marketing terms

A/B Testing is a stage of design and development that compares two or more versions of a web page or app in simultaneous use to assess which is the optimized version for achieving a specified design goal or performance metric.

The words in your advertising messages to customers. Ad copy can be the headline of a display ad, the subject line of a marketing email, the call to action (CTA) of a Facebook ad, or the script of a video or TV spot. Ad copy is distinguished from ad design elements such as photography and illustration, although copy and design should always work together as a whole.

A service that offers online ad space for sale to advertisers. This space can represent inventory from hundreds and thousands of websites. A general rule is that some inventory is more valuable than others, so it costs advertisers more. Think of buying a TV ad placement during “the big game” versus during a mop infomercial at 3 am. Depending on the ad network, the payment structure may be based on cost per thousand impressions (CPM), cost per click (CPC), or cost per acquisition (CPA).

Marketing based on a relationship between an online advertiser and website publishers where the advertiser pays for leads or revenue that comes from the publishers’ sites. It’s a form of value sharing or commission sharing. Partnering with affiliates extends your advertising reach and increases your relevance with target audiences for a limited investment. You only “pay for performance.” Bloggers can make great affiliates.

Algorithms are a list of mathematical calculations and if/then statements that decide what action a computer program should take. The Google algorithm is the rules-based system Google uses to sort through hundreds of billions of websites to deliver relevant results to users’ search queries. The results are ranked in order of usefulness on the search engine results page (SERP). The algorithm also uses personal context, such as your current location and past search history, to tailor the results.

Alt text shows in place of images or pops up when you hover your mouse over an image. Alt text, or alternative text, is written into the HTML code of a web page to describe an image in case the image doesn’t show. This can happen for a few different reasons. Some users may have images turned off so web pages load faster. Other users may have low vision or blindness, so they use special screen readers that translate web page text into an audio or a Braille-like touch format. Alt text also helps search engines "understand" images better.

A marketing strategy based on identifying subgroups within the target audience in order to deliver more tailored messaging for stronger connections. The subgroups can be based on demographics such as geographic location, gender identity, age, ethnicity, income, or level of formal education. Subgroups can also be based on behavior such as purchases made in the past. Psychographics come into play when you have access to insights about your audience’s values, attitudes, and beliefs.

Links on websites other than your own that go back to a page on your website. Backlinks are also called inbound links because they represent traffic coming to your website from somewhere else. The quality and quantity of your backlinks can help you rank higher in search engines such as Google and Bing. This is because your backlinks are considered an indicator of how popular your website is with users.

Best Practices refer to a procedure or set of procedures that is preferred or considered standard within an organization, industry, etc.

The short form of "web log." A blog is a collection of journal-like articles written about a particular topic and published on a website. New articles are added frequently and comments from users are encouraged. Anyone can publish a blog. Successful bloggers attract advertisers through affiliate marketing because they add credibility to the messaging for their followers.

The percentage of visits to your website where only 1 page was viewed. When we say users "bounce," we mean they viewed a page of your site or a landing page but didn’t engage further. They didn’t click on links or view more pages. There are many methods for improving your pages so more users stick around. An offer, call to action (CTA), ad copy, and design can all be optimized through A/B testing.

Brand Identity is the experience a customer has with your product or service visually. A brand identity is made up of elements like the brand’s name, logo, color palette, and type style to convey a distinct brand image to customers. It also includes consistent standards for words, images, voice, and tone.

If you’re thinking "Hansel and Gretel," you’re right. This fairy tale duo left a trail of breadcrumbs as they ventured into the forest so they could find their way back home.

Digital breadcrumbs serve the same purpose. They’re a form of website navigation that shows users the sections they’ve visited in the order they visited them so they can retrace their steps easily.

The percentage of users who click on the link in your digital marketing message after seeing it. For example, if 10,000 users see your display ad, and 10 users click on it, your click-through rate (CTR) is 0.001 or 0.1%. The same math applies to links within marketing emails, landing pages, and social media. CTR is a key success metric for an advertising campaign.

Content marketing is a strategy businesses use to attract, engage, and retain customers by creating and sharing relevant articles, videos, podcasts, and other media. This approach establishes expertise, promotes brand awareness, and keeps your business top of mind when it’s time to buy what you sell.

The process of increasing the percentage of users who take the actions you want them to, such as clicking on a website link or purchasing a product online. Two key conversion rate optimization (CRO) strategies are A/B testing and personalized marketing. Both use analytics to uncover customer insights to help you craft the right message to the right person at the right moment for better results.

A fee that a website publisher charges to serve your display ads on its site. Instead of paying for your ads to simply show up, you only pay when the audience interacts with them. Google is a major publisher of cost-per-click (CPC) ads, and it contracts with other publishers to distribute them to other sites, too.

The practice of customer relationship management (CRM). The goals of CRM are to retain current customers, increase their spending, and convert prospects into new customers. CRM technology is used to manage information such as a summary of each interaction, indicators of intent to purchase, and purchase history. Analytics are also used to provide real-time insight into cross-sell and upsell opportunities at the individual customer level.

Cascading style sheet (CSS), a language that dictates how a web page looks. It covers layout, colors, fonts, font sizes, and more. The advantage of using CSS is that its rules can apply—cascade—across all of your web pages, reducing the time to code each page from scratch. CSS also enables responsive web design, which aims to reuse code across desktop and mobile devices and keep the user experience (UX) consistent.

What you want your target audience to do after receiving your marketing message. The call to action (CTA) clearly articulates the next step: learn more, contact us, shop now, follow us, sign up. A/B testing offers a great opportunity to experiment with different calls to action and optimize your messages with the CTAs that get the best audience response.

A page on a website that contains a brief questionnaire that allows users to provide information about themselves and indicate an interest in being contacted about your products or services. Common form fields are first name, last name, email address, and area of interest. Essential elements of a contact form are a statement confirming the user is giving you permission to make contact and a link to your privacy policy.

The percentage of user actions taken after total clicks on a display ad or other digital asset. Your marketing strategy defines your actions, which commonly include clicking on a second link, downloading an asset such as a B2B (business-to-business) white paper, or signing up to receive special retail offers. The formula is: clicks / actions = conversion rate. The higher your conversion, the more successful your campaign.

Customer acquisition cost (CAC) is the amount of money a company spends to get a new customer. It helps measure the return on investment of efforts to grow their clientele. CAC is calculated by adding the costs associated with converting prospects into customers (marketing, advertising, sales personnel, and more) and dividing that amount by the number of customers acquired.

Think of a customer journey as a detailed map that shows the full experience a customer has with your business. It lets you see every interaction they have with your company, even before and after they engage. By first understanding the customer journey, it will be easier to define your goals and use our automation tool to create the overall marketing experience you want to provide.

Digital marketing is the promotion of brands to connect with potential customers using the internet and other forms of digital communication. This includes not only email, social media, and web-based advertising, but also text and multimedia messages as a marketing channel.

The path a product or service takes as it travels from where it is created to the person who will use it. In marketing, distribution channels are typically broken into business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C). B2B deals with the interactions between companies to create products, while B2C focuses on how products get to the people who actually use them. For example, a business may sell directly to a customer, or it may sell to a retailer who in turn sells to the end user.

A domain or domain name is what comes between the @ in your email address and the .com, .org, .net, etc. (For example, yourname@domain.com.) Domains help your customers find and remember where your business is located on the internet. A subdomain is a portion of your domain—sales.domain.com or marketing.domain.com—that can be used to help increase deliverability of your email marketing.

A domain name system (DNS) takes a human-friendly internet address, such as Website.com, and translates it into a computer-friendly IP address a web browser can use to find and display a website. DNS is often described as the “phone book” of the internet that does the heavy lifting of remembering the “phone number” of a website so humans only have to know the name.

A drip campaign is a series of automated emails sent to people who take a specific action. For any given action, you can choose how many emails to send and the rate at which to send them. These emails can be personalized with data like the contact’s name and specific references to the action they took.

You might send a drip campaign to someone who signs up for your online course, for example. Or you could send a drip campaign to people who add an item to their online cart without buying it.

An e-commerce model where the seller doesn’t own any inventory or handle any of the shipping responsibilities. When a customer makes a purchase, the seller processes the order and transfers it to a third-party supplier—like a wholesaler or manufacturer, for example—who prepares and ships the order. The seller only pays the supplier for an item after someone buys it, which makes dropshipping a popular option for entrepreneurs who want to start an online store quickly and with minimal overhead.

E-commerce is the buying and selling of goods and services using the internet. It starts when a potential customer learns about a product. It continues through purchase, use, and, ideally, ongoing customer loyalty. Data powers the most successful e-commerce operations, which take advantage of best practices such as targeted email marketing, audience segmentation, and marketing automation.

The use of predefined rules to trigger email messages based on specific actions customers take—or don’t take. Some examples include a welcome email that sends when a customer signs up for a mailing list, or a quick reminder that the customer placed something in their cart but never finished checking out. Email automation takes repetitive tasks off your to-do list to free up your time for other valuable tasks, such as responding to customer questions. It can help customers learn more about your brand, encourage them to keep coming back, or remind them of why they bought from you in the first place.

The use of email to promote a business’s products and services. Email marketing can make the customers on your email list aware of new products, discounts, and other services. It can also be a softer sell to educate your audience on the value of your brand or keep them engaged between purchases. It can also be anything in between. There are many email marketing tools that can help you design, build, and optimize your email marketing to get the best ROI.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is a United States government agency that regulates communication devices and systems, which includes the internet. They ensure all citizens have fair access to these communication platforms and that they’re safely performing in the interest of the public and national security. In most cases, the FCC is the agency responsible for crafting consumer protection rules such as privacy protections, while the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) enforces these rules.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is tasked with promoting competition in the United States marketplace and protecting consumers. In the world of e-commerce and digital marketing, the FTC is responsible for providing rules and guidance around online advertising, which it refers to as the “rules of the road.” It enforces the CAN-SPAM Act to ensure email marketing isn’t misleading or harassing.

Algorithms are a list of mathematical calculations and if/then statements that decide what action a computer program should take. The Google algorithm is the rules-based system Google uses to sort through hundreds of billions of websites to deliver relevant results to users’ search queries. The results are ranked in order of usefulness on the search engine results page (SERP). The algorithm also uses personal context, such as your current location and past search history, to tailor the results.

A platform that measures and reports on website traffic. It provides information about how people use your website, which includes the most popular content, the time spent on each page, and what devices are used to browse. Google Analytics can be connected to Google Ads to learn which campaigns are driving the most traffic and converting casual visitors into customers. Additionally, the platform offers rich insights about your audience, such as terms they use to search and location data.

A Google tool that helps you optimize your website content to improve its performance and your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts. You can submit URLs and full sitemaps to Google Search Console to make sure your most important pages are indexed in Google’s search engine. It makes recommendations about how to structure your content so it appears as “rich results” on the search engine results page (SERP). For example, recipe pages can display a photo of the dish right in the results.

An email that is rejected by an email server for a permanent reason. An email may hard bounce if a recipient email address or domain name doesn't exist—or the recipient email server has completely blocked the delivery. There are, however, occasionally times when a valid email address will hard bounce.

A hash or pound sign (#) used after a word or phrase to label content and make it easier to find. Hashtags are common on social media and used to connect posts on related topics. For example, if you click #Mailchimp on Twitter, it will bring up a list of tweets that include that hashtag. Hashtags can combine multiple words and are often styled with internal capitalization so they’re #MuchEasierToRead.

A visual representation of data that uses color to communicate areas of highest use or likelihood. A click map is a special type of heat map that shows which parts of web pages receive the most clicks. Using a scale of red (“hot”) to blue (“cold”), areas where people look or click the most are labeled with red. Web designers can combine the data from an eye-tracking heat map and a click map to position call-to-action buttons where they are most likely to be seen and clicked.

A piece of text or an image on a website that takes you to another web page when you click on it. Hyperlinked text is often blue and underlined, but thanks to CSS, it can appear any way a web designer chooses. Hyperlinks can also link to different areas on the same page (see the jump navigation to the left of this definition), or they can trigger actions with the help of JavaScript (such as launching an overlay screen).

Hypertext markup language (HTML) is the coding language used to create web pages. With the help of CSS and JavaScript, HTML tells a web browser how to format, style, and link together text and images on a page. For example, the tag is used to separate a block of text into paragraphs. HTML tags can also include attributes and values that tell the web browser what to do with the content.

Hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) is the application (or program) that a web browser uses to ask a web server for information. When you type www.studiomovellan.com into your browser, a domain name system (DNS) helps it reach out to return the page you requested. Think of it as the internet version of call and response. HTTPS is the secure (encrypted) version of HTTP called hypertext transfer protocol secure.

An iframe is a section of a web page that contains content that comes from another page. It’s a page within a page. Iframes are typically used to pull in content from third parties. For example, you can set up iframes on your website to display banner ads from Google Ads or another ad network. Iframes are different from framesets (also called just “frames”), which were used in the early days of the internet to make page layouts easier and navigation consistent.

The homepage of a website. If you type Mailchimp.com into your browser, the page that appears is our index page. Sometimes people refer to pages that collect all of a website’s links, images, or headlines into a single page as an index page like a book. Both are correct, which just makes things more confusing. If you’re talking with a web developer, they probably mean the homepage when talking about index pages. Ask for clarification if you’re not sure.

A coding language that works with HTML to make dynamic web page content possible. Contact forms, sign-in pages, and shopping carts are all brought to you courtesy of JavaScript. JavaScript is also a key player in responsive web design, which uses the same code for desktop and mobile devices, making the user experience (UX) seamless.

The 5 elements that determine whether or not a company will be effective in capturing its target audience. The key success factors are strategic focus, people, operations, marketing, and finances. These factors are also known as strategic posture or competitive emphasis.

A word or phrase in the content of your web pages that matches the words and phrases users are entering into search engines as closely as possible. The idea is to speak the same language as users when they make their search queries so you rank higher in their organic search results based on relevance. Mailchimp.com keywords include: marketing platform, email marketing, landing pages, and automation tools. The keyword is the cornerstone of search engine optimization (SEO).

Key performance indicators (KPIs) are quantifiable measures that help businesses evaluate their progress toward achieving important objectives. Although different businesses use different metrics, KPIs are always central to understanding how your company is performing and how you can improve that performance.

A standalone web page that potential customers can “land” on when they click through from an email, ad, or other digital location. A landing page aims to capture information from contacts in exchange for something of value, such as a retail offer code or business-to-business (B2B) insights in the form of a white paper. Landing pages are different from other web pages in that they don’t live in the evergreen navigation of a website. They serve a specific purpose in a specific moment of an advertising campaign to a target audience.

A person who has shown interest in your company's product or service. “Lead” is a term used more often in the sale of business-to-business (B2B) products and services than retail or consumer packaged goods. Leads can come from website users who complete a contact form, trade show attendees who provide contact information in person, or lists you purchase from another company such as a list broker. Sales and marketing professionals further vet, or “qualify,” leads to prioritize their fit with the company’s buyer profiles.

Gathering and analyzing information about a market to inform how best to offer a product or service to customers. Marketing research is based on the principles of scientific inquiry and should be objective and systematic. Common methods are focus groups, one-on-one customer interviews, online or telephone customer surveys, and A/B testing different advertising tactics.

A math-based discipline that seeks to find patterns in data to increase actionable knowledge. Analytics employs statistics, predictive modeling, and machine learning to reveal insights and answer questions. Weather predictions, batting averages, and life insurance policies are all the result of analytics. In the world of digital marketing, analytics is critical to understanding and predicting user behavior and optimizing the user experience (UX) to drive sales.

A process that enables technology to take over repetitive marketing tasks from people, freeing people to focus on strategy. Technology can automate scheduled email sends and social site postings. It can determine clear winners among deployed advertising options and optimize accordingly. Instead of a person (let’s call her “Joan”) having to zig every time a customer zags...Joan can determine the strategy that a marketing automation platform should execute upfront.

Digital or print materials that accompany a primary advertising campaign. Before the internet, “collateral” was practically synonymous with “brochures” that supported traditional TV commercials, such as a savings account brochure from your local bank branch. Today, “collateral” can refer to any printed or digital piece that supports and extends a campaign. Common digital collateral includes websites, landing pages, and banner ads.

The 4 “P”s: price, product, promotion, and place (point of sale). Your marketing mix covers these must-have elements when bringing a product to market. The marketing mix is inextricable from the marketing objectives in your business plan. Some companies add “P”s that are of high importance to them, such as packaging or positioning. Packaging and positioning arguably overlap with promotion, but calling out the extra “P”s can be useful in focusing your organization.

What you want a marketing initiative such as an advertising campaign to accomplish for the bottom line of your business. Common marketing objectives are customer acquisition, order value, engagement, and contribution to revenue. Objectives usually follow the SMART format: specific, measurable, actionable, relevant, and time-bound. An example for email marketing is a goal to acquire 5,000 new customers this quarter through the “friends and family” loyalty discount email campaign.

A brief summary of what a web page is about in the HTML code of the page. Character counts may vary by search engine, but 160 characters with spaces is a good guideline. Search engines consider meta descriptions when ranking your page for relevance to user searches, but it’s not one of the most important factors.

Words and phrases in the HTML meta keywords tag of a web page. Meta keywords help search engines identify what the page is about and rank its relevance to user searches accordingly. The keywords in your tag should reflect the content of your page. Otherwise, search engines will disregard the meta. In other words, you can’t add keywords to the meta tag to make up for a lack of relevant keywords in the content itself.

HTML code that helps search engines understand, evaluate, and rank web pages. Meta tags include meta description (a summary of the page), meta keywords (words and phrases used in the content of the page), and a canonical URL (the master version of a page).

Sending a media message to a highly targeted audience. The opposite of broadcasting, narrowcasting is also considered a form of niche marketing. Narrowcasting has been around since the days of radio. In modern practice, it spans traditional direct mail, TV, email marketing, paid search, online video, and in-person event marketing. Trade shows can also be a particularly valuable forum for business-to-business (B2B) marketing.

A meta tag in the HTML code of a web page that tells search engines to disregard the page. On pages such as blog posts that invite user comments, a nofollow link protects you from search engines ranking your page based on user comments you can’t control. Let’s say some users comment on your blog post to promote their own products and stuff your comments with keywords. You can use a nofollow tag to avoid search penalties.

The natural and unpaid results users receive after making search queries. Search engines, which crawl your web pages and rank your content for relevance to the most common queries, determine these results. You can improve your ranking through search engine optimization (SEO) activities, such as including keywords in headlines.

Online advertising that is triggered when users perform searches using keywords that a company has purchased. Ads look like organic search results, but they appear more prominently on a search engine results page (SERP) than they would have organically. They are also labeled as “ad” or with another word indicating “paid.” You’ll often see paid search in crowded categories such as airline flights, hotels, and laptops. The pricing model is usually pay-per-click (PPC).

An online advertising campaign that a company pays for only when users interact with the ads. Instead of paying for your ads to simply show up on a publisher’s website, you pay for user clicks. Pay-per-click (PPC) refers to a type of campaign. Cost per click (CPC) refers to the actual cost: the campaign fee / number of clicks = cost per click. For example, if you pay $1,000 for a campaign that receives 50,000 clicks, your CPC is $0.02.

The practice of using analytics to make advertising messages and product experiences feel unique to each customer. Personalized marketing is much more than just inserting the customer name into the same marketing email that goes to all of your customers. It’s about reaching the right person with the right message at the right moment with the right suggestions.

A Portable Document Format (PDF) is a file that looks like a printed document and is compatible across computer systems. Adobe Systems developed the .pdf format, which allows people to view, download, save, share, and print the file regardless of their computers’ operating systems or software. Business-to-business (B2B) promotions such as white papers and e-briefs are typically provided to prospects and customers in a PDF.

What makes your product or service different and more appealing to customers than other options in your category. Product differentiation is what gives you a competitive advantage in your market. Product differentiators can include better quality and service as well as unique features and benefits.

The stages a product goes through during its time on the market. There are 4 stages: introduction, growth, maturity, and decline. The stage your product is in helps inform your marketing objectives and promotional mix. For example, raising awareness of a new product may be more important than raising awareness of a mature product.

The image of your product or service that you want members of your target audience to have in their minds. Because first impressions of your brand count, it can be helpful to craft a positioning statement that communicates how your product or service fulfills customer needs. For example, Mailchimp helps small businesses become the brands they want to be with smarter technology built for big things.

A set of versions of one product from the same brand, each tweaked to appeal to a different audience segment. These versions are relatively slight variations on a theme instead of major departures in features and benefits.

The combination of promotions (advertising, sales promotion, personal selling, publicity) you use to deliver marketing messages to your target audience. A promotional mix should be planned out strategically to support your marketing objectives. Common goals are customer acquisition and engagement.

Marketing communications designed to inform target audiences about products or services and persuade them to buy them. There are 4 general types of promotions: advertising, sales promotion, personal selling, and publicity. Let’s say your company creates all-natural makeup. Your promotions could include advertising on beauty blogs, sending a discount to an email list, setting up sales calls with owners of local boutiques, or hosting a free makeover event for beauty-site editors.

Your target audience’s values, beliefs, and behaviors that are relevant to your product or service. Like demographics, psychographics can help you segment your audience into highly relevant subgroups. That way you can tailor your messaging and get better advertising campaign results. Psychographics give you a peek into the minds of your customers so you can communicate more effectively.

A Google Ads metric that rates how relevant your pay-per-click (PPC) ads and landing pages are to your chosen keywords. Google doesn’t reveal its exact calculation, but your estimate is based on ad relevance to keywords, expected click-through rate (CTR), and landing page experience. If you want to improve your Quality Score, Google recommends optimizing your ads and landing pages as well as revisiting your keyword strategy.

A set of questions about a topic that’s used for research purposes. Questionnaires are commonly used in digital marketing to get feedback on user experience (UX). For example, you might send one after a customer makes a purchase to find out if they experienced any confusion during the checkout process. Marketers also commonly use questionnaires after someone unsubscribes from a newsletter or other mailing list.

Sending a user to a different web page than the one they requested with a URL. Redirects send readers to a new page if content has been moved or an older page has been deleted. This helps prevent 404 errors. They can allow people to type in short, easy-to-remember URLs rather than complicated URLs with many slashes and hyphens.

When a website sends traffic to another website. Tracking referrals can help you understand how people find your website without using a search engine. For example, if you put links to your website in your social media posts on Facebook and Twitter, these sites would be listed as a source of referral traffic. Referrals can also come from websites that posts news articles, reviews, and other industry-relevant content.

The ratio of the amount of revenue generated by an ad campaign to its cost. If you generated $10,000 from a campaign that cost $1,000, your return on ad spend (ROAS) would be 10:1. While similar to return on investment (ROI), ROAS is more focused on the hard cost of a campaign rather than on the overall value of running a campaign, which could include brand awareness or other marketing objectives.

A calculation of the monetary value of an investment versus its cost. The mathematical formula is: (profit minus cost) / cost. If you made $10,000 from a $1,000 effort, your return on investment (ROI) would be 0.9, or 90%. ROI is often used to evaluate business strategy, including all advertising and marketing efforts. Return on ad spend (ROAS) is a similar metric, but it focuses more on specific tactics, such as an individual ad campaign.

Paid advertising on a search engine results page (SERP). This is also called paid search. Search engine marketing (SEM) ads are used to drive traffic to websites but can include other calls to action, such as making a phone call or visiting a local store. Keywords in a search query trigger SEM ads. They usually appear at the top of search results and sometimes to the side. Most SEM is pay-per-click (PPC), so you only get charged if someone clicks on the ad.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the method used to boost the ranking or frequency of a website in results returned by a search engine, in an effort to maximize user traffic to the site.

The page that a search engine returns after a user submits a search query. In addition to organic search results, search engine results pages (SERPs) usually include paid search and pay-per-click (PPC) ads. Thanks to search engine optimization (SEO), ranking position on a SERP can be highly competitive since users are more likely to click on results at the top of the page. With the launch of schema markup, SERPs are becoming much more complex to try to anticipate user needs.

Software used to find information and websites on the internet. Google, Yahoo, and Bing are the big 3 search engines in the United States, although Google is the clear leader. Search engines “crawl” across website content and index it into their databases. Then they display results based on the keywords in the search query. Search engines play an important part in inbound marketing through search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM).

The string of words users enter into a search engine to receive a result. Search queries are the raw text that people type into the search engine, such as, “Will it rain today?” When you look at search queries that lead to your website, you can determine which keywords to include for search engine optimization (SEO). In this instance, “rain forecast” may be a more popular query.

Using social media to advertise a brand, products, or services. Social media marketing allows a brand to insert itself into ongoing conversations on channels such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Best practices for social media marketing include creating interesting content that links back to your website as well as publicly replying to questions and comments. Posts can be organic, meaning you don’t pay anything to “boost” them, or they can be promoted with media dollars.

An email that is rejected by an email server for a temporary reason. An email may soft bounce if a mailbox is full, the recipient email server is down or offline, or the email message is too large.

The digital equivalent of junk mail. Spam can be an email, text message, social media direct message, or any other unwanted or unsolicited electronic communication. Marketers can ask people to actively opt into email lists and provide easy ways to unsubscribe to prevent their digital marketing communications from being considered spam.

Sponsored Content is advertising that a brand pays an online publisher to create and seamlessly integrate, conforming to the design, format, and content of the website or social media feed where it is published.

A piece of HTML code that tells a web browser how to render an element on a web page. Tags are the workhorses of HTML and provide structure to this otherwise plain-text programming language. In the early days of the web, tags were used for layout purposes, but modern web design relies on CSS to keep content and layout separate. HTML tags and hashtags are unrelated.

The people you want to reach with your marketing efforts. These are the consumers who will be most interested in your products or services—and most likely to convert from leads into customers. Target audiences can be based on demographics (age, gender identity, location), psychographics (aspirations, concerns, values), or behavior (likely to buy online). Target audiences are often broad and varied, so audience segmentation can help deliver a more personalized and effective message.

An HTML tag that designates the title of a page. Confusingly, the title tag isn’t responsible for the headline that appears on a web page—the H1 tag defines that. Text contained in the title tag is usually rendered in the top of the browser window or in a tab label. Title tags are an important part of search engine optimization (SEO) and should contain 1 or more keywords to help with search engine ranking.

A small piece of JavaScript placed on a website that sends data to Google Analytics. The tracking code is what enables Google Analytics to report information about your audience, including how they got to your website, how long they stayed, and what they did while they were there.

A web address. Uniform resource locators (URLs) can point to a website or any other resource on the web, such as an image or video. They can use letters, numbers, or a combination of both. Certain characters such as brackets and braces are considered “unsafe.” Various web browsers handle them differently, which can lead to errors.

The number of individuals who visited your website in a defined amount of time. This is often compared to visits, which is the number of times your website was accessed during a set period. If 2 people went to your website 10 times in a day, you would have 20 visits and 2 unique visitors. Repeat visits are important because they could be a sign of loyalty or a response to an abandoned cart email.

How a person feels about using a product or service. The discipline of user experience (UX) makes digital experiences efficient, effective, and sometimes entertaining. In the world of digital marketing, UX is often equated with optimizing the user interface (UI) on the website. For example, e-commerce companies want to know about the browsing and checkout experience on their websites.

A short description of a company’s goals for the future. Vision statements tend to be highly aspirational, serving to motivate employees while guiding day-to-day decision making. Vision statements (future goals) are often paired with mission statements (today’s goal) and value statements (how a company goes about reaching all of its goals).

Webhooks are a way for one application to provide other applications with real-time information. They allow one application to send a notification to another application when a certain event occurs rather than constantly polling for new data. This can help save on server resources and costs.

A message to a new subscriber or customer. Welcome emails are a follow-up to a newsletter signup, service subscription, loyalty program, or any initial or next-level interaction with a business. If someone gives you their email, say hello and thank you. Welcome emails give you the opportunity to build relationships, tell brand stories, and, ideally, turn subscribers into customers. They’re a great candidate for marketing automation, especially if sent in a series.

A blueprint for a website’s user interface (UI). Wireframes are simplified sketches—often drawn by hand—of how content and functionality come together in a layout. They focus on how elements are ordered and placed on a page but rarely include specifics about the final visual design. For example, photographs are represented by a box with an X through them. Wireframes are an essential step in responsive web design, since the same elements need to be reordered for different screen sizes.

Person-to-person conversation that promotes a product or service. For example: “Hey, I loved that movie. You should check it out.” Word-of-mouth marketing (WOM marketing) can be organic. A brand can also script and direct it. In social media marketing, influencers are a common type of WOM marketing. A trusted expert or celebrity is paid to talk about their experience with a product or service. Authenticity is essential for WOM marketing to be successful, so it’s not always as positive as other types of marketing messages.