Marketing glossary

20 Marketing terms

This glossary is for whoever is unsure about some of the marketing vocabulary or who wants to learn more about it.

Advertorial

Advertising and editorial content combined. If you think of a traditional printed magazine or newspaper, the line between ads and editorial articles is distinct—and often literal. An advertorial brings the 2 formats together to educate readers about a product through an editorial-esque storytelling experience. They’ve become a popular online advertising tactic that is typically labeled "sponsored" or "paid" so as not to mislead users about the source of the information. https://mailchimp.com/marketing-glossary/

Affiliate Marketing

A specially selected group of website publishers who partner with an advertiser to deliver leads or sales and receive a commission based solely on their performance. Here’s a simple example: A shoe company partners with a few highly influential fashion bloggers. The bloggers include ads and links promoting the company’s shoes on their sites. The shoe company pays the bloggers a commission on the sales generated. Affiliate networks offer advertisers "prepackaged" affiliate programs. https://mailchimp.com/marketing-glossary/

Audience Segmentation

A marketing strategy based on identifying subgroups within the target audience in order to deliver more tailored messaging for stronger connections. The subgroups can be based on demographics such as geographic location, gender identity, age, ethnicity, income, or level of formal education. Subgroups can also be based on behavior such as purchases made in the past. Psychographics come into play when you have access to insights about your audience’s values, attitudes, and beliefs. https://mailchimp.com/marketing-glossary/

Black Hat SEO

Not a great idea. Black hat SEO is an approach to search engine optimization (SEO) that focuses on gaming the system and disregards the human experience. These practices don’t follow search engine rules, and search engines can exclude entire sites for using them. The colorful term “black hat” comes from old Western films in which the villains wore black hats and the heroes wore white hats so viewers could tell them apart in the days before Technicolor. https://mailchimp.com/marketing-glossary/

Bounce Rate

The percentage of visits to your website where only 1 page was viewed. When we say users "bounce," we mean they viewed a page of your site or a landing page but didn’t engage further. They didn’t click on links or view more pages. There are many methods for improving your pages so more users stick around. An offer, call to action (CTA), ad copy, and design can all be optimized through A/B testing. https://mailchimp.com/marketing-glossary/

Breadcrumbs

They’re a form of website navigation that shows users the sections they’ve visited in the order they visited them so they can retrace their steps easily. https://mailchimp.com/marketing-glossary/

Contact Form

A page on a website that contains a brief questionnaire that allows users to provide information about themselves and indicate an interest in being contacted about your products or services. Common form fields are first name, last name, email address, and area of interest. Essential elements of a contact form are a statement confirming the user is giving you permission to make contact and a link to your privacy policy. https://mailchimp.com/marketing-glossary/

Creatives

The products of copywriters, graphic designers, and other creative advertising people—or simply the people themselves. If you’re looking at layouts, or mock-ups, of marketing emails, landing pages, or display ads, you’re looking at creatives—or simply “creative.” When finalized, these pieces may be called “creatives” or digital “assets.” If you’re looking at the people who imagined them, you’re looking at creatives, too. https://mailchimp.com/marketing-glossary/

CSS

Cascading style sheet (CSS), a language that dictates how a web page looks. It covers layout, colors, fonts, font sizes, and more. The advantage of using CSS is that its rules can apply—cascade—across all of your web pages, reducing the time to code each page from scratch. CSS also enables responsive web design, which aims to reuse code across desktop and mobile devices and keep the user experience (UX) consistent. https://mailchimp.com/marketing-glossary/

Direct Marketing

Marketing that is delivered directly to the customer via the company selling a product. It’s often called direct response marketing. It typically includes a call to action (CTA) requesting a desired response such as calling a phone number or visiting a website to learn more and buy the product. Email marketing and direct mail marketing are 2 common types of direct marketing. https://mailchimp.com/marketing-glossary/

DNS

A domain name system (DNS) takes a human-friendly internet address, such as Website.com, and translates it into a computer-friendly IP address a web browser can use to find and display a website. DNS is often described as the “phone book” of the internet that does the heavy lifting of remembering the “phone number” of a website so humans only have to know the name. https://mailchimp.com/marketing-glossary/

Drip Campaign

A series of automated emails sent to people who take a specific action. For any given action, you can choose how many emails to send and the rate at which to send them. These emails can be personalized with data like the contact’s name, and specific references to the action they took. You might send a drip campaign to someone who signs up for your online course, for example. Or you could send a drip campaign to people who add an item to their online cart without buying it. https://mailchimp.com/marketing-glossary/

Dropshipping

An e-commerce model where the seller doesn’t own any inventory or handle any of the shipping responsibilities. When a customer makes a purchase, the seller processes the order and transfers it to a third-party supplier—like a wholesaler or manufacturer, f

Error 404

File not found, an error your web browser flags. A 404 error message can be the fault of the user (if they mistyped the URL, for example) or the publisher of the website. This can happen when a web page has been deleted and no longer exists, which is also called a broken link. To prevent these errors, create a redirect to take the user to the new location of the page. Setting up a standardized error 404 page for your domain can help improve your users’ experience, especially if you provide a search bar or list of similar content. https://mailchimp.com/marketing-glossary/

Eye Tracking

Measuring and recording the movement of eyes as they look at a web page. In digital marketing, eye tracking is often used to figure out what parts of a web page or email people look at first or spend the most time looking at, which is often displayed as a heat map. Marketers use this data to strategically place elements, such as call-to-action buttons, where they are most likely to be seen and clicked on. https://mailchimp.com/marketing-glossary/

Featured Snippet

A section of Google’s search engine results page that tries to answer a question without a person having to click through to another web page. They include Google’s best guess at an answer, the title of the page the answer comes from, the page’s URL, and an image from the page. While featured snippets are designed to save time for the person searching, they’re mostly machine generated and aren’t fact checked. https://mailchimp.com/marketing-glossary/

Hard Bounce

An email that is rejected by an email server for a permanent reason. An email may hard bounce if a recipient email address or domain name doesn't exist—or the recipient email server has completely blocked the delivery. There are, however, occasionally times when a valid email address will hard bounce. https://mailchimp.com/marketing-glossary/

Inbound Marketing

An email that is rejected by an email server for a permanent reason. An email may hard bounce if a recipient email address or domain name doesn't exist—or the recipient email server has completely blocked the delivery. There are, however, occasionally times when a valid email address will hard bounce. https://mailchimp.com/marketing-glossary/

Integrated Marketing

The practice of aligning all marketing tactics to the same core messaging for a consistent customer experience with your brand. Through integrated marketing, communications tactics such as display ads, landing pages, email marketing, direct mail, and product catalogs all work in the same direction toward your marketing objectives. One example is making your call to action (CTA) consistent across all online and offline tactics for a particular campaign. https://mailchimp.com/marketing-glossary/

Key Success Factors

The 5 elements that determine whether or not a company will be effective in capturing its target audience. The key success factors are strategic focus, people, operations, marketing, and finances. These factors are also known as strategic posture or competitive emphasis. https://mailchimp.com/marketing-glossary/