Glossary of Terms

Acronyms and marketing terms are often used in the world of email marketing. You can use this list as a reference point throughout the course if you need any clarity on terms that are referenced:

• A/B Testing: A/B testing is the act of running experiments with content and copy between two or more emails to see which performs or converts best.
• Abandoned Cart or Abandoned Checkouts: An abandoned cart occurs when a customer adds an item to their cart and doesn’t follow through with a purchase. Abandoned cart emails is an ecommerce term used to describe automated email reminders sent to customers who exit a website after adding items to their shopping cart but failed to check out.
• Campaign: An email you send to your subscribers. Sometimes, people call these messages “e-blasts” or “newsletters,” but we call them campaigns. Campaigns can involve one email or a sequence of emails around a specific theme. For example “Black Friday Deals” sequence or a one-time “Sunday Funday Sale.”
• CRM: Customer Relationship Management. In the context of this course when we refer to CRM we are referencing the email software you use to holistically manage your communication with the people who have subscribed to your email list.
• CTA: This stands for a call to action, which is the way you encourage someone to subscribe to your list or take action (i.e. use a coupon code)
• Click Through Rate: The number of people who click on a specific link compared to the total number of people who have access to the link.
• ESP: Email Service Provider. This is a company that provides email marketing software.
• GA: Throughout the course the term GA is sometimes used as shorthand for Google Analytics. Google Analytics lets you measure your advertising ROI as well as track your Flash, video, and social networking sites and applications.
• Lifecycle Emails: Lifecycle marketing or emails refers to when a business sends emails to a customer based on their journey with the business. For example you wouldn’t send a VIP discount to a new subscriber who hadn’t purchased products from you before.
• List: The place you store your subscribers’ and recipients’ information, along with unsubscribed and bounced email addresses.
• Open Rate: The percentage of emails opened in an email marketing campaign, or the percentage opened of the total number of emails sent.
• Opt-in: The way people sign up to your mailing list.
• Subscriber: The typical contact in your list. These people have opted-in to receive email marketing from you.
• Template: The layout for an email campaign.
• RFM: RFM stands for Recency (R), Frequency (F), and Monetary Value (M). There are three data points you have on every email subscriber in your database, your ESP, and in Shopify.
• Segmentation: This refers to group email subscribers into smaller groups based on a set of criteria (to ideally increase open rates or sales)
• Welcome Series: A welcome email or welcome series is your potential customer’s introduction to your brand. It’s either a single email or a series of automated emails you send to a potential customer when he or she signs up for your email list. This will help you start building a relationship and organically move that potential customer down the funnel from subscriber to buyer. Welcome series are where you build trust, educate and inform your potential customer and also provide real value.