Email Glossary

Abandoned Cart Email (Architect)

An email sent to a customer when they leave items in their cart but do not make any purchase. Refer to Cart Abandonment to read more about Architect's cart abandonment use case.

Abuse Complaint

Registered when a subscriber clicks on a Spam button in their email client. For ISPs using feedback loops (FBLs), you can record these abuse complaints and unsubscribe the complainer. It is important to remove complaining subscribers as failing to do so is a common reason for getting blacklisted.

AMP Email

Enabling emails to show app-like or website-like behavior. This technology is not mature yet, but ESPs such as Google are trying to provide a platform for the email senders to embed AMP into messages themselves, making them more actionable and updating them with the most current information. Refer to AMP for Emails to read about Insider's AMP solution.

Authenticate

To prove to be true or genuine. DNS records should be configured accordingly for authentication. Read about DNS & Authentication.

Automation

A type of marketing tool which empowers online retailers and marketers to smartly manage multiple email workflows according to customer behavior

Birthday Email

An automated e-commerce workflow in which an email with special offers is sent to customers on their birthday. Refer to Birthday Journeys to read more about Architect's birthday use case.

Blocked

Blocks occur when your messages experience a temporary failure. They can occur when your IP address has been added to a blacklist, when recipient's inbox is full or if the recipient's server is temporarily down. The mailbox provider will block affected messages that show up on this list. It is possible to get your IP address removed from a block list, and some lists automatically do this after a period of time.

Bounced

A bounced message gets returned to the server that sent it. Messages are bounced when there is either a permanent or temporary failure to deliver the message due to conditions on the recipient's mail server. For example, the message might get returned because the recipient's email address is invalid or the domain name does not exist.  

Bulking

Appears when an email is routed to the spam folder instead of the inbox. Bulking can occur because of improper authentication, content resembling spam or something in your infrastructure’s history causing concern.

Campaign

An email sent to subscribers. Each bulk email that is sent to the list or segment is considered as a separate campaign. Unlike a journey which can include a lot of marketing activities, Newsletter campaigns occur only once.

Campaign Personalization

Personalization lets you customize the subject line or content of a campaign for each recipient.

Canonical Name (CNAME)

A record that creates an alias for subdomain.yourdomain.com and points to the 3rd party domain. 

CAN-SPAM

The Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing (CAN-SPAM) Act of 2003, a law that sets the rules for commercial email, establishes requirements for commercial messages, gives recipients the right to stop senders from emailing them and spells out tough penalties for violations.

Contacts List

You can send your email campaigns to a list of subscribers as well as to segments. You can create contact lists yourself and add subscribers manually or connect them to your signup forms and they will be updated automatically.

Direct Complaint

When a subscriber or ISP complains they no longer want to receive email from you by emailing the reply-to or abuse@ addresses. It is generally best to unsubscribe them and let them know that they are unsubscribed. You should not ask them to stay a subscriber or do anything.

DMARC

Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance standard. This has been developed in order to defend email users from receiving a large amount of spam and phishing messages.

A DMARC policy allows a sender to indicate that their emails are protected by SPF and/or DKIM and tells the receiver what to do if neither of those authentication methods passes – such as junk or reject the message. DMARC removes guesswork from the receiver's handling of these failed messages, limiting or eliminating the user's exposure to potentially fraudulent & harmful messages. 

Domain Authentication

Shows mailbox providers that the 3rd party domain has your permission to send messages on your behalf and this gives the appearance of messages coming directly from your domain.

Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM)

An email authentication system that is designed to verify the DNS domain of the sender to prove message integrity.

Domain Name System (DNS)

An internet service that translates domain names into IP addresses. Refer to Configuring DNS Settings for further information.

DNS Record

Domain Name System is a naming system that designates domain names and maps them to IP addresses.

Dropped

Drops indicate that a message was suppressed due to its presence on the bounce, unsubscribe or an invalid list.

EDM

Electronic Direct Mail. An electronic marketing campaign which is solely based on email send-outs.

Email Drag&Drop Editor

Drag&Drop Editor allows the user to quickly add, delete, duplicate and move content blocks in the campaign layout by dragging and dropping the elements wherever/whenever needed.

Email HTML Editor

HTML Editor allows the user to quickly add, delete, duplicate and move content blocks in the campaign by writing codes wherever/whenever needed.

Email Client

A web application or desktop program that displays and manages emails. Gmail, Apple Mail, Outlook, and AOL are a few examples of popular email clients.

Email Deliverability

The ability to deliver emails to subscribers' inboxes. Factors such as SendVolume, Send Frequency, User Interaction and Quality can affect email deliverability.

Email Hosting

A Web or Internet hosting service which rents out and operates email servers. Email hosting services are usually premium services which differ from the typical free webmail sites such as Yahoo and Google.

Email Header

Every email consists of two parts: the header information and the body of the message. Email header lines contain behind-the-scenes information that makes up the first part of an email message. It controls the transmission of the message as well as metadata including the subject, origin, and destination email addresses, the path an email takes, the servers it passes along the way, the time it did so, and the priority of the message. 

Engagement

How subscribers respond to the content you are sending. Are they regularly opening your email and clicking your links? If they are engaging with the content, your reputation and deliverability will improve. If they are not engaging and are deleting your emails, marking them as spam, or unsubscribing from them then your reputation will drop and affect your overall deliverability. Read more about Email Engagement Segments.

“Envelope from” address / Return Path

The return address located in the email message header that informs mail servers where to return, or bounce the message. It is hidden to email users.

ESP

A company that provides bulk email services and email marketing tools.

FBL

A feedback loop is an agreement you can make with ISPs where they get back to you with the identity of complainers in their webmail. This is very valuable since you stop sending emails to unhappy subscribers and will drastically lower your complaint rate, and at the end of the day, will help your overall deliverability.

Global Unsubscribes

The Global Unsubscribes feed shows a list of all contacts who have globally unsubscribed from the communications. This means that they have chosen not to receive any further communications. Read more about Email Suppressions.

Group Unsubscribes

The Group Unsubscribes feed shows a timeline of all contacts who have opted out of any of the unsubscribe group which has previously been created. Read more about Email Suppressions.

Hard Bounce

A hard bounce is an email message that has been returned to the sender because the recipient's address is invalid. A hard bounce might occur when the domain name does not exist or the recipient is unknown. Read more about Email Suppressions

“Header from”address / "friendly from" address

When the recipient replies to a message, the reply is generally sent to the envelope from address and it is contained in the from field of an email.

IP and Domain Reputation

Your sending reputation is how ISPs identify you as a legitimate sender. Every time you send an email campaign, ISPs collect valuable data that says whether or not you follow proper sending practices. There are two types of email reputation: IP reputation and domain reputation. Read more about Email Sender Reputation Fundamentals.

IP Warmup

Warming up your IP involves ramping up email volume over a specified period of time. With your IP, you should ramp up your sending over time instead of sending a blast of messages at once. Read more about Email Warm-Up.

ISP

Any corporation or entity receiving email. Please note that only the major email providers are the ones capable of implementing technology to filter your email, provide FBL reports, etc.

JMRP

Hotmail offers a feedback loop that they call JMRP (Junk Mail Reporting Partner Program). As with other feedback loops, Hotmail expects receivers to process any transaction sent via the feedback loop as an immediate unsubscribe to the sender's list.

Journeys (Architect)

The customer journey is the complete sum of experiences that customers go through when interacting with a company and brand. Refer to Architect for its capabilities and use cases.

Link Branding

DMARC checks if the domain names are identical between SPF and DKIM. It also pulls together SPF and DKIM authentication so that domain owners can inform mail servers how to handle mail messages that fail verification tests. Link Branding allows all of the click-tracked links and opens-tracked images in your messages to be from your domain instead of from the 3rd party domain.

List-Unsubscribe

Some mailbox providers, such as Gmail and Apple, will present their users with a way to unsubscribe from a sender's emails via a button or link in the email client itself. They do this by parsing the list-unsubscribe information in the email's headers and then presenting the list-unsubscribe link in a consistent location in the mail client's user interface.

Mailbox providers typically only present the list-unsubscribe function in emails of senders with a good sending reputation.

Marketing Automation

Software platforms and technologies designed for marketing departments and organizations to more effectively market on multiple channels online and automate repetitive tasks.

MTA

An application responsible for transferring email from point A to B.

Mx record

MX records are DNS settings associated with your domain that direct its mail to the servers hosting your users' mail accounts. These settings are managed by your domain host, not by Google. To make sure mail always gets delivered, you typically create records for multiple servers, all of which can deliver mail to users. That way, if one server is down, mail can be routed to another server, instead.

Non-subscribers

Visitors of an online shop who have interacted with it (e.g. tried to make a purchase) but have not opted in to receive campaigns.

Open Rate

The open rate of a campaign shows how many recipients have opened the email. Read more about Email Metrics.

Opt-in

The act of someone giving permission to be added to a mailing list. Opt-in can be either single or double. A single opt-in is when a subscriber submits their email address into the signup form and gets onto the list. A double opt-in requires the subscriber to click on a confirmation link in a follow-up email after they submit their information through a signup form.

Preview

An option in the editor that shows how your campaign will appear on a desktop or mobile device. See how to preview your email content.

Promotional Email

A commercial broadcast which usually offers incentives to drive sales and revenue for a business. The main aim of this form of email marketing is to convince customers to make a purchase.

Rate Limit

Critical step in the MTA configuration is rate limiting (AKA: throttling.) Rate limiting provides ISPs proper time to process and filter spam, ensuring transactional emails do not get backed up. Without rate limiting in place, ISPs would be even more overwhelmed than they already are.

Recurring Emails

Recurring emails are email messages that are supposed to be automatically sent, periodically, based on previously defined settings.

Reverse DNS record lookup

Checks to see who the owner of an IP address is and what domain it is associated with.

Scheduled Emails

When an email campaign is built and tested, it can be scheduled to be sent thereafter. In the last step of creating an Email Campaign, set up the date and time when it should be sent and Newsletter will take care of it. Read more about Email Launch Settings.

Seed List

A list of email addresses with the major ISPs injected into a campaign to see whether the email is delivered. You do not need to update or set these emails in any way; you can see where the email is placed or if it is delivered at all.

Segment

A collection of email addresses maintained in the Subscribers section, that is defined by a set of conditions. Segmentation is a practice that allows you to target specific subsets of your audience with content that is relevant to them. Read more about Email Recipients.

Sender Authentication

Shows the mailbox provider that a message is actually from the sender and that it has not been altered along its journey.

Sender ID

Sender ID verifies the sender’s identity using the From: or Sender: header fields. It is simply a different way to identify the legitimacy of a sender.

Sender Policy Framework (SPF)

SPF tells mailbox providers that 3rd party servers are authorized to send from your domain therefore your message can be trusted.

Sender’s Email Address

The sender’s email address is what recipients see in the From field of your email campaigns. It also serves for replying to any emails or bounce messages and receiving test emails. Read more about Sender Management.

SNDS

Hotmail provides a service whereby senders can monitor their delivery performance at Hotmail MSN. The service is referred to as SNDS which is short for Smart Network Data Services. The tool allows senders who own an IP space to view by IP address, their sending volume, accepted message volume, complaints generated, and spam trap hits, and Smart Score rating.

Soft Bounce

A soft bounce means that the email address was valid and the email message reached the recipient's mail server but was not delivered to the recipient. Read more about Email Suppressions.

Spam Traps

Spam traps are a type of fraud management tool, used by major Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and blacklist providers to identify spammers so they can block emails from them. A spam trap looks like a real email address, but it does not belong to a real person and cannot be used for any kind of communication. Read more about Email Spam Test, and how to Conduct an Email Spam Test and Inbox Preview.

Subdomain

Before explaining what a subdomain is, we must first clarify what a ‘root domain’ or ‘apex domain’ is. A root domain or apex domain is a domain that you can own and control by registering it with a domain registrar. Examples of root domains are 'mycompany.com ' or 'greatuniversity.co.uk'.
A subdomain is domain that sits hierarchically under such a root domain. Its syntax is as follows: 'string' + '.' + 'root domain'. Examples of subdomains are 'offers.mycompany.com' or 'registrations.greatuniversity.co.uk'.

Subscribers

Website visitors, customers, or social media fans that have expressed an interest in receiving your newsletters by submitting their email addresses into your Signup form. Read more about Email Subscriber Base.

Suppression List

A suppression list is a list of suppressed email addresses used by email senders to comply with the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 (United States of America). All the unsubscribed, bounced and email addresses are placed into a "suppression list" which is used to "suppress" future email messages to that email address. Read more about Email Suppressions.

Template

An HTML file that serves as a starting point for a new campaign. This is like a container for the campaign's content where the design layout and content reside.

Total Clicks

You can see the total as well as a unique number of clicks on the Click Map. The number of total clicks identifies the overall number (unique and multiple) of subscriber clicks on the links in the campaign, i.e. if the subscriber clicks on the three different links in the campaign, it will count as three total clicks and only one unique click. Read more about Email Metrics.

Transactional Emails

A method of customer communication in which automated, real-time messages are sent to users through email after a specific action has been performed within an application or website.

UTF-8

UTF-8 is a variable width character encoding capable of encoding all 1,112,064 valid code points in Unicode using one to four 8-bit bytes.

UTM

Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) parameters are five variants of URL parameters used by marketers to track the effectiveness of online marketing campaigns.

Vertical Platform

Business niches where vendors serve a specific audience and their set of needs.

Workflow

Automated email workflows allow you to set up an email or series of emails that are sent to your customers according to their activities in your store (e.g. abandoned cart).