For Beginners and Business Owners.
Technology can be like speaking a whole different language. So we want to help you become fluent in tech talk. This resource will help you understand the terms used on Mailchimp and in Email Marketing so you can easily reference them when needed.
Audience - Your Audience is your overall collection of contacts. A group of people. In Mailchimps free version you are allowed 1 audience of 2000 contacts. If you want to create multiple audiences or have over 2000 contacts you need to upgrade to a paid account. There are ways to get around audience segmentation using tags.
Abandoned Cart - People who have put items in their virtual shopping cart and left them there without purchasing. Did you know that Sending 3 abandoned cart emails results in 69% more orders than a single email? Source: Omnisend 2018.
Alt Text - Alt text is the text shown in the place of an image on a webpage. In more recent times we use it to make campaigns more accessible to those with different needs. Those with Low Vision or Blindness can use it to transcribe the visuals of your campaign.
Blog - Did you know that Blog is a short term for web log. I didn't. A blog is a collection of journal-like posts discussing a particular topic. They are a great way to offer advice, support or just tell people about what you have been up to in your day to day work and business life.
Bounce Rate - A bounce occurs when an email campaign cannot be delivered to an email address it might be because that email no longer exists or it could be on accident. Mailchimp might have got it wrong. I recommend emailing that address personally to check.
Brand - Business or organisation marketing or designs that help the viewer recognise the company and what it does. Brand Awareness is people knowing who you are and what you do from your colours, logo, photography or other media.
Click Rate - The percentage of people that clicked on a button or a link in your campaign. This is a type of engagement on your campaign and measures the amount of traffic you convert to different links and places.
Contacts - Your contacts on Mailchimp are the people you store contact information from. An email address is the most common piece of information that is stored but Mailchimp also does addresses and phone numbers if that is relevant to your organisation and processes.
CTA - Abbreviation for Call to Action
Call to action - The action you want your audience or viewer to take after viewing or engaging with your post. This could be Like, Follow, Comment Below, Join our email list or many more. Most of the time if you don't ask you don't get.
Conversion Rate - A conversion rate is the number of people you convert to customers or clients from one campaign. If you are a numbers brain it is the number of clicks divided by the total amount of actions equals the conversion rate. For example, if you had 50 people come into your shop and 5 brought your conversion rate would be 10%. You should aim for 50% of people. This means that for every 2 people you engage with 1 buys or becomes a client.
Campaign - A Campaign on Mailchimp is a Marketing Email sent to Multiple people in Bulk at Once. Campaigns can be Newsletters, Updates or Invites. You can design them to what your organisation or business needs. When you create a campaign you can use a template to keep your marketing consistent or you can create it from scratch. Mailchimp tracks the campaign and provides you with lots of helpful insights.
CPA - Cost Per Acquisition is a way to measure how much money you spend per client you receive. Think about time spend, resources brought and even things like Facebook Ads. All the money you spend as a business or organisation to get traffic and sales adds up to your CPA.
Cleaned - A cleaned contact on Mailchimp is a contact that's email campaign has bounced and Mailchimp has automatically unsubscribed them. I would recommend sending that address an email personally and checking that it does bounce. If it does delete it from your Mailchimp contacts as the email no longer exists.
Email Automation - Emails or campaigns sent automatically based on a trigger set up by yourself. For example when someone buys they get an email receipt or a thank you email. This can be automated with the trigger being a purchase.
Email List - A collection of contacts, similar to an audience.
Email Marketing - It is simple, marketing your product via email. It is a cheap, easy and effective way to reach customers directly wherever they are from behind your screen.
Hyperlink - A hyperlink is a virtual connection between two locations online. It is often simplified to a link or also can be used in a button form. It means you can get the user from one place to another easily.
Keywords - Keywords are words commonly used by your audience. The most important things to remember when creating email marketing is that you are trying to give value to your audience. If you use words that are familiar to them they are more likely to engage with you. I recommend making a brainstorm of terms they may use or search for when discussing your niche or market.
Open Rate - The open rate is a percentage showing how many people out of the successful deliveries has opened your campaign. It is a great way to measure your engagement and tell if your contacts are interested in your campaign or business. If you cant get them to open it in the first place they will never know what they are missing out on.
Redirect - Redirect is another word used to describe the movement of traffic. You can redirect the traffic or audience from one place to another using a hyperlink or link.
Reports - A report on Mailchimp is a tracker for the performance of a particular campaign. The contacts are still which means if you add or delete subscribers your report will not be affected it will be based on people who received the campaign the time. A report contains many statistics that help you track your email marketing success.
Spam - Also known as a Junk email it is an unwanted email campaign received by the audience. These could be from a brand or organisation that they were once interested in, from an account they signed up for years ago or it could just be that they have received too many emails for that source recently.
Subscribe - Subscribers are people that have opted into your email marketing campaign. These can be people that you have added to your audience or people that have added themselves through a link.
Total Unsubscribes - The total amount of people that have removed themselves or have been removed by an admin from your campaign subscribed list. The means they will no longer receive your content. This could be from a particular campaign or over a particular time period.
Total Cleaned - The total amount of people that Mailchimp has removed or marked as cleaned. A cleaned contact on Mailchimp is a contact that's email campaign has bounced and Mailchimp has automatically unsubscribed them. I would recommend sending that address an email personally and checking that it does bounce. If it does delete it from your Mailchimp contacts as the email no longer exists.
Template - A template in Mailchimp is a pre-designed guideline for your campaign to keep the communications with your audience consistent. When you use the template it means that the layout of your campaign will be similar if not the same every time.
Test Email - A test email on MailChimp is a way to proofread your campaign and can be found in the Campaign Edit Screen. You can send your campaign draft to multiple email addresses for checking. The great thing is when people reply to the email it goes straight into the comment section on your campaign so it's easy to see on the same tab and make the changes needed.
Tags - Tags on Mailchimp are labels to organise your contacts. For the Free Version of Mailchimp, you can only have 1 total audience of 2000 contacts and under. This means you cannot create different audiences for different groups of contacts. BUT don't worry because Tags are the solution. Creating your contacts under one audience and tagging them into different groups is the free way of being able to send campaigns to different organised groups.
Unsubscribe - Unsubscribed is people that have opted out of your email marketing campaign. There are three ways people can become unsubscribed. They can unsubscribe themselves at the bottom of your campaign. You can unsubscribe them for lack of contact or engagement. Lastly, they can be cleaned which means their email has bounced and MailChimp has removed them.
Are you looking for something else?
Check out Mailchimp's Glossary. It is a great tool for more complicated aspects of the tool.