Dictionary
Brush up on Fairmont's marketing and sales vocabularyA-F
Above The Fold
Top part of the email that the reader sees first. Considered more valuable than lower parts. This is not necessarily your preview text.
Affiliate
A marketing service where the partner you hire is paid for performance.
A/B Split
A testing technique for marketing email campaigns where an email list is split in two and a variable is changed (such as subject line or call to action button) in order to see which version is more successful.
AOV
Average Order Value – similar to average selling price ASP. An average order value can be for combined products on one order, where ASP is usually the average for one particular product
Application Service Provider
A company who provides a software to you that requires no installation on your computer. All the hosting and running of the software is handled by the provider.
Autoresponder
An email that is sent automatically based on a trigger, such as a welcome email sent immediately to a new subscriber.
ASP
Average Sales Price
Banner Ads
Online ads delivered by an ad server and embedded into a webpage. They are image based, as opposed to text only, and can be static or animated.
Blacklisted
A list of domains and IP addresses that are blocked from reaching the recipient because they are deemed to be Spam.
Blue Statements
A set of primary corporate messages (usually three) that the foundation for all other messaging. They relate to brand, vision/mission, target end markets, and company strategies. Blue Statement is a Fairmont Concepts created phrase.
Bounce
An email that is not immediately delivered to the recipient. There can be many reasons for the bounce, such as email no longer valid, recipient’s mailbox is full, mail servicer is down, the system detects Spam.
Buyer Persona
A description of the ideal buyer which is a composite of attributes of real customers
CAC
Customer Acquisition Cost. See also NAC New Acquisition Cost
o All marketing cost spent acquiring more customers / number of customer acquired during period money is spent
CAN SPAM
US Ant-Spam regulations from the Federal Trade Commission intended to stop the sending of emails in bulk to recipients who do not wish to receive them. In short, it says the following: Don’t use false or misleading header information (“From:”), don’t use deceptive subject lines, don’t sell or transfer any email to another list, identify the email as an ad, tell recipients where you’re located, provide means to opt out, honor the opt out, and monitor what others are doing on your behalf.
Cause Marketing
Contributing to charity in a public way that benefits the charity and your business. Ronald McDonald House is an example.
Clickthrough
When a hotlink or CTA link within an email is clicked on by the recipient.
CLV
Customer Lifetime Value (similar to LTV Lifetime Value)
CFS
Critical Success Factors are a limited number of key activities required for the success of an individual, department, or company.
COGS
Cost of goods sold. All costs associated with the production of a product, but excludes fixed costs such as operating expenses. In an income statement, Revenue – COGS = Gross Margin. Gross Margin dollars – Operating Expenses = Income.
Cold Call
Phone call or site visit to a prospect who has not given you permission to market.
Commercial Engine
The company-wide system for generating leads, selling, delivering and servicing.
Content Management System (CMS)
Software that helps manage digital content. Commonly used to manage what is on your website, your digital assets such as photos, videos, and other content within your company. Often has collaboration features.
Conversion
The word conversion is used to represent more than one thing in marketing. A web conversion is when a prospect fills out contact information and becomes a subscriber or lead. Similarly, MarketSherpa says it is the point at which a recipient of a marketing message performs a desired action. A lead conversion is a term also used for the point at which the sales process begins (which is further along on the buyer journey than the creation of a new subscriber or new lead).
CPA
Cost per Acquisition, or sometimes Cost Per Action (like a click).
CPM
Cost per Impression.
CTA
Call To Action. In most promotions, the marketer provides some type of clear request for the audience to do something. It might be to call a phone number, visit a website, or click on an email button to get more information.
CTCs
Critical To Customers. These are factors that are deemed critical to the customer being successful. It is a term often used by service departments of a company.
Customer Funnel
customers who are noted as Customers or Loyal Customers. These potential customers are primarily the responsibility of service, and the goal is to obtain repeat business and loyalty.
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
Also called Lifetime Value (LTV) or lifetime customer value (LCV), is a prediction of the value attributed to the entire future relationship with a customer. The calculation usually involves annual revenue – COGS – cost to serve – cost of acquisition x number of years in the relationship.
Customer Loyalty
A customer is considered loyal when they purchase all they can from you, recommend you to others, and are impervious to competition.
Customer Needs
Consumers desire for a benefit of an offering.
Customer Value
A blend of factors representing the annual value a customer brings to your company, and might include factors such as revenue generation, profit generation, cost to serve, and customer cost of acquisition. If made numeric, customer value can be used to create Gold/Silver/Bronze-type segments.
Demographics
Statistical data pertaining to a group.
Digital Marketing Trifecta
The three main promotional media for digital marketing are Paid media, Owned media, and Earned media. One of the many resources to view this is from Titan-SEO.com
Domain Name
The name for the IP address. An example is fairmontconcepts.com.
DNS
Domain Name System – How computer networks locate internet domain names and translate them to IP addresses.
Drip Marketing
A pre-written set of messages are sent on a predetermined schedule to a target audience.
Digital Sales Library
A sales presentation tool that is an image library that looks like a small website with navigation for quick access to digital data regarding your company, products, technical specs, and customer cast studies. It contains videos, documents, and images and is structured in such a way as to allow the sales person to quickly bounce from one image, video or document to another.
Early Adopters
First wave of customers who tend to want to buy leading edge, novel products. Coined by Eric von Hippel in 1986, who created a bell-shaped curve that includes, left to right, lead users, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards.
Earned Media
One of the three media forms (owned, earned, paid). Includes Digital promotions such as social media likes, shares, mentions, reviews, reposts. Includes Non-digital promotion such as WOM (word of mouth), trade association articles, non-digital social networks & conferences, PR pickups, investor relations.
EBIT
Earnings before interest and taxes. A measure of a firms profitability.
EBITDA
Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization. A measure of a firms profitability similar to EBIT, but by adding in depreciation and amortization the idea is that this number removes finance, accounting and tax decisions from the view of profit.
Email Client
The software a recipient uses to list new and old emails, and open, read, respond to, and categorize emails. Outlook is an email client.
Email Domain
The part of the email address to the right of the @ symbol. For example, an email address is cburnham@fairmontconcepts.com but the email domain is fairmontconcepts.com.
Email Prefix
The part of the email address to the left of the @ symbol. For example, an email address is cburnham@fairmontconcepts.com but the email prefix is cburnham.
Email Service Provider (ESP)
A company that sends bulk emails on behalf of their clients. Also known as Email Vendor, Email Broadcast Service Provider.
Fairmont Concepts, Inc.
Sales and marketing consulting agency. Co-founders Chip Burnham and Brian Kent. Creators of the MarketMD™ approach.www.fairmontconcepts.com.
G-K
Gated Content
Gated content is where a contact must provide something in order to receive content from you. It is most common that someone following a digital CTA must fill out contact information such as email and possibly name, company name and phone number, to receive a download.
Geo Fencing
Online advertising where you are paying for a message or ad to be sent to a prospect’s smart phone when they enter a certain geographic area. This is a form of location based services (LBS).
Hard Bounce
A rejected email send caused by a closed, invalid, or non-existent address.
HTML Email Message
A type of email that contains graphical elements, not just text. You typically have a choice when sending out email campaigns to go with all text based or HTML based.
IP Address
A Unique number given to each device connected to the internet.
Internet Service Provider (ISP)
A company that provides customers access to the internet, such as AOL.
Laas
Infrastructure as a Service.
Landing Page
A website page that is arrived at when the recipient of an email clicks on a link. It is also called a Clickthrough Page, Splash Page. If it is more than one page it is sometimes called a Microsite.
Lead Nurturing
The act of providing relevant content to potential buyers to move them along their buyer journey efficiently in an effort to generate more sales.
Lead Scoring
A means of rating a lead with a number to identify where along the buyer journey they reside. The lead score changes based on an action, attribute, or behavior of the potential customer. For example, if a contact in the marketing funnel (being nurtured) downloads a whitepaper and attends a webinar on purchasing the right product for your application, they get points added to their score, and if those points surpass a limit the contact moves to the sales funnel.
Loyalty
Customer loyalty is defined by a customer who buys all they can from you, is impervious to competition, and refers you to others.
Inbound Marketing
Customer acquisition practice that involves providing great content, usually digital content, that naturally draws potential customers to you. Examples are websites, blogs, social media, videos on YouTube. The counter to inbound marketing is, you guessed it, outbound marketing.
IPA
Institute of Practitioners in Advertising – UK based organization focused on the trade of advertising.
Keyword Pay Per Click
Online advertising where a marketing activity involves using words or phrases that will help your content – and your site – rank high on the search engine results page (SERP). Lead – A sales lead is a potential customer who has given you permission to market to them. They are not yet considering entering the buying cycle.
L-P
LTV
Lifetime Value is a prediction of the value attributed to the entire future relationship with a customer. The calculation usually involves annual revenue – COGS – cost to serve – cost of acquisition x number of years in the relationship. Also known as Customer Lifetime Value (CLV).
Marketing Funnel
Potential customers who are Subscribers, Open Marketing Leads, or Marketing Qualified Leads who are not yet in the buying cycle (which would make them sales ready and move them to the Sales Funnel). These potential customers are primarily the responsibility of marketing, and they are nurtured.
MarketMD™
An approach created by Fairmont Concepts, Inc, www.fairmontconcepts.com. Businesses investigating how to improve their sales and marketing commercial engines take a quick business health checkup to identify the areas of the greatest ROI, and then follow comprehensive, practical solutions to strengthen their business and capabilities.
Marketing Qualified Lead – MQL
A potential customer lead within the Marketing Funnel, and is nurtured by marketing in hopes of moving them to the Sales Funnel.
MUA
Mail User Agent. Third party email client who assists you in sending out large numbers of emails and tracking results.
NAC
New Acquisition Cost – same as CAC.
NPS
Net Promotor Score – standard approach for measuring customer loyalty
Ask one question, “Likelihood that you would recommend us to a friend or colleague.”
Rating from 1 to 10. NPS = Promotors (score of 9 or 10) – detractors (score of 1 to 6). Passives, scores of 7 and 8, are not used in the NPS calculation.
OOH
Out of Home advertising. Advertising that is consumed outside of the prospect’s home. Four main types: Billboards, Street furniture, Transit, and Alternative.
Open Marketing Lead
A lead in the Marketing Funnel that has not yet had verbal communication with your company to be qualified as an MQL or OSL.
Open Rate
The percentage of email sends that were opened by recipients.
Open Sales Lead
A lead in the Sales Funnel that has not yet been re-evaluated by Sales through verbal communication to be qualified as an SQL or returned back to marketing for nurturing as an MQL.
Opt In
When a recipient takes action and agrees to receive emails from a company.
Opt Out
When a recipient takes an action to signify that they do not wish to receive emails from a company.
Outbound Marketing
Customer acquisition practice where you interrupt the potential customer in some way to inform them of your offerings in hopes they follow a call to action. Examples are print ads, TV or radio ads, bill boards, transit and furniture ads. The counter to outbound marketing is inbound marketing.
Owned Media
One of the three media forms (owned, earned, paid). Includes Digital assets such as your website, mobile site, blog, social media company page, YouTube company page, email. Includes Non-digital assets such as brick-and-mortar storefront, your vehicles complete with branding, investor relations.
Paas
Platform as a Service.
Paid Media
One of the three media forms (owned, earned, paid). Includes Digital advertising such as PPC, display ads, retargeting, paid content, social media ads. Includes Non-digital advertising such as TV, radio, tradeshows, charities (cause marketing), OOH.
Pareto Principle
A term named after Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who noted in 1906 that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population. More generally – 80% of the effects come from just 20% of the causes. Pareto principle is often applied to marketing, in that 80% of a company’s profit comes from 20% of customers.
Pay Per Impression
Online advertising where you pay for each time your ad is shown on a webpage, whether the user clicks on it or not. The pay per impression advertising method is also known as cost per thousand impressions (CPM) because the payment is often $X per 1,000 views.
Phishing
A criminal act where the criminal forges an authentic looking email to obtain personal information from you, such as credit card number. It is a form of identity theft.
Operating Expenses
Part of the Expenses category of an income statement. Operating expenses are the expenses incurred by a company not related to the production of goods. Same as Selling Expenses or General Administrative Expenses.
Opportunity
A potential customer who is considering entering the buying cycle or in the buying cycle.
Pocket Income
A means of comparing customers or groups of customers against your average customer to identify relative net income profitability. It estimates the resource and expense drain on the company for a customer or group of customer relative to the average customer. Companies know the revenue and COGS from each customer or group of customers, and they know their average operating expenses for each department, such as engineering, marketing, sales, finance, production. By estimating for each department how much a customer or group of customers drains more or less than average a bottom line Pocket Income can be estimated.
Pocket Margin
Connected to Pocket Price, Pocket Margin is the Pocket Price minus COGS.
Pocket Price
The actual price a customer paid to you after you account for annual volume discounts, rebates, quota discounts, free shipping, and free giveaways associated with the order but not reflected in the purchase order. Sometimes called the Pocket Price Waterfall. The term was created by McKinsey Co., a leading marketing agency out of the UK.
Preview Text
Email clients show subject line and 30 to 100 characters of preview text. When creating email sends make sure your subject line and preview text are compelling. Also called Preview Pane.
Primary Research
A market research effort comprised of obtaining data on your own through interviews and data analysis, versus Secondary Research, which involves analyzing the research of others.
Price Elasticity
A small change in price creates a large change in sales volume.
Q-U
Remarketing or Retargeting
An online advertising service provided by Google and others that enables advertisers to show ads to users who have already visited their site while browsing the web. Once a prospect visits your site using Google, a cookie is dropped onto the visitor’s computer. When that person visits other websites using Google, your ad can show up on that other website page as well.
Responsive Design
The size, layout and content of your digital media (website, email) responds to the device (cell phone, tablet, computer) employed by the visitor.
Revenue
The amount of money, from all sources, that a company actually receives over a given period of time. It is the “top line” gross income from which COGS and Operating Expenses are subtracted to obtain Income.
ROI
Return on Investment is the gain or loss generated by an investment as compared to the money invested.
Saas
Sales as a Service – cloud based apps and programs.
Sales Forecast Opportunity
SFO – An opportunity in the Sales Funnel that has been forecast by sales with a prognosis data, probability of close, equipment list, and revenue amount.
Sales Funnel
Potential customers who are considering. These potential customers are primarily the responsibility of sales, and they are worked to become customers or returned back to marketing as MQLs.
Sales Qualified Lead – SQL
A lead in the Sales Funnel that has been accepted by sales. Sales is responsible for converting this SQL to a customer, or returning it to marketing for nurturing as an MQL.
SAM
Serviceable Available Market is a subset of TAM. This is the total market that is service by either you or your competitors. You do not have products or services to cover all of the SAM at this time. The SOM is the Serviceable Obtainable Market, and you do have products or services to cover the SOM. You can mine the SOM today and the SAM tomorrow.
Search Engine Results Page
SERP. The search results pages delivered to the user as a result of the user’s search.
Secondary Research
A market research effort comprised of reviewing and using existing research created by others, versus Primary Research which is obtaining data on your own through interviews and data analysis.
SOM
Serviceable Obtainable Market. A portion of the market you can actually capture with your current products and services. SOM is a subset of the SAM. You can mine the SOM today, and the entire SAM tomorrow.
SMTP
Simple Mail Transfer Protocol is the most common protocol for sending emails messages between servers.
Snail Mail
Postal mail.
Soft Bounce
As opposed to a Hard Bounce which might occur when an email address is invalid, a Soft Bounce is a rejected email send caused by a temporary reason, such as the email server is down, or the recipient’s mailbox is full.
SPAM
A common term for unwanted receipt of email. It is also a canned meat-based food for consumption by some humans and is used as fodder for old Monty Python skits.
Spiff
Temporary, small, immediate bonus paid to a sales person for pushing one product over another.
Subject Line
Short phrase copy that tells the recipient what the email is about.
Subscriber lead
A potential customer lead who has provided only an email address in exchange for educational and/or promotional material. This is the lowest quality of potential customer who has given permission to market to them.
TAM
Total Available Market. Total market demand for a product or service.
Target End Market
Specific end market that you segment out of all other end markets to pursue with marketing activities.
Unsubscribe
Action taken by an email recipient to inform the sender they no longer wish to receive emails.
V-Z
VOC
Voice of the Customer. A term used to reflect extensive research to uncover the voice of the customer and use that information to better product or service offerings.
VOM
Voice of the Market. A term used to reflect extensive research to uncover and analyze a target market. VOM typically includes VOC, CAGR, market size, competitive analysis, market location, buyer personas, and buying behavior.
Warm Call
Phone call or visit to a potential customer who has given you permission to market
Win Rate
When your potential customer buys something to fill a need that could be filled by your offering, did they buy from you?