Decoding the Jungle of Email Marketing Jargon (With Memes, Because Why Not?)

If you've ever felt lost in the labyrinth of CTRs, segments, campaigns, fear not! We're here to guide you through the email marketing maze, armed with the most powerful weapon of all: memes.

I'm not going to bore you with lengthy explanations and dry definitions, because the great Albert Einstein once said, "Man, memes are funny, innit?".

We're taking the polar express route through the meme-filled shortcut of humor and wit. So buckle up and hold on tight, cause the power of memes is said to be over 9000.

Get ready to LMAO your way to email marketing mastery!

Segmentation  

Segmentation is when you divide your email list into different segments based on different criteria. For example, segmenting readers who've opened your emails in the past 30 days.

By segmenting your audience, you can send relevant messages to relevant segments. It helps you deliver value across the entire list, be it through campaigns or automations.‍

Me sending out campaigns to specific segments:

You definitely don't want to be someone who does this:

Imagine you just bought a hair serum from a skincare brand, and they send you tips on using their sunscreen. Sure, you could ignore it once or twice, but regularly receiving irrelevant content can easily convince anyone to unsubscribe from them.

For a deep dive into segmentation, check out our A-Z Guide on Customer Segmentation.

Campaigns

Campaigns are the emails you send out manually. You select the date and time at which it goes live. For example, sending out Valentine's Day campaign on February 13th 5:00 PM.

Automations

Automations are automatic emails that go out upon a specific trigger you set up. For example, when a consumer leaves a checkout without purchasing, they receive an "abandoned checkout" email after 2 hours.

Subject lines

Subject line is like the door to an email, so make it look intriguing and drive people to open it. But, don't sound too clickbaity to create curiosity, it can backfire and make people unsubscribe from your list.

Another factor to consider are filters that Inbox Providers use. They have a list of words that they scan for to detect potential spam emails.

For example, using all caps, lot of exclamation marks, excessive use of certain words like "Free", "Low Price", etc., can trigger the ISP filters.

Metrics

There are many metrics that you can track from the ESP you're using but I'm gonna focus on open rate, click-through rate and bounce rate.

Open rate is pretty simple, it tells you how many people have opened your email.

Click-through rate tells you how many links have been clicked in the email. Usually, CTR tends to be lower than the open rate.

Bounce rate tells you how many emails were not delivered. One of the reasons for a bouncing email could be an invalid email address, so it's important to clean your email list every once in a while

Email when it reaches an invalid email address:

Deliverability

Deliverability means how many of your emails has actually reached the inbox vs the spam folder. Now, this is not decided through a coin flip, but rather after your email goes through various authentication checks and spam filters.

So basically, email service providers and inbox service providers have protection layers to ensure the safety of their users and to prevent them from being bombarded with spam emails. All legitimate emails go through the protection layers before reaching the inbox.

It's a different case for imposter and spam emails as they are sent to roam the spam folder abyss for eternity.

Usually, when people start engaging with your emails, it's a sign for the Inbox Providers that you're trustable. To have a list of engaging subscribers, place a double opt-in process, so that you know these subscribers actually want to receive emails from you.

Interested more about deliverability? Check out our 11 tips to maximize email deliverability

I hope you enjoyed these memes as much as I enjoyed making them. Check out our other blogs to learn more about how your DTC brand can benefit from email and SMS marketing.