If you’re new to the wonderful world of email marketing and deliverability, or even if you’re a seasoned pro, you’re probably overwhelmed by the alphabet soup of acronyms, jargon, abbreviations and initialisms our trade uses. We’re going to define some key terminology for you here within a series of posts. Before you know it, you’ll be speaking like an Email Pro. This week, we’ll cover A through D.
Check back soon as we roll out the rest of the deliverability defined alphabet!
| TERM | DEFINITION |
|---|---|
| API | Application Program Interface - A computer programming term describing a set of definitions, protocols and tools for building software. |
| APWG | Anti-Phishing Working Group Inc: APWG is the international coalition unifying the global response to cybercrime across industry, government and law-enforcement sectors and NGO communities. |
| ASP | Application Service Provider - a business/vendor who provides computer-based services to customers over a network, such as access to a software application (similar but not exactly the same as the more commonly used term “SaaS” provider which we’ll define later on). |
| B2B | Business to Business |
| B2C | Business to Consumer |
| BIMI | Brand Indicators for Message Identification: A new email standard that allows email marketers to combat fraudulent emails by inserting their brand logo on every mail. |
| CAN-SPAM | The Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing Act of 2003, the first USA national standards law governing the sending of commercial email. |
| CASL | Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation - Canada's version of CAN-SPAM |
| CAUCE | Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email: CAUCE is an all-volunteer Internet end-user advocacy organization. CAUCE has moved beyond its original mission of advocating for anti-spam laws, to a broader stance of defending the interests all users in the areas of privacy and abuse in all its forms on the Internet. |
| CIDR | Classless Inter-Domain Routing - a method of allocating IP addresses & IP Routing. |
| CNAME | CANONICAL NAME record - A DNS record that enables one domain to map to another domain. |
| COI | Confirmed Opt In - an email address verification method. Also known as Double Opt-in and Verified Opt-in. COI eliminates a large amount of deliverability issues. |
| CRM | Customer Relationship Management |
| CTA | Call To Action - A URL link or content copy that influences the reader to take action. |
| CTO | Click-to-Open Rate - Email metric calculated by dividing the total number of unique clicks by the number of unique opens. |
| CTR | Click-Through-Rate - Email metric calculated by dividing the number of clicks by the total amount of delivered emails. |
| CTT | Click Through Tracking - The email metrics obtained by counting all activity related to the recipients clicking on the URL Links in an email message. |
| DKIM | Domain Keys Identified Mail - a standard email authentication protocol. |
| DMARC | Domain-based Message Authentication Reporting & Conformance - The latest email authentication, policy and reporting protocol that enables companies to protect their brands and their emails from spoofing attacks. |
| DNS | Domain Name System - The internet's invisible phonebook which allows humans to find resources on the internet. |
| DoS | Denial-of-service attack - a cyberattack on computer networks. |
| DSN | Delivery Status Notification - The plain english message transmitted with bounce notifications that explains why the email was bounced. |
