Bob’s Jargon Buster
A block of text placed below the body of an email, typically containing your contact information such as your name, physical address, phone number, web address.
Topic: Email Marketing
The buying of advertising space in another person’s email newsletter, or sponsoring a specific article or series of articles.
Advertisers pay to have their ad inserted into the body of the email.
This can be an effective way to reach a new group of people.
Topic: Email Marketing
This is when a legitimate permission-based email is incorrectly filtered or blocked as spam.
In other words, the person confirmed they wished to receive your emails by subscribing using Double Opt-In but your email to them was marked as spam.
False positives are a common occurrence since mail systems do not check whether the recipient requested the email in the first place. False positives can be avoided by following best-practice guidelines on designing marketing emails.
Topic: Email Marketing
Thi is when email fails delivery due to a permanent reason like a non-existent, invalid, or blocked email address.
The other type of bounce is a ‘Soft Bounce’.
Topic: Email Marketing
A email address created specifically by organizations trying to combat spam that, when a spammer adds to their mailing list and emails, identifies that sender as a spammer.
Also referred to as a ‘Spamtrap’.
Topic: Email Marketing
A permission-based list that you built yourself with opt-in subscribers.
This is one of your most valuable marketing assets.
Also known as a ‘Retention List’.
Topic: Email Marketing
Simply an email that is formatted using HTML as opposed to plain text. This is typically the default when sending emails nowadays, although don’t underestimate the power of plain text emails.
Sending HTML email makes it possible to be more creative with the design of your emails.
Topic: Email Marketing
A link from an web page to another location, activated by clicking on a highlighted word, image or object.
Topic: Websites
A standard for tagging text to build web pages. HTML can control the display of fonts, colours, graphics, links, structure as well as many other elements.
Topic: Websites
This is the address of a device on the Internet. All devices on the Internet need one of these to be able to send and receive information. Without one, you won’t be doing any browsing and no one will be able to find you.
Topic: Websites
A method for increasing the reputation of an IP Address used to send email marketing messages. It involves sending out increasing numbers of emails over time.
The higher reputation of an IP Address the more likely it is that emails from that address will successfully reach a recipient’s mailbox.
Topic: Email Marketing
A web page that’s designed with one purpose in mind – to get visitors to enter their email address to subscribe for more information.
Landing pages are a very important component when it comes to building relationships with your web visitors.
People are taken to landing pages by either clicking a link in an email marketing message, an online advert, a social media post or a search engine result.
Visitor information is captured through the user completing a form on the page. In return for entering their email address visitors will receive a gift or discount.
Landing pages are also known as sales pages, lead capture pages, landers, destination page, splash pages,
Topic: Email Marketing, Online Advertising, Remarketing, Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Websites
Authentication is the process of determining whether someone is in fact who they say they are.
When sending marketing emails using third party software it is necessary to prove that you are authorised to send emails from a particular domain.
Without the correct level of authorisation you will not be able to send emails from your company email address.
Topic: Email Marketing
The selecting of a target audience of subscribers for your email marketing list based on their interests, activities or demographics. For example, a segment could be subscribers who own a saloon car which is more than 5 years old who live within a 50 mile radius of your location. Or they could be subscribers who clicked on any link in your last email marketing campaign.
List segmentation is essential to ensure subscribers are sent relevant email campaigns from you, thereby getting a higher level of engagement and less unsubscribes and spam reports.
Topic: Email Marketing
Malware is computer software written with the intent to harm and infect the host system.
Malware includes: viruses, trojan horses, worms, spyware, adware and ransomware.
Topic: Computers
The percentage of targeted subscribers who opened an email you sent. For instance, if you sent a marketing email to 500 subscribers on your list and 100 open the email, then your open rate would be 20%.
Open means that they clicked or tapped on the email to display the body of the email.
Open rate tracking does not work for Plain Text email campaigns or where recipients have chosen not to display image in their email. This is because tracking uses a hidden image in the body of the email.
Topic: Email Marketing
To opt-in or subscribe to an email list is to choose to receive email communications. This is done by supplying your your email address to a particular company along with permission to send you marketing emails.
Just having someone’s email address doesn’t mean you’re allowed to send them marketing email messages. Explicit permission is required and you’ll need proof that you have that permission in order to stay legal.
Subscribers can often indicate areas of personal interest e.g. money saving tips. You may also be asked for your name.
Topic: Email Marketing
This is when a subscriber chooses not to receive any more email marketing messages from the sender anymore, and requests removal from your email list.
It is legally required that you provide a clear way for subscribers to opt-out in every marketing email you send.
People can be asked the reason why they opt-out, which can be useful in improving the targeting of your emails.
Topic: Email Marketing
The method of dynamically altering of a bulk email message to make it personal to each recipient.
Personalisation can be a very useful tool to increase reader engagement.
A common example of this is to insert the recipient’s name into the first line of the email body.
Personalisation typically uses merge-tags that are replaced with information about each subscriber when the email is sent.
Topic: Email Marketing
The physical street address of the organisation that is sending the email marketing messages. It is usually placed in the footer of an email. Its inclusion is a legal requirement for all email marketing messages.
Topic: Email Marketing
An email composed of standard text without an markup e.g. no HTML.
Sending email marketing messages in plain text email can sometimes achieve higher levels of reader engagement, since the messages look like regular email.
It is good practise to offer subscribers the option to read emails in either HTML or plain text for improved readability.
Topic: Email Marketing
A clear description of a website or company’s policy on the use of information collected about website visitors and what they do, and do not do, with the data.
It is often a legal requirement to have a privacy policy.
Topic: Email Marketing
A type of malware designed to defraud and extort money from computer users.
Typically the software will take over operation of the person’s device and ask for money in return for releasing control and returning access to the user.
Under no circumstance should the victim pay the ransom. Often there is return of control of the infect computer. The person is left out of pocket and still has a broken computer.
It is important to take regular backups of your system so you can retrieve your system in the event of your device becoming infected.
Topic: Computers
The length of time a subscriber spends reading a particular email.
Topic: Email Marketing
