.

80. Rental List/Acquisition List –
This permission-based opt-in list of prospects can be emailed based on specific interests and priorities.
81. Responsive Design –
This term refers to an email design that is compatible with mobile or any other device.
82. Reverse DNS –
This method is used to catch spammers by matching an IP address to a domain name.
83. Soft Bounce –
This bounce generally occurs when the recipient inbox is full or the server is temporarily unavailable.
84. Signature file/Sigfile –
This is often added at the end of an email message as a tagline to talk about a benefit or CTA for an added marketing opportunity.
85. Sender Score –
This decides your reputation as a sender with a rating between 0-100 in every outgoing mail IP address.
86. Shared IP –
This term denotes a common IP address used by many email marketers. This is your option when you don’t want a dedicated IP address against an investment.
87. Triggered Emails –
This refers to an automated pre-configured email scheduled by marketers on specific events like birthdays or anniversaries.
88. Transactional Emails –
This kind of marketing emails has higher chances of client engagements as they are not promotional in content, but purely responsive in nature. For ex., order confirmation emails are transactional.
89. UCE –
This is an acronym for unsolicited, junk or spam marketing emails.
90. Uniform Resource Locator/URL
– This points to the very familiar web page address that starts with https://, then www (if not any other variation) and ends with a domain name.
91. video email –
This kind of emails contains video files.
92.Viral Marketing –
This term usually denotes a type of email marketing that is voluntarily steered through the goodwill of your subscribers when he/or she decides to spread the word by forwarding a piece of your newsletter to a fresh new client.
93. Welcome Message –
This is the automatic message that is sent to the client every time a new subscriber email address is added to your marketing list.
94. Web Bug
– Also known as Web Beacons, this term refers to a software that tracks open rates of your emails by adding image tags to an HTML message.
95. Wearables –
These refer to the smart devices next level to your smartphones. For ex., Apple iWatch and Google Glass are wearables.
The bottom line is, the list of email marketing terms will continue to grow as there is something new every day. However, the above ones are enough, for now, to keep you on top of your email marketing ventures. Time to give your ventures a head start.
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