Now that we're going to be digging more into e-mail marketing in future blog posts and how it can help your business, I thought it might be helpful to define a few of the industry terms to help you make more sense of the coming posts!

Single Opt in and Double Opt in: These terms are both related to someone requesting to be added to your mailing list.  When a user enters their email address to be added to your list and they are immediately added, this is considered a "Single Opt in", whereas if they enter their email address to be added to your mailing list, but are then sent an email asking them to click on a link to confirm they would like to join your mailing list it is considered a "Double Opt in".  Double Opt in is considered a superior and safer method of building your email list, as it requires the user to confirm they want to join your mailing list, whereas with a single Opt-in, a malicious user or competitor could conceivably add 100's of people to your mailing list without their (or your!) knowledge.

Above the fold: This is an old print term describing the information showing on the top half of a newspaper when it's folded in half. This is the most important part of the paper and contains headlines along with anything else that will convince the consumer to buy it.  In the digital age,  above the fold has come to describe what's visible on a webpage without scrolling, and more recently the part of your marketing e-mail that is viewable in a email program's preview pane without requiring the user to scroll down.  Because of web resolutions, the above the fold line is constantly shifting and changing... and email clients make it even harder to predict where the above the fold line will be. However, it's important to keep this in mind because typically your "above the fold" information is what will convince your reader to open your email and read what's involved in it.

Email Service Provider: A company that has a large number of servers setup specifically to send email. Typically they will have established many relationships with various service providers on the Internet to ensure high deliverability of emails.  Sending email newsletters through your desktop mail client can become problematic especially as your list grows; you may begin to have issues with emails being filtered out because of the quantity of mail being sent. In addition, Email Service Providers or ESP's can provide a wealth of other benefits, such as easy list segmenting and tracking of open rates / click throughs of the users that receive your emails.

Metrics and Conversion: Just like any other marketing campaign, it's important to know if you are turning a profit or not. Tracking your cost / versus how many emails you send out and how many sales you make per email broadcast will help you determine if you're making a profit on your e-mail marketing -- and show you what needs to be improved if you're not.

Hopefully you found this useful, as we learn more about e-mail marketing we'll periodically review industry terms to help make this learning process easier!