Email Marketing: Glossary of terms

• Email Marketing

• Email Permission Marketing

• Direct Marketing

• Spam

• "From" field in an email

• "To" field in an email

• "Subject" field in an email

• Body of an email

Email Marketing

Email Marketing is also called emailing, mass email, permission email, or email campaigns. It involves sending information or commercial messages by email to a distribution list of recipients, whether signed or potential customers.

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Email Permission Marketing

Email permission marketing implicates mailings to lists of individuals who have previously given their permission to receive advertisements via email.

Direct Marketing

Direct marketing is a direct system without any intermediaries to promote a particular product or service to a targeted audience, using one or more media to obtain a measurable response. The channel mostly used today in direct marketing is the mailing by which companies or their marketing departments send their advertising messages to consumers, usually extracted from a database. One variety of mailing implies dropping advertising brochures and other elements directly in the mailboxes of buildings, saving the cost of the postal service. A second method of direct marketing is telemarketing, that is to say companies call phone numbers that are either previously selected or randomly composed with the purpose of promoting or marketing a product or service.

Other methods or channels of direct marketing and currently being increasingly adopted are electronic channels (email, fax, SMS etc.). These tools exceed traditional means with their speed, cost and effectiveness, although electronic media might as well be known as spam, when used improperly, that is without the prior consent of the recipient.

Some of the advantages of direct marketing: it is a fast and economical method of getting through to consumers; it is directly addressed to potential customers so that their effectiveness is greater than other mass media; most direct marketing is done by companies whose sole function is to design and implement this kind of publicity. Generally, these comanies use databases of consumers and often handle highly complicated criteria in order to create a marketing list by including or removing segements.

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Spam

Spam messages are undesired advertisements sent in massive quantities. Although there are various ways, the most widely used at large is email. Junk messages can also be directed toward mobile phones through text messaging and instant messaging systems. In Spain the Law on Society Services of Information and Electronic Commerce (LSSI), published in the BOE of July 12, 2002 forbids sending junk mail or spam. Also the Organic Law of Data Protection (LOPD) is applied in case of personal data. In the United States the Law CAN-SPAM was enacted in regard to this, but has been virtually ineffective.

"From" field in an email

The word "from" or "sender email" refers to the person or company that sends bulk email. The field from email can be configured to display an email address or the name of a company or person.

"To" field in an email

The field "to" in emails designates to whom we send an email, which is addressee of our email. When using distribution lists hundreds or thousands of email addresses are used.

"Subject" field in an email

The "subject" summarizes the contents of the e-mail message in one line. In the vast majority of programs for managing e-mail this field apprears right next to the field "from" in the perspective of our recipients, and according to studies carried out in this regard, this field is responsible for the decision of the recipient to open the mail or not.

Body of an email

The "body" of the email is the part where you see the whole message that we want to convey. This is where we explain the message graphically or textually. Sometimes the body has a "header" and a "footer" or "footnote" where information concerning legal issues usually appear.

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