Here is a glossary of Mailchimp (MC) / emailing marketing terminology.
* Automation: A single email, or a series of emails sent to a subscriber based on a trigger or a date.
* Automation Email: A single campaign that is part of a specific automation workflow. MC refers to emails as ‘Campaigns’, as they are sent to a list of subscribers. Within Automation, they are called ‘emails’, as they go to a targeted subscriber.
* API: Application Programming Interface. An API allows one application (such as MC) to communicate (or ‘talk’) to another application, such as Magento.
* Aviary: MC’s image editing facility.
* Bounces: A bounce is where an email is rejected by the email server. A hard bounce indicates an email address is no longer in use (i.e. a member of staff has left the company or someone has changed their email provider). A soft bounce indicates.
* Campaign: An email newsletter, e-shot or announcement.
* Cleaned: The cleaned portion of your list, which won’t be sent campaigns. Subscriber’s email address arrive in ‘cleaned’ when their email address hard bounces.
* CMS: Content Management System, i.e. WordPress, Drupal, Joomla.
* Conversion: Within Google Analytics, a conversion (or ‘goal conversion) is the completion of an activity on your website. i.e. a customer subscribes to your email newsletter (a Goal conversion) or they make a purchase (AKA transaction, e-commerce conversion). See also ‘Goal’
* CRM: Customer Relationship Management system.
* CSV: Comma Separated Values. A .csv file can be used to import contacts into MC.
* Deduping: The process of removing duplicate email addresses from a list. MC scans your file when you import a list and removes any duplicate email addresses. Furthermore, when you add new subscribers to an existing list, MC scans for duplicates, bounces and unsubscribes that are already stored in the list you’re importing to and dedupes them.
* Delay: The period of time between two emails within an Automation workflow. A relative delay depends on the email before it, whilst absolute delays are based on the trigger-date.
* Double opt-in: New subscribers immediately receive an email from you. They are invited to click on a link, in order to confirm that they really want to receive your emails. This process ensures that subscribers are using their own email addresses in your opt-in box.
* EepURL: MC’s URL shortening service. (Like Bitly.com)
* Engaged: An engaged subscriber (in MC terminology) opens your emails and clicks on links. Marketing tip: create Segments for engaged subscribers and send them special offers.
* ESP: An Email Service Provider (i.e. Mailchimp).
* Event: see Trigger or Event
* Goal: A Google Analytics term for a pre-determined outcome which you wish to achieve. You can set a monetary value for each Goal (which means that you can see the value of your conversions).
* High volume: MC defines a high volume sender as an enterprise which sends more than four million emails a month.
* HTML: Hyper Text Mark-up Language. This is the computer language used to create (most) websites. It is read by a website browser, in order to create a web page for you to look at.
* Member-rating: Member-activity ratings provide a visual means to determine subscriber engagement levels. They take into subscriber account open rates, click activity, past bounces or unsubscribes. The ratings are recalculated after each campaign is sent.
* Omnivore: MC’s automated abuse-prevention system. It processes information from billions of emails and doesn’t like high bounce rates and unsubscribes. See: http://mailchimp.com/omnivore
* Opt-in: When a new subscriber chooses to join your list.
* Opt-out / unsubscribe: An easy way for people to leave your list. Within MC an Unsubscribe link is added to every campaign automatically.
* Queue: A batch of subscribers who have met an Automation’s workflow’s criteria. They are waiting to receive the next email in a workflow.
* RSS: Really Simple Syndication. RSS enables people to follow your blog.
* Theme: Pre-designed ‘look and feel (or ‘skin’) for your newsletter.
* Transactional email: An email which is triggered by an event, i.e. account balance updates, cart abandonment, email address confirmations, password resets, purchase receipts, support requests, thank you notes. Also known as: action based emails, automatic emails, autoresponders, real-time emails, triggered emails. Important because they can be highly effective.
* Trigger or Event: The catalyst that starts an Automation workflow, i.e. joining your list.
* Unsubscribe: See Opt-out.
* URL: Web page address (it stands for Uniform Resource Locator)
* Workflow: A schedule for sending out a series of emails, combined with the email’s content and the configuration details.
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Written by marketing consultant, trainer, speaker and author Nigel Temple.
3,000+ clients over a 30 year period.
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