Marketing Automation Glossary

Sometimes it is not easy to find “the one” page for all the acronyms you have to find about Sitecore’s amazing Marketing Automtation Tool. But also a some general marketing buzzwords I want to explain here:

Term or AcronymDescription
ContactAn entity in the Sitecore Experience Database (xDB) that represents a real person who interacts with your organization, for example, by visiting a website or using a mobile app

Anyonymous: Technical contact, identified by the cookie, browser clear or new browser: New contact

Identified: Logical contact, typically via email or form submit
VisitorA visitor on the website – mostly a contact, multiple visitors could be one contact
Experience ProfileComplete view of individual contacts
Filterable by Channels, Goals & Outcomes
Interesting for identified contacts
Cross channel perspective
Anonymous contacts usually do not appear
Read only
InteractionAn interaction with the organization, e.g. visiting the website or opening an email
A visitor can have any number of interactions
Engagement ValueInteger value per ContactIncreases continuously
Measure of the value of a contact
Value per VisitAverage increase in value per visit
Measures how well the website converts overall
Rises and falls continuously
GoalGoals are activities that visitors can perform on your websiteA business goal that a visitor should go through
Types:
Informational: e.g download of a white paper
Transactional: e.g newsletter sign up
Processual: Typically a combination

Goals can be defined independently of their use
Goals have engagement value
Goals must have unique names
Goals must be deployed
EventEvents are smaller steps for tracking visitor activity on a website.
Doesn’t necessarily have to have business value
OutcomeA business-significant result of one or more interactions between a contact and your organization, for example, a sales lead or product purchase, and that you can use to quantify your contacts based on the financial value they bring to your organization

Outcomes are like goals, but have a (theoretical) financial valueOutcomes depend on contact, goals depend on interactionCustom outcomes have to be coded
Conversion rateConversion rate measures the number of users who converted as a percentage of the total number of users that visited your site.
The higher your conversion rate, the more effective your content. In the marketing world, conversions refer to the moment when a user responds to a call to action.
Bounce rateA bounce email is an email message that is returned to the sender because it cannot be delivered.

There are two kinds of bounce email:
A soft bounce is a temporary failure and there is a chance that the recipient will receive the message eventually. A soft bounce means that the recipient’s mail server recognizes the email address but the message is returned to the sender, for example, if the recipient’s email box is full, the mail server is temporarily unavailable, or the recipient no longer has an email account at that address.

A hard bounce is a permanent failure. A hard bounce means that the email message is permanently bounced back to the sender because the address is invalid.
CampaignA campaign is a promotion or advertising initiative designed to encourage people to visit your websiteAn activity to increase engagement

Campaigns can be defined independently of their useCampaigns can have a start and end dateCampaigns are described by a name, a group and a channelCampaigns group visits and all associated data – similar to taggingCampaigns must be deployed
ProfileA Profile is the criteria you’d like to use to categorize your content
A profile is a property of the visitor that allows us to classify content.
An example would be the type of product the customer is interested in
ProfilingSitecore profiling is the process of tagging Sitecore content with defined visitor profiles
Pages in Sitecore can be marked as interesting for specific groups
Profile cardYou can use profile cards to identify and segment contacts, and implement personalization rules. A profile card is a card that contains saved profile keys and profile values. They allow you to assign profile
Profile keyYou assign numerical profile values to your profile keys, then use profile values to track how contacts interact with the website.
Pattern cardWhen a visitor navigates through a website, they accumulate the profile values of all the pages and resources that they request. Sitecore calculates the average score that the visitor has accumulated for each profile and maps the visitor to the pattern card that is the closest match.

A visitor can only be mapped to one pattern card per profile at a time. However, as a visitor navigates through your website, the pattern card that they are mapped to can change as they interact with different items and resources.

You can use the personalization rules engine to implement rules based on pattern cards, which will display different content based on which pattern card the visitor best matches.
Contact listA standard list where contacts can be added and managed, you can add/remove contacts by MAT, Excel import or manually within the List Manager
Segmented ListIts a filtered list based on a standard list, you can utilize segmentation rules for segmentation
Global opt-out listIf a recipient clicks the Unsubscribe from all link in an email message or marks the email message as spam, or if a hard bounce is registered for a recipient, the recipient is added to the manager root’s specified global opt-out list and thereby excluded from email messages.

Every time an email message is sent, the Email Experience Manager (EXM) checks the specified global opt-out list to make sure that if any of the included recipients appear in that list, they do not receive an email message.


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