Email Marketing Jargon Buster
Jargon | Meaning |
ASP | Application Service ProviderThis is a way of providing computer applications to an organisation without installing software on the Customer's computers. The Customer pays to use the application running on the computer of the Service Provider |
ESP | Email Service ProviderThis is an organisation that provides emailing services to its Customers. Emails are sent out by the ESP on behalf of the Customer. (See ASP) |
Hard Bounce | This is when an email has been returned because the address to which it has been sent is invalid. Normally also included are emails that cannot actually be sent because the email address is invalid. So, there are two reasons why an email cannot be delivered (excluding temporary faults). Firstly, the domain might be invalid (the domain is the part of the address to the right of the @ symbol). In this case the email will not even be able to be sent. Secondly, the domain is valid, and the email is sent. However, the receiving system rejects the message because the recipient part of the address (to the left of the @ symbol) is not recognised. There is no standard way in which email systems might tell you that an email address is not valid. |
HTML | Hypertext Mark-up LanguageWhen you send out a 'graphical' email, which might contain images as well as formatted text, what is actually delivered are the instructions that enable the recipient's email client to build your message. HTML is the set of codes that are used to write these instructions. HTML is the predominant language for Web Pages, so when you send out an HTML email you can think of it as mailing someone a Web Page. |
Personalisation | Even though you may be sending an email to a large number of reicipents a good email system will still allow you to personalise the message. This means that the message can adjust itself so as to appear differently to individual recipients, or to classes of recipients. A trivial personalisation would be to mail merge the recipient's name or other details into the message e.g. 'Dear --name--'. This is however only just the start and with good profiling data whole sections of the message can be switched on or off so that the message that is created is most likely to be of interest to the recipient. |
SMTP | Simple Mail Transfer ProtocolThis is the standard protocol for sending emails across the internet. |