As is typical in the tech world, we use many weird and wonderful words to explain our application and how to use it.

This Glossary is our attempt to demystify some of the terminology and jargon we use every day while working with our platform.

Have we missed something? Let us know using the feedback form at the bottom of the page.

Allows users to use mark up language to personalize and tailor content for email campaigns and landing pages.

Stands for Application Program Interface: the code and technology behind a user’s request and the intended outcome. Think of it as a waiter in a restaurant bringing you the dish you choose on a menu. dotdigital’s APIs power Dotdigital and can be used standalone to create custom integrations.

A short description of no more than 12 characters that’s used to provide instant recognition of who the SMS sender is.

Synonymous with email in Dotdigital. But in a wider marketing context, it can mean promotion, automation program, SMS trigger, etc. A campaign is usually a series of messages that share a single idea.

Lets users score contacts’ engagements with emails, forms, and landing pages.

The RFM section of the platform, where users can apply commerce personas to new or existing segments – for more customized campaigns – and report on persona movements and important KPIs.

Stands for Communications Platform as a Service. It allows businesses to unify their different channels and communicate with customers from one place.

A unique, predictive system that uses a complex set of algorithms, checks, and intelligent analysis tools. It detects and actively prevents users from sending emails that may cause complaints and issues.

Refers to whether your recipient’s mail server accepts your message or bounces it back, as is determined before the email gets anywhere the inbox.

Refers to the art of landing messages in the inbox rather than the spam folder; it incorporates anything that touches email delivery (i.e. domain and IP reputation, list quality, design and content, and message frequency and relevance).

Enables users to show different content for different contacts in one email send.

Dotdigital’s drag-and-drop design tool, where users can create emails and landing pages in minutes with zero coding required.

Enables users to pull campaign content from a URL endpoint, that is unique to each individual recipient (e.g. a product that has been abandoned online).

Marketing campaigns that provide customers with a completely seamless and integrated experience, from the first touchpoint to the last. That means each channel works together for our customers to create a unified message, voice, and brand.

Enables users to create personalized marketing campaigns and content based on customers’ past orders.

A drag-and-drop tool that enables users to create forms and surveys to collect data, as well as build on-brand landing pages.

A data-capture form embedded onto a landing page that collects contacts’ information in order to tailor their experience with a brand. Users typically ask for product and channel preferences, message frequency, demographic information such as DOB, for example.

Are populated in email and on landing pages using customer order data and web history. These include basic (bestseller), predictive (lookalike, best next), and personalized (abandoned cart/browse) recommendations.

Our drag-and-drop automation tool that enables users to build visual marketing programs and omnichannel triggers.

Customers that have been segmented according to their recency, frequency, and monetary values (each with a score of one to five) into the following groups: champions, loyal, high potential, need nurturing, recent, and inactive. Because the values are assigned a number based on a store’s percentiles, the criteria for these six personas will adapt for busier or quieter times of the year.

Gives users the opportunity to see real-time campaign results in graphical reports, with exportable data and automated email updates.

The total value of tracked sales from a campaign or product recommendation. A sale is attributed to when a contact interacts with a campaign and then makes a tracked purchase within one hour of that interaction.

The sum of all ROI marker hits of all the campaigns used in a program.

A marker used to track purchase events made by a contact arriving at your website from a link in your campaign.

A drag-and-drop segmentation tool that enables users to filter contacts by data into meaningful groups.

Is a predictive, AI feature that automatically sends emails at the time they’ll most likely be opened by each contact.

Lets users split test any aspect and variable of their campaigns’ content and creative, such as the subject line.

Enables users to send administrative and operational-based email to contacts via SMTP or API.

Is an SMS term that defines any character not included in the traditional Latin character set (‘GSM-7’); this includes Chinese Hanzi, Arabic characters, emojis, and certain punctuation marks that have been formatted incorrectly. Including just a single Unicode character pushes the SMS character limit from 160 to 70. Dotdigital has a built-in Unicode alert for customers.

Is an advanced module giving users the power to collect identifiable contact data from their site, based on contacts’ browsing behavior.