Marketing Automation Glossary

AB testing is a technique to figure out which version of your email or page is best, based on real behaviour, not assumptions.

More than half of your website visitors don’t finish their purchase. An abandoned cart campaign helps re-spark interest in buying your product.

Above the fold refers to the part of a web page or email that’s visible without having to scroll.

AMP is a way to make mobile content faster and more usable for those who browse on slower connections or don’t wait for heavy pages to load.

The acceptance rate is the percentage of your emails that are accepted by the recipient’s mail server.

Acquisition is about gaining new customers or users. Those who sign up, subscribe, or buy what your company offers.

Alt text is a written description of an image, designed to be read by screen readers for people with visual impairments.

A clickable link that takes users directly to a section of a website page.

An API is a set of rules that lets two software systems share information and work together.

The at sign has become a universal symbol of communication, connection, and context. It’s used in different ways across the Internet.

An automation trigger lives inside a marketing platform as the first step of a journey, for example a nurture campaign.

A birthday campaign is a marketing tactic that involves sending personalised messages to customers on or around their birthday.

The ‘blind carbon copy’ is a feature in email that lets you privately send a message to someone without having the main recipient know about it.

Bot clicks are automatic interactions with digital ads, emails, or website links triggered by software rather than real users.

BIMI is an email standard that lets companies display their verified logo alongside messages in supported inboxes.

Bulk email is one of the most direct and consistent ways to communicate with a large audience.

The buyer journey is the path someone takes before they become a customer, typically in the stages ‘Awareness’, ‘Consideration’, and ‘Decision’.

A buyer persona is a semi-fictional profile that represents your ideal customer.

A call-to-action, or CTA, is a prompt that tells someone what to do next.

A US law passed in 2003 to set basic rules for commercial email. It is in some shape comparable to GDPR.

A carbon copy (or: CC) lets you send a copy of your email to someone without making them the primary recipient.

CSS is a language used to control how things look on a web page.

Churn is the opposite of retention and happens when a customer decides to stop using your product or service.

Customer churn is about the number of users leaving; revenue churn looks at the money lost when subscribers downgrade or cancel.

Click-through rate, often shortened to CTR, measures how frequently people click on a link, ad, or call-to-action after seeing it.

The click-to-open shows how many people who opened your email clicked on something inside it.

Confirmed Open Rate (COR) is a metric used in email marketing to measure the number of recipients who opened an email.

A Content Management System or CMS allows you to create, manage, and publish content on a website.

A conversion is when someone takes a specific action you want them to take, split in macro and micro conversions.

CRO is the process of improving your website (or landing page, email, or app) to encourage more visitors to take a specific action.

CPC, or cost-per-click, is a way advertisers pay for online ads, only when someone actually clicks on them.

A countdown timer tells visitors exactly how many hours, minutes, and seconds are left in a promotional campaign.

Cross-selling encourages customers to purchase additional, related products alongside their main purchase.

CAC tells you how much it costs your business to win a new customer: Divide the spent budget by the amount of leads generated. Quick maths!

A Customer Data Platform is software that helps businesses gather everything they know about their customers into one place.

A customer journey maps out how people move through each stage of getting to know, buying, and using your product or service.

The customer lifecycle includes all customer relationship stages.

Put simply, it’s the total amount of money a customer is expected to spend with your business over the entire length of their relationship with you.

CRM is both a strategy and a toolset that helps businesses manage interactions with customers and potential customers in one central place.

Customer Retention Rate is a metric that tells you how well your business keeps its customers over time.

Dark mode is a colour scheme setting that users can enable on their device, operating system, browser, or specific apps.

A DMP is a tool that collects, stores, and organises data about your audiences so that you can better target them.

A Data Protection Officer is the person responsible for overseeing how a company collects, manages, and protects personal data.

A database holds rows and tables of data that can be sorted, searched, updated, and analysed with precision and speed.

DMARCbis is an email security tool that helps stop scammers from pretending to send emails from your domain.

An API is a set of rules that lets two software systems share information and work together.

DKIM adds a digital signature to the email’s header, which the recipient’s mail server can verify.

Sender Policy Framework (SPF) is an email authentication method that helps verify a sender’s identity to prevent email spoofing.

Zero-shot prompting is an artificial intelligence technique particularly relevant in natural language processing tasks.