Email Marketing Terminology Guide
Whether starting with a dedicated email marketing campaign or looking to up your game, understanding email marketing terminology makes navigating platforms and evaluating campaigns easier!
And it’s worth a little study time: Email marketing is so important that 4 out of 5 marketers would rather give up social media than email marketing.
The glossary below outlines the email marketing vocabulary you need to know and other phrases you might encounter.
Email Marketing Vocabulary and Terms to Know
Email marketing is an essential part of your inbound marketing strategy. There are a lot of email marketing terms, which may make it confusing, but we’ve designed this email marketing glossary to help. You might find considerable overlap between email marketing terminology and other key marketing terms. This helps shorten the learning curve. Put on your study cap and dive in.
Acceptance rate. This measures the percentage of mail that did not bounce back to the sender.
Bounce rate. The number of users who quickly left the email.
CAN-SPAM. Official name: Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of 2003. This legislation protects users’ digital rights by law and regulates how businesses can email them. The Act also outlines penalties for those who break the law. It’s worth reading the full Act if you’re unsure what these restrictions mean for your business.
Click rate. The number of clicks compared to the number of sends.
Click-through rate. The number of links clicked compared to the number of opens. It’s also expressed as a percentage and a more powerful engagement metric.
CRM. Stands for customer relationship management. CRM is a system used to store contacts and information about customers.
Double opt-in. After a user submits their info to be on an email list, an email is sent asking to confirm the subscription. Users who do not confirm are not put on the list. It’s a tactic to keep your email list clean and full of engaged users.
Drag and drop email. Some email clients offer premade email blocks that you can manipulate to create an email without knowing HTML.
Email service provider. An application that allows you to send emails to a list of subscribers.
Hard bounce. A permanent reason an email cannot be delivered, like an email client, such as Microsoft Outlook or Apple Mail, has blocked the sender.
HTML email. An HTML email is an email created entirely with HTML.
Landing page. The website page where you encourage email sign-ups.
List segmentation. Organizing and separating your list of email contacts based on preferences, demography, engagement and more.
Open rate. The number of opens compared to the number of sends. Often expressed as a percentage. Typically, open rate has been a good engagement indicator, but recent privacy changes mean it’s a less accurate metric.
Plain text email. An email containing no images or HTML, simply text.
Preview text. The text that is often displayed in email clients after the subject line.
Soft bounce. There are many reasons an email can soft bounce, and it’s usually temporary, like the email is too large or the mailbox is full.
Spam. Inappropriate or irrelevant messages.
Subject. Your email’s subject line.
Subscribe. Users sign up for an email list.
Unsubscribe and unsubscribe rate. Users remove their email from a list. The unsubscribe rate is the number of unsubscribes compared to the number of sends for a given email.
Want to learn more about email marketing? Check out our Email Marketing FAQs and check out our other digital marketing glossary resources, too.
Level Up Your Email Marketing with Our Digital Expertise
While email marketing at its most basic is following up with an interested customer via email, your business can benefit greatly from a strong email marketing strategy. Oneupweb’s team of experts helps midsize and enterprise businesses with their marketing goals. View our email marketing services, and reach out online or call (231) 922-9977.
