Emarsys Platform Glossary – Emarsys

This document lists and explains the terminology related to the Emarsys Platform. The terms are grouped by product areas. For other non product-specific glossaries, see:

Deliverability glossary

General

Term	Explanation
Client Success Manager	During your onboarding process to Emarsys, your Client Success Manager will guide you as the project nears completion and you begin to consider your first marketing campaigns.
Customer Engagement Platform	Emarsys, as an integrated Customer Engagement Platform unifies customer data through an open architecture and API to create customer profiles and drive more intelligent omnichannel customer engagement.
Implementation Consultant	During the onboarding, your main contact on the Emarsys side will be your Implementation Consultant. They will manage the project from our side and involve additional stakeholders when required.
Omnichannel	Omnichannel means that you use all your available channels to create one, unified experience for your customers. The Emarsys marketing platform offers a number of these channels, like email, sms, web, CRM, etc.
Personalization	With the Emarsys Personalization Service you can create tokens that are reusable across different channel campaigns. These tokens are placeholders for contact specific data. In your final content, the relevant contact will see, for example, their own name and preferred products.
Pilot features and products	All our new features and products are carefully tested before we move them to pilot stage. We then choose selected customers to activate the features in their accounts, and collect their feedback before releasing the feature globally.
Product package	As an Emarsys customer, you can choose from three different product packages, built on the one below: Essential Advanced Max AI
Release notes	When releasing new important features and product developments, we summarise all information related to the new functions in the Release notes on the Help portal.
Time-critical Message	In the case of time-critical messages (whether email or SMS) ), delivery of the message at a specific point in time plays a crucial role, and directly influences the value of the message.
Verticals	Emarsys offers pre-built marketing solutions for different industries - verticals. These verticals include: E-Commerce Retail Travel Cross-industry

Strategic Dashboard

Term	Explanation
Engagement	Engagement stands for customers engaging with your marketing campaigns via different channels, like email, mobile, etc.
Strategy	A strategy is a particular way to achieve a target. For example, for the objective Active Customers, you have a number of strategies along this part of the customer lifecycle, which contribute to it, including Grow contact database, Drive first purchase and Reduce customer churn.
Strategic Dashboard	Through a number of widgets, the Strategic Dashboard shows the results of your marketing strategies against a particular objective, and helps you to make your strategic marketing decisions.
Target	Setting a target on the Strategic Dashboard helps you to focus on one aspect of your business, for example growing your active customer base. It makes easier to measure the performance of your campaigns and then to extend or optimize them.

Account Dashboard

Term	Explanation
Account Dashboard	The operational Dashboard is the default home page for the Emarsys Marketing Platform. It consists of a number of widgets that provide you with easy visual overviews of the status of your account and the performance of your e-commerce marketing strategies.
Advanced widgets	These widgets include features only available in the Advanced or Max AI packages.
Standard widgets	These widgets are included in the Essentials package and are available for all customers.

Email

Term	Explanation
A/B Testing	A/B testing your content is a great way to try out different strategies and continually optimize your marketing efforts. You can send different versions of your email campaigns and draw the conclusion which performs better to reach higher customer engagement.
Ad hoc email campaigns	Ad hoc campaigns are batch campaigns, which means that one email campaign is sent to many recipients. This happens at a fixed time and only once. They can be launched immediately or scheduled for a future date.
Alias	In the context of email marketing, this is the part of an email address before the ‘@’ sign - the local part of the address. An example of an alias is “martin@emarsys.com".
Authentication	Authentication is the process by which an email sender’s identity is positively determined. Generally speaking, the more easily an email can be confirmed as actually originating from the domain that it claims to be sent from, the better the deliverability for that message will be (as long as the sending domain is deemed to have a good reputation). The need for this type of authentication emerged due to spammers, using forged ‘from’ addresses, or using ‘from’ addresses containing popular domain names such as ‘hotmail.com’, in order to avoid spam filters. Authentication initiatives include Domain Keys, DKIM, SPF and Sender ID.
Blacklist	Blacklist is a generic name for a list of domains, IP addresses or URLs that originate with known spammers. These lists are either hosted internally or available on the internet and are most commonly used to block emails from senders listed on them. Commonly an ISP or spam filter will query a particular email or email sender against one or a number of blacklists, and depending on the results will deliver, bulk, bounce or adjust the spam score of the email accordingly.
Block targeting	By using block targeting, you can decide to hide or show an entire content block for different user segments within the launch list.
Bounce	An email is considered ‘bounced’ when it is returned to its sender because it could not be delivered.
Call to Action (CTA)	Call to action provides instruction to the customer, provoking an immediate response. For example buttons like ‘Click here’, ‘Call now’, etc.
Click Through Rate (CTR)	The number of clicks per 100 messages delivered. Total click through rate is determined by dividing the total number of clicks on a message by the number of emails delivered and multiplying by 100. Similarly, unique click through rate is determined by dividing the number of unique clicks (i.e. individual subscribers who have clicked) on a message by the number of emails delivered and multiplying by 100.
Click-to-Open Rate (CTOR)	Click-to-Open Rate (CTOR) measures how many people clicked on a link; however, it only takes into account people who got as far as opening your email. It does not include everyone on your email list or all the emails that were delivered. In other words, this metric compares the number of people that opened the email to the number that actually clicked.
Conditional text	Conditional text is a flexible way to personalize your emails. It adds placeholders which will substitute text defined by you, according to filter conditions. In this way you can have one subject line for women and one for men, or different text in different languages, etc.
Contact preview	You can select any one of the contacts in your database and see exactly how your email will look when it has been personalized with their properties.
Dynamic Content	Dynamic Content is content (i.e. a news story) within a single email template that is included or omitted according to a particular recipient’s preferences.
Email Service Provider (ESP)	Email Service Providers are companies providing email marketing or bulk email deployment services. In terms of global presence and volume of deployments.
Embedded Image	An embedded image is one that is part of the email itself, in a similar way to an attachment. Most commercial / bulk emails are sent with linked images, as opposed to embedded images, as they keep the size of the email relatively small, therefore significantly improving deliverability.
Fallback text	A fallback text is a word or words that will be substituted in if you don't have the relevant data.
False Positive	A false positive is a piece of legitimate email that an individual has requested or signed up to receive that is incorrectly identified as spam by an ISP.
Greylisting	Greylisting is a spam prevention method used by some ISPs where email from unknown or unrecognised sources is accepted, but not delivered to the intended recipient. Instead, it is placed in a separate location for further analysis. When the message is set aside for this analysis, a false soft bounce is sent to the sender by the ISP, asking them to resend the message. Once the sending server tries to deliver the mail a second time, it is accepted.
Ham	In the email context, Ham is an email that is delivered to a recipient’s junk or bulk folder, but is subsequently marked as legitimate mail by that user and moved to the inbox. Ham emails are essentially false positives.
Header	A header is the section at the top of an email that contains information relating to the sender and the origin of the message. This information can include the time the message was deployed, the recipient, the route the message took to the recipient and the time it was received.
IMAP	Internet Message Access Protocol is one of the two Internet standards for retrieving email from a mail server, the other being POP3. While SMTP is predominantly used for the sending of email, IMAP enables users to download email from the local server to which it has been sent on a selective basis.
Invalid Address	An invalid email address is one that is either incomplete, or syntactically invalid. For example martin@emarsys..com or m@artin@emarsys.com. Basically, in the email marketing context, if an email address does not meet the standards set by the RFC series, it is an invalid address.
Mailing List	A Mailing List is any grouping of subscribers. The most common use of Mailing Lists is to group together subscribers to whom email messages are sent, but Mailing Lists can also be used for data management or suppression purposes.
Mirror Link	Mirror links are commonly found at the top of HTML emails, inviting subscribers to click through on the link if images are being blocked or the message is not rendering properly at their ISP. The link clicks through to a version of the email hosted on a webpage, enabling the subscriber to view the email with images and links intact.
Mobile preview	When previewing your email, you have to consider whether the email will be opened on mobile, desktop or both. To this end we have developed a screen where you have the opportunity to test how your content looks on different platforms.
On-event emails	On-event emails are triggered by recipient action.
Open Time Content (OTC)	Open Time Content is a third-party plug-in, delivering contextualized, personalized content to your email campaigns, updated in real time. Open Time Content displays this content in the form of customizable widgets.
Personalization variables	You can personalize your text content in email campaigns by using variables to populate the text with values from your Emarsys database fields.
Preheader	The preheader is the area at the very top of an email marketing message, before the message ‘properly’ begins. It is commonly made up of a few lines of text that can contain such content as a summary of the email or its call to action, add to address book instructions, a forward to a friend link or a mirror link.
Real-time Messaging (RTM)	Real-time messages or transactional messages go out to a single recipient and are triggered by a specific event. Some events can be selected in the Emarsys application interface.
Recipient source	The type of the Recipient source defines how launch list is generated. Here you can define the source either from a list or a segment, a form submission, an API call or via an event.
Seed Address	Seed addresses are email addresses set up with the purpose of monitoring email deliverability – they are not ‘real’ email addresses belonging to end users or recipients.
Send Time Optimization (STO)	Send Time Optimization is an AI-driven add-on for your email campaigns, which analyzes the email responses of every recipient in relation to the campaign launch time, and then sends the next email at the optimal time for them.
Static Content	An email message with static content contains the same content for every subscriber, so every subscriber receives exactly the same message. An example of static content is message footers - they tend to contain the same standard information (e.g. links to unsubscribe, preference centres, company information etc) regardless of the content in the rest of the message.
Testmails	Prior to launching an email campaign, we recommend sending a test email. These test emails are not recorded as part of the launch and no contact responses (opens, clicks etc.) are displayed in the Email Analysis. Scheduling settings, the launch list or A/B testing versions are not affected by testmails.
The Fold	The fold is a term that refers to the area of a computer screen that is visible without the user having to scroll down the email. The area of an email that is above the fold is considered the prime location for email marketers to include as much user-centric content as possible (such as the call to action) in order to entice the recipient to scroll through the rest of the email and click through to the sender’s website.
Triggered Message	A triggered message is an email message sent to one or more subscribers when a specified event occurs. For example, when your customer makes an online purchase, or changes their subscriber preferences, you can send a confirmation message automatically.
Visual Content Editor (VCE) or Block-based email editor	The VCE is a flexible, intuitive block-based email content editor that uses simple blocks for fast email creation.
Whitelist	There are two common types of whitelist – those maintained by ISPs themselves and those run by third parties. These are lists of IP addresses that generally improve the deliverability of listed senders.

CRM Ads

Term	Explanation
Audience	An audience is the name given to the user group in the network being targeted by your ad campaign
CRM Ads	CRM Ads allows you to leverage the power of the data Emarsys collects and analyzes for you to truly target any contact online, wherever they are. Reach contacts who have not yet visited your website, responded to your content or are otherwise unreachable.
Facebook Ads	Facebook Ads is the Facebook display advertising module, which lets you launch ads campaigns to contacts.
Facebook Custom Audiences	Custom audiences are lists of Facebook users which correspond to the contact lists and segments that you create in Emarsys.
Google Customer Match	Google Customer Match allows Emarsys to match your contacts to Google accounts. This ultimately provides targeting capabilities to specific customers that were previously unavailable.
Lead Ads	Lead Ads is an integration with Facebook forms that lets you capture new leads directly from Facebook and add them to your Emarsys database.

Web Channel

Term	Explanation
Campaign Priority	Campaign priority determines which Web Channel campaign is displayed for customers who are targeted by more than one campaign.
Embedded	Your personalized message will replace a selected web page element on your website.
Overlay	Your personalized message will appear as an overlay above your normal website content.
Ribbon	Your personalized message will appear at the top or bottom of the page or follow your scrolling in a narrow ribbon.
Web Channel	Web Channel allows you to display personalized content on your website using AI and all the customer information available in your Emarsys database, including real-time session data and historical CRM data.

SMS

Term	Explanation
Credit	Emarsys SMS is paid for via pre-paid credit which you purchase through your Emarsys Success Manager. You buy this in your local currency, which is then converted into one of: USD, EUR, KHD. This credit is charged for each SMS part you send by the local carriers according to the tariffs of the destination.
Double Opt-In	After the contact signed up on your website, the subscription must be confirmed by an SMS opt-in confirmation request being sent to the contact for agreement.
Inbound Number	An inbound number is a virtual business number that is used to receive and manage your calls and sms messages.
Inbound SMS	Inbound SMS is when your customer text you a short code or keyword, enabling a two-way interactive SMS conversations between your customer and your business.
Keyword	A keyword is a word the customer can reply to your SMS messages.
Link Tracking	The recipient's click on the URL in the SMS message is being tracked, pushed to the open-data platform, which you can use for segmenting and exporting, and is available as a report in the reporting tab of the SMS channel.
Smart Mobile Filtering	Smart Mobile Filtering makes sure that you are not sending your campaign to invalid numbers, known hard bounces and opted-out contacts. This will reduce your costs as well.
Transactional SMS	Transactional SMS messages are non-marketing automated messages, therefore they do not require opt-out information.

Automation

Term	Explanation
Batch Email	Batch email strategy is sending a big group of people the exact same email message, with no specific targeting or personalization.
Exit Criteria	Exit criteria determines certain prerequisites, that once fulfilled, the contact leaves the program.
Participation Settings	The Participation settings define how contacts can enter your Automation Center program.

Personalization

Term	Explanation
Contact Data Token	Contact data token can be used to include any data entry from the Emarsys contact database into your messages.
External Content Token	External Content tokens enable you to personalize your messages using externally stored data, for example, your website.
External Data Token	External data tokens are usually used for purchase confirmation or delivery information messages and they are triggered by an external event containing some kind of information, like a purchase or an estimated delivery date.
Predict Token	Predict tokens make it possible to create personalization tokens using Predict’s recommendation logics.
Relational Data Token	With Relational Data, you can use your own, business-specific data in combination with data stored by Emarsys to populate personalization variables.
Voucher Token	With Voucher tokens you can use your existing voucher pools to create tokens that can be used across channels.

Predict

Term	Explanation
Data Collection JavaScript API	Data Collection Javascript API is a data collection system that captures the activity and behavior of website visitors.
Email Recommendations	Email recommendations are are dynamic images, rendered in real time when the recipient opens the message, showing a thumbnail image and other product information, such as product name and price.
Predict	Predict is Emarsys' recommendation engine, analyzing the behavior data collected from your web shop. Then, this information is used to deliver personalized recommendations to all your customers across email, mobile and web.
Web Recommender Logics	Recommender logics appear on website pages in the form of recommender widgets, with the widget displaying a selection of relevant products served by the specific logic.

Web Extend

Term

Explanation

In the internet context, a cookie is a text file that is sent to your web browser by a web server and is subsequently saved on the hard drive of your computer. Cookies are commonly used by websites to store information about your visit to their site so that they can remember you and your preferences / browsing history the next time you visit.

For example, upon filling out a form on a particular website with your name and preferences, the information you enter may be packaged up and sent to you as a cookie. The next time you visit that site, your web browser will send that page the relevant cookie with your details, enabling the web page to present you with content, personalised according to your preferences – for example a custom welcome page.

Data Collection Script

The Emarsys data collection scripts collect data from multiple sources: your product data file, visitor interactions on your websites and historical and offline sales data. They process this input and feed validated data to other features in the Emarsys platform.

They track all users of the website, and sync the interactions of known contacts with your Emarsys contact database every few hours.

Tracking

Tracking is the collection of data regarding the user's identity or activity across one or more websites.

Smart Insight

Term	Explanation
Customer Lifecycle	The Customer Lifecycle pages give you an oversight of the status of the contacts in your database according to the lifecycle stages you defined during setup. These are based on eRFM scoring parameters, and categorize your contacts as one of: Leads / First-time Buyers / Active Customers / Defecting Customers / Inactive Customers
Data Collection Scripts	Online behavior data collection scripts capture valuable information from your website and use this for engagement scoring (contact behavior) and affinity scoring (product clustering).
Predictive Revenue	Smart Insight looks at the historical average spending figures for customers in each lifecycle stage and uses these to give an average value to each customer in each stage. Predicted revenues are then calculated by matching the likelihood of a contact to convert in each stage with the values those conversions would bring. This takes into account not only the initial conversion, but also the average revenue of all subsequent repeat purchases and conversions, giving a predicted lifetime value.
Product Affinity	The Product Affinity pages list your products and categories according to the number of contacts who have bought them, or who are likely to buy them in the future.
Smart Insight	Smart Insight is the Emarsys customer intelligence module, designed to maximize the revenue from your customers by automating your retention marketing.
Smart Insight Attributes	Smart Insight Attributes are filters that you can use to customize your Smart Insight charts. Where available, they are listed to the right of the chart, and are grouped by category.
Smart Insight Profiler	Emarsys collects your historical purchase data and runs it through clustering algorithms, and makes eRFM parameter recommendations for you. Based on that, the Smart Insight Profiler segments your contacts automatically.
Smart Metrics	Smart Metrics are very focused and condensed analytics that drive decisions to maximize customer value.

Loyalty

Term	Explanation
Actions	Actions are the customer-side interactions with your Loyalty plan. Your Loyalty plan is based around offering incentives to customers to take these actions, and rewarding them for doing so.
Breakage	Breakage is the number of unused (removed) points divided by the number of issued points.
Cost Per Points (CPP)	These are the expected expenses for the reward divided by the number of issued points.
Emarsys Loyalty	With the Emarsys Loyalty add-on, you can create a loyalty program, which allows you to award points to your customers based on their behavior on your website.
Fixed Benefits	Fixed benefits are the annual benefits you offer in advance to your loyalty members. All members of a tier, without any exception, are entitled to enjoy the fixed benefits defined for the specific tier. Each tier can have different fixed benefits.
Impact of FX	FX risks can occur when expenses are calculated in a different currency than the value of the reward.
Loyalty Plans	Loyalty Plans ensure that the workflow for rewarding and engaging with your customers fits the underlying use cases. We have different plan types and structures to cater for different business models.
Loyalty Wallet	The Loyalty Wallet appears as a sidebar widget on your website when your Loyalty members are logged in. Your customers can see their balance, activity, and earn and redeem points for gifts and other rewards. The Loyalty Wallet is customizable via the Emarsys Loyalty account.
Points	Points are the standard currency for Loyalty. You define how customers earn them (e.g. through spending money or engaging with your brand), and then control how they spend them.
Tiers	Tiers are the levels within your loyalty program used to rate and group your customers.

Data Management

Term	Explanation
Bool	The bool data type is used to store two values, i.e True and False.
Custom Field	In addition to system fields, you or another administrator can create own custom fields. They can be edited, deleted or copied as required.
Data Field	Data field is the place where you can store data. Commonly referring to a column in a database or a field in a data entry form or a web form.
Float	The float data type is a floating-point number, which means it is a number that has a decimal place.
Formatting fields in CSV files	When you are preparing data files for import into Emarsys, you must make sure that they are correctly formatted, and that the field types are suitable for the data they contain.
Integer	Integers are whole numbers and negative whole numbers. Integers can be positive, negative, or zero.
Open Data	Open Data is a Google Cloud Platform plug-in that enables you to query and export all the email, web, sms and mobile app behavior and response data that you have stored in your Emarsys account.
Product Fields	Product fields are created depending on your product package and the add-ons you have purchased, for example the 'Do not track me' field for Web Extend or channel-specific opt-in fields.
Relational Data	Relational Data enables you to use content in your email campaigns from a database which is populated by your own data (e.g.: product name, price, recommended product for an external ID).
String	A string as a data type is used to represent text rather than numbers. It is comprised of a set of characters that can also contain spaces and numbers.
System Field	Emarsys accounts come with around 50 standard fields for storing contact data. These are known as System fields.
Timestamp	Timestamp is a digital record of the time of occurrence of a particular event.
Unified Customer Profile	Unified Customer Profile lets you dig deep into your contact database and bring together everything you know about a contact relating to their email responses, purchases and product recommendations.
Voucher Field	Voucher fields are specific fields which are then assigned to individual voucher pools which enable you to send vouchers with your emails.

Technical terms

Term	Explanation
A Record	Address record. The A record is a crucial component (record type) within DNS, as it is this record type that translates the human readable domain name to the machine readable IP address. For example, upon typing www.example.com into your web browser, your computer queries the relevant name server which then uses the A record that relates to that domain to return the correct IP address that it is mapped to (208.77.188.166). Your computer then uses this IP address to access www.example.com, and displays the page in the web browser.
API	Application Programming Interface. This is a set of specific programmatic methods by which two application programs can communicate with each other.
Dedicated IP	A dedicated IP is an IP address that can be assigned exclusively for you to deploy mailings from. A dedicated IP address configuration ensures that a domain deploys campaigns from the same and unique IP address. No other domain’s mailing will be deployed from this IP address.
Emarsys Scripting Language (ESL)	The Emarsys Scripting Language is a scripting language for creating dynamic content in your campaigns, based on predefined rules. It lets you personalize your content based on external factors, opposed to the standard personalization options, which can populate email content based only on contact database fields. ESL is specifically for people with a knowledge of HTML.
File server	A file server is a computer in a network (for example the Internet) that primarily works as a storage device for computer files (such as text documents, images, videos etc) that other computers in that network access.
Hostname	A hostname is a domain name that has one or more IP addresses associated with it.
HTML	HyperText Markup Language is the predominant form of markup language used to describe the content displayed on web pages and emails. As with all markup languages, it features the text to be displayed on a web page or email, but also coding known as elements or tags.
JavaScript	JavaScript is a widely used and supported scripting language that is commonly used to partner HTML source code in the design of web pages. While HTML is a static language that describes what is displayed on a page, JS is commonly used to augment this static content with dynamic elements.
Primary Key	A primary key is a field in a data table that uniquely identifies each row in the table. Primary keys have to be unique in the context of a table – they are commonly a unique identifier such as a customer ID number.
Server	A server is a computer that provides services to other computers. For example a web server hosts and provides web pages for other computers to access, while mail servers send and deliver email to and from other computers.
Shared IP	ESPs can use a range of IP addresses from which a group of domains deploy their email campaigns. These domains may not send enough email volume to sustain a strong reputation on their own dedicated IP, so therefore they deploy from the pool IP range where they can benefit from the strong reputation built up from other senders deploying from the range.
Subdomain	A subdomain is a component part of a larger domain name – for example mail.emarsys.com.
Top Level Domain (TLD)	The Top Level Domain is the final part of a domain name – for example .com or country specific TLDs such as .uk or .au.

Introduction