Glossary

Above the fold
The part of the email or webpage that is visible without scrolling – the best placement because of its immediate visibility.

Alt text
Text that is displayed when an image cannot be rendered (e.g. when images are turned off). The use of alt text can vary between browsers and email clients.

Animated GIFs
GIF is an image file format which is suitable for images with relatively few colours, such as brand logos and charts. The GIF format is widely used to provide simple image animation effects.

Authentication
The process of verifying that the sender of an email is genuine. By equipping email messages with the correct verifiable information both deliverability and sender reputation improve. The most common process is where ISPs checking that the IP address of the sender matches the domain name.

Blog/Web log
An online diary. Typically updated daily, blogs should reflect the personality of the author and the company and are a way of ‘humanising’ your corporate face.

Breadcrumbs
Generally a way of describing a link trail that appears (normally) within the top area of the page, allowing the user to see their journey throughout the site and click back on previous sections or pages.

Cache
The area of memory where visited web pages are stored on your PC. When you use GO, BACK, or any other means to revisit a document, the browser first checks to see if it is in the cache and will retrieve it from there because it is much faster than retrieving it from the server.

Cached link
Within results from many search engines, there is a ‘Cached’ link which allows you to view the version of a page that the search engine has stored in its database. The live page on the web might differ from this cached copy, because the copy dates from whenever the search engine last visited the page and indexed the content. Use the cached link to see when a page was last indexed and, in Google, where your search terms are in it.

Call to action
A request or direction to ‘do something’ – often the next step that a consumer could take toward the purchase of a product or service. For example ‘Click here to find out more’

Campaign
An email campaign is a series of marketing emails that share a single purpose or theme which can be part of an integrated marketing communication. The campaign theme is the central message that will be promoted.

Cascading style sheets (CSS)
A web design language used to describe how an HTML document should be formatted and can improve accessibility and flexibility in presentation.

Click-through
Used to describe the process of clicking on a link in an email to visit an indexed site. This is an important link in the process of receiving visitors to a site via a marketing email, allowing the sender to track how effective messages are at driving recipients to a website or microsite.

Cookie
A message from a WEB SERVER computer, sent to and stored by your browser on your computer. The main use for cookies is to provide customised Web pages based on their content. They’re how pages remember who you are when you revisit, and how they remember that you have logged on to a particular area of a site. They’re also how you might receive banner advertisements based on your ‘profile’ etc.

Crawler or Webcrawler
See spider.

Copy
Copy refers to written material, in contrast to photographs or other elements of layout, in a large number of contexts, including magazines, advertising, and book publishing.

Deliverability
The process of getting your email messages into the inboxes of your recipients. An ongoing battle for email marketers to avoid being classed as spam, successful deliverability depends on a combination of best practices, including authentication and reputation. However, the rules are constantly changing.

Domain name, Domain Name Server (DNS) Entry
The domain name is the initial part of a web address (up to the first ‘/’). A domain name is translated via huge tables standardised across the Internet into a numeric IP address unique to the host computer where your requested website sits. These tables are maintained on computers called "Domain Name Servers." Whenever you ask the browser to find a URL, the browser consults the table on the domain name server which that particular computer is networked to consult.

Email Service Provider (ESP)
A company that provides email marketing tools and services

Filters
Used to refer to spam filters, implemented by email clients or ISPs to stop spam emails from reaching users’ inboxes

Flash
Flash is a web design technology created by Macromedia and now owned by Adobe. It facilitates a more interactive interface to be created with more impressive visuals but has it’s drawbacks, such as reduced accessibility, poor SEO and cost of updates.

Feed Reader
A software package that enables you to read the XML code in which RSS feeds are written. This can give you a central place to read updates from news feeds, blogs, email etc. Feed readers are increasingly being included in browser software, or as part of personalised homepages such as Google’s. Bloglines.com is a good place to start.

Frames
An old-fashioned format for web documents that divides the screen into segments, each with a scroll bar as if it were as "window" within the window. Usually, selecting a category of documents in one frame shows the contents of the category in another frame. Although there is a place for the odd frame in a modern website, their use as the foundation of a site is considered obsolete.

Friendly from address
An easily recognisable sender email address

FTP
File Transfer Protocol. A way of rapidly transferring entire files from one computer to another.

HTML
HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is a markup language designed for the creation of web pages and other information viewable in a browser. HTML is used to structure information - denoting certain text as headings, paragraphs, lists and so on - and can be used to define the semantics of a document

Image blocking
Many email clients now have images turned off as standard unless the sender is included in the users’ address book, meaning that users have to take an action in order to view the images in an email.

Inbox preview tool
A tool which allows email marketers to generate a snapshot of how a marketing message will appear to the recipient in a variety of different email clients

Internet Service Provider (ISP)
A business that provides an individual or a company with access to the internet. Some methods of providing this service are through dial-up telephone, cable, or high-speed DSL circuit. AN ISP might also offer various technical services.

IP Address or IP Number
(Internet Protocol number or address). A unique number consisting of 4 parts separated by dots, e.g. 165.113.245.2. Every machine on the Internet has a unique IP address.

Javascript
A scripting language that can make web pages more animated and dynamic in terms of graphics and navigation.

Junk button
Many email clients now include a button in their inbox to allow a user to mark a message as junk or spam without opening it. This can damage a sender’s reputation. Marketing messages can fall foul of this system when recipients mark legitimate messages as junk.

Landing page
The page on a website where the visitor arrives having clicked on a link in the email (which may or may not be the home page).

Links
Text or images in an email which, when clicked direct the recipient to another online location, usually a webpage.

Microsite
An addendum to the main brand website which can be easily edited to match the formatting of a marketing email without changing the primary website.

Open rates
The amount of emails sent which have been opened by recipients. Used to track success of email campaigns.

Reading/preview pane
An area in an inbox which can show the recipient the content of the email without being opened

Renderability
The process of getting all aspects of your email messages to load properly and look as intended.

Reputation
The reputation of the sender impacts directly on deliverability rates. Building a good
reputation can be helped by avoiding spam words and sending relevant, timely emails. When a recipient labels your email as spam it puts a black mark against your name, directly affecting deliverability of future emailing campaigns.

RSS or RSS feeds
Short for "Really Simple Syndication" (a.k.a. Rich Site Summary or RDF Site Summary). Any website can issue an RSS feed. When a user subscribes to this feed, they are alerted to new additions to the feed since they last read it – for example a new item of news, new blog post, new email alert etc. In order to read RSS feeds, you must use a feed reader, which formats the code into an easily readable format.

Script
A script is a type of programming language that can be used to fetch and display Web pages. There are many kinds and uses of scripts on the Web. They can be used to create all or part of a page, and communicate with searchable databases. Forms (boxes) and many interactive links, which respond differently depending on what you enter, all require some kind of script language. When you find a question mark (?) in the URL of a page, some kind of script command was used in generating and/or delivering that page. Most search engine spiders are instructed not to crawl pages from scripts, although it is usually technically possible for them to do so.

Segmentation
The process of separating your overall mailing list into small groups (or segments) in order to test the effectiveness of aspects of your campaign by sending variations to each group.

Server, Web Server
A computer running web server software, assigned an IP address, and connected to the Internet so that it can provide documents via the Internet. Also called HOST computer.

Server-side
Something that operates on the server computer (the one providing the Web page), as opposed to the "client" computer (your own home PC).

Social network bookmarking links
Some ESPs include a link in your marketing emails so that recipients can post it to popular social networking sites such as Facebook. This is a way of facilitating viral marketing.

Spam
Unsolicited commercial email. The term normally given to commercial email sent without the recipient’s permission.

Spiders
Robot programs, sometimes referred to as "crawlers", "knowledge-bots" or "knowbots" that are used by search engines to roam the Internet, visiting sites and databases to keep the search engine database up to date. They obtain new pages, update known pages, and delete obsolete ones. Their findings are then integrated into the "home" database. Most large search engines operate several robots. Even so, the Web is so enormous that it can take a long time for spiders to cover it, resulting in a certain degree of out-of-datedness (or ‘link rot’) in all search engines.

SSI commands
SSI stands for "server-side include," a type of HTML instruction telling a server to dynamically generate data, usually by inserting variable contents based on user input into a fixed template web page. Used especially in database searches.

Straplines
An advertising slogan used as a secondary sentence attached to a brand name.

Sub-domain
e.g. mail.dotmailer.co.uk – dotmailer is the domain, mail.dotmailer is the sub-domain.

Subject line
The title of the email which is usually displayed in the inbox.

Targeting
Selecting a specific group of people to send a message to, often through segmentation of data.

Title (of a document)
The official title of a document from the "meta" field called 'title'. The text of this field may or may not also occur in the visible body of the document. It is what appears in the top bar of the browser window when you display the document and it is the title that appears in search engine results.

URL
Uniform Resource Locator. The unique address of any Web document.

Viral elements
Viral marketing facilitates and encourages people to pass along a marketing message voluntarily.

Web text
Visible text that can be manipulated by HTML code.

XHTML
Extensible Hypertext Markup Language - a hybrid between HTML and XML that is more universally acceptable in Web pages and search engines than XML.

XML
Extensible Markup Language. XML is very useful (among other things) for pages emerging from databases and other applications where parts of the page are standardised and must reappear many times. See XHTML.