Email & Marketing Glossary

Anti-spam laws are regulations that govern how businesses and individuals can send commercial electronic messages, including marketing emails, SMS, and other digital communications.

In email marketing, bounce rate is the percentage of emails that were not successfully delivered to recipients’ inboxes.

CC stands for carbon copy. In email, CC is a field that lets you send a copy of a message to additional recipients, beyond the main recipient(s) in the “To” field.

Click-through rate (CTR) is an email marketing metric that measures the percentage of recipients who clicked on at least one link in your email.

In email marketing, a cold email is an email sent to someone you don’t have an existing relationship with.

DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) is an email authentication method that helps verify that an email was sent by an authorized sender and wasn’t altered in transit.

In email marketing, DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance) is an email authentication protocol that helps protect your domain from being used in phishing attacks, spoofing, and other fraudulent email activities.

In email marketing, drip campaigns are automated email sequences that send a series of emails to a contact over time, based on a schedule or a specific trigger.

In email marketing, e-blast (short for “email blast”) is an informal term for sending a single email campaign to a large group of recipients all at once.

An email domain is the part of an email address that comes after the “@” symbol. It identifies the organization, company, or email service responsible for sending and receiving the message.

An email list (also called a mailing list) is a collection of email addresses gathered by a business or organization to send communications to subscribers.

An Email Service Provider (ESP) is a platform that allows businesses and organizations to create, send, manage, and track email marketing campaigns.

Email marketing is a digital marketing strategy that involves sending emails to a group of contacts to promote products, share information, or build long-term relationships.

In email marketing, a follow-up is an email sent after an initial message to continue the conversation or prompt the recipient to take action.

A GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) is an image file format that supports short, looping animations. GIFs are widely used in digital marketing to add movement, personality, and visual interest to emails, landing pages, and social media content.

A hyperlink (or simply a link) is a clickable element in an email or web page that directs the reader to another destination, such as a website, landing page, product page, form, or downloadable resource.

A landing page is a standalone web page designed with one specific goal: to convert visitors into leads or customers.

In email marketing, marketing automation refers to software and technology that automates repetitive marketing tasks, manages multi-step campaigns, and delivers personalized messages based on user behaviour or predefined triggers.

In email marketing, a newsletter is a regularly scheduled email sent to subscribers containing updates, news, content, or information about your business, industry, or area of expertise.

In email marketing, open rate is the percentage of delivered emails that were opened by recipients.

In email marketing, an opt-out refers to a recipient’s decision to stop receiving future emails from a sender. It typically happens when someone clicks the unsubscribe link in an email and requests to be removed from a mailing list.

In email marketing, outreach refers to the practice of sending targeted, personalised emails to individuals or organisations you don’t have an existing relationship with, typically to establish a connection, build a partnership, or generate leads.

In email marketing, personalization is the practice of tailoring email content to an individual recipient based on their data, behaviour, or preferences.

In digital marketing, RCS (Rich Communication Services) is an advanced messaging protocol designed to replace traditional SMS text messaging with a richer, more interactive experience.

RE appears in the subject line of an email and indicates that the message is a reply to a previous email in the same conversation.

In email marketing, a recipient is an individual who receives an email you send. The term refers to anyone on your email list who is delivered a message, whether they’re a subscriber, customer, lead, or contact.

In digital marketing, SMS (Short Message Service) is a text messaging channel that allows businesses to send short, text-based messages directly to customers’ mobile phones.

SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) is the standard protocol used to send emails across the internet. It defines how messages move from your email client to a recipient’s mail server.

In email marketing, segmentation is the practice of dividing your email list into smaller, targeted groups based on shared characteristics, behaviours, or preferences.

In email marketing, spam refers to unwanted or unsolicited emails—especially messages sent in bulk without the recipient’s consent.

A subject line is the short text recipients see in their inbox that summarizes what an email is about.

A UTM code (short for Urchin Tracking Module) is a small piece of text added to the end of a URL to track the performance of digital marketing campaigns.

Unsubscribe refers to the action a contact takes to stop receiving email messages from a sender.