Email marketing is the most advanced and fast growing marketing strategy to reach customers via electronic mail. Email marketing is not about a text message, it is more than that. It gives a lavish texture and good flavour for your product or service by providing media formats or graphical representations like images along with the commercial message. Nowadays even expert marketers are into email marketing for creating a brand image, build customer loyalty, converting customers into potential ones. If you are new to email marketing and want to be a smart email marketer then you should be aware of the marketing terms constantly thrown by email service provider.

When you are determined to improve your business through email marketing then here are some of the most important and commonly used marketing terms which you will come across when you expand your business with the email processes like building an email database, crafting and sending email campaigns or while dealing with your technical team.

A/B split test:
Marketers can test their email campaigns by splitting them into two groups before hitting the send button to their email database. Guess works would not fetch out better results when it comes to email marketing. Hence rather than assuming which subject lines, content, discounts or offers will work out best among the targeted audience, this will help you to test your creative piece on different platforms with generated segments and based on the result you can select the best one to your designated email list.

Blacklists:
It is a reference list of "unauthorized or false senders" with which anti-spam technologies are capable of recognising an email to be spam or an authorized one.
Every email service provider has a definite set of blacklisted false email senders built out from their incoming emails. They might take up third party concerns to check the sender against the blacklist from which they are sending email campaigns. If the sender is out of the list then they are considered to be authorized and if the sender is in the list then they are concluded or tagged as spam

Whitelist:
This is quite opposite to that of blacklist. This is a list of good senders or authorised senders. If you are into white list then your email campaigns will pass through spam filters and spam checkers of email service providers easily. But this is an accepted truth that they are no such global white list which helps in allowing your email campaigns to their destination points. Giant ISPs and ESPs have their own list of white list and getting listed in that differs with service providers.

Bounce rates:
Bounce rate will indicate you of how many emails doesn't make their way to the inbox. This one gives you an insight of your list maintenance and list health as it measures the quality of your list addresses. Bounce rates are monitored by the ISPs; if they found your bounce rates to be high then they will block your campaigns to their domains. The bounce rate should be less than 5%.

Hard bounce rates:
These are permanent delivery failures. The emails are either send to invalid addresses or addresses not in use. Emails send to such addresses will encounter a hard bounce rate.

Open rates:
The word open itself tell us about this, the number of clients opened your emails from their inbox is calculated and rated with a percentage. Generally open rates are being calculated as the number of opens / number of leads or emails actually delivered.

Spam:
Any marketing email sent to anyone without getting their permission or without opt-in is considered to be spam.

Acceptable SPAM report rate:
Generally the best acceptable rate for email marketers would be zero but for those who are newbie there might be some higher number than zero, however anything above 0.1% is unaccepted. For every 1 out of 1000 emails tagged as spam.

Spam trap:
Spam traps are called as honey pots which are designed to collect spam. These are email addresses which are not actively used but actively monitored to trap spam emails. Such email addresses are not meant for communication, sending email campaigns to such traps will result in negative performance.

Bulk email:
This is a category of emails which are processed for mailing a large number of people with the identical content to individual addresses at reduced rates. This generally does not identify any particular purpose but at times called as "junk mails".

Double opt in:
A double opt-in process is a two step process where people can sign up through the internet on a webpage or by sending an email to the mailing list. In this the user not only subscribes to a newsletter or product or service or other email marketing messages by raising a request but also confirms that the email address is of their own.

Landing page:
This is sometimes known as lead capture page or a ladder. This refers to any single page where the user arrives as soon as they click on the hyperlink to know information about the product or service.

Conversion rate:
The rate is calculated with the total number of people who are actively responded to your call to action. This is how your email campaigns success rates are being calculated.