Email Marketing Terminology...Everything You Ever Wanted to Know
If you are in business, chances are you use email on a daily basis to communicate with customers and colleagues. Emails have become an important part of how we do business today. And with websites, there has become a need to ensure that we are capturing those that may be visiting our sites but not yet purchasing from us so that we can communicate with them and hopefully get them to buy.
There are plenty of Email Marketing tools available to small businesses such as MailerLite, MailChimp and Active Campaign, but it can be confusing understanding the terminology used on these platforms so here’s a quick guide to some of the common email terms.
Campaign
A campaign is a single email (such as a newsletter or promotion of a one-day-only deal) sent to subscribers.
Newsletters
An email newsletter is sent periodically containing news, updates or curated content (see campaign).
Automation
An automation is a series of emails sent to subscribers based on a trigger. It could be a user action such as abandoned cart or they downloaded a freebie or a predetermined time delay eg: birthday.
Landing Page
A landing page is a web page which serves as a landing point. It is usually a standalone web page created specifically for marketing or advertising purposes. It’s aim is to capture information from contacts in exchange for something of value eg: retail offer code, signing up to a course or downloading a guide.
Template
Templates allow you to customise the formatting and text of emails then reuse it over and over without having to recreate the same information.
Merge Field
A merge field is a field that you input into an email template that auto-fills values automatically when generating an email. The most common use of a merge field is the first name. If the particular field you are using is not filled in, then it is generally left blank (no coding will display either).
Tag
A tag is a label attached to someone for the purpose of identification. These can be used to insert personalisation data from your subscriber into a campaign or allow you to target a specific group of people to communicate with.
Segment
This is the process of dividing your mailing lists into multiple categories according to specific criteria. It could be used to personalised your list to specific subscribers based on parameters such as age, gender, location, interests, behaviour and more.
Call to Action
A Call to Action or CTA) is a step that encourages customers to perform a desired action. It can be direct such as: Buy, Shop, Sign up, Register, Learn more, Visit or it can simply move the reader further along towards becoming a consumer.
A/B Testing
A/B testing enables you to test different variations of a similar email campaign to get the best results and improve your email metrics.
Understanding these basic email marketing terms can help you better manage your marketing and get more out of your communication efforts.
So whether you’re just getting started in the world of email marketing or looking for a refresher on key concepts, this glossary should give you all the information you need!
Jo
