Internet Marketing Glossary: A List Of Digital Terms You Need To Know (2/3)

Infographics are considered to be effective worldwide because of their ability to convey information in a simple and quick manner to the reader. They are used for maps, signs, and data presentation. Infographics transform a rather boring story in a manner that is visually digestible for the user. They are usually eye-catching, entertaining, and concise.

Major elements of infographics are:

• Visual elements – the graphics, color, and reference icons
• Content elements – statistics, time frames, and references
• Knowledge elements – facts

Why people make use of infographics

1. They attract and engage a website user.
2. Attracts more traffic to a website
3. The contents are viewable and can be easily scanned
4. They are easy to share on social media

WordPress came into existence in 2003, it was introduced with a single kind of code that promotes the use of ordinary text. Since its introduction, WordPress has expanded to become the largest self-hosted blogging system used all over the world.

WordPress is used by millions of sites and viewed by millions of people on a daily basis. There is an enormous amount of people that operate on WordPress all over the world which means that it is an open source design (far more than major commercial sites).

You are in safe hands if you use WordPress in publishing on the Web. Most renowned blogs, news channels, music platforms, largest companies, and celebrities all make use of WordPress. An instance of renowned blogs on WordPress is Mashable. There is also News Channels like New York Times' blog and CNN's on-air personality blogs on WordPress.

If you are wondering about people and brands that use WordPress, go to the WordPress site’s showcase, and you will be intrigued by the number of famous sites and notable personalities that make use of WordPress to influence their website.

WooCommerce is designed to incorporate easily with WordPress, making it the apparent eCommerce option for the current WordPress users, as it links easily with advanced WordPress ecosystem. Here are some features of WooCommerce:

• Sell whatever wherever: Be it physical goods, digital downloads, subscriptions, contents, or even your time, you will be able to create a WooCommerce store to sell across the globe (or within a country, depending on your choice).
  
  
• Mobile-friendly: WooCommerce is designed so that both your store and your products look sophisticated when viewed on your customers’ mobile devices as they do on a desktop computer.
  
  
• Scalability: WooCommerce can be managed conveniently, so as you expand your business, you can also expand the functionalities of your store. Beginning from the sales of a product to the management of your store, Woocommerce will accommodate your needs, and help you can expand your business.
  
  
• Having your own data: With the ability to safeguard your data privately of any third-party software platforms, it gives you full control of your business and future.
  
  
• Secure Code: Sucuri, is setup to enhance security as it audits WooCommerce and ensures that it abides by WordPress approved practices. It also ensures that the rules of coding are adhered to, and that information is kept safe and updated.
  
  

Shopify is also an SAAS (Software as a service)-based platform. With Shopify, you can begin your online store on this platform; you can easily manage orders, receive payments, create and monitor shipments and so much more.

Shopify app allows you to purchase and install various similar apps for your online store to get more features. The app store is an amazing portal of information that will transform your e-commerce store into a Multipurpose marketplace.

Although Shopify is not the only e-commerce platform online, it is virtually the most used and popular platform available in the market for both small to medium businesses. Bigger businesses can use the enterprise version.

Amazon recognizes Shopify, and with time, Shopify will become one of the most famous e-commerce platforms online, with the hard work, dedication and expertise put it this platform, it is expected to become one of the most used online shopping platform in the nearest future.

CRM is a relationship that starts right from the onset the customer makes contact with the company, and it continues throughout that relationship.

A fast, efficient and effective way to improve company revenue is company retention because the company doesn't need to synthesize, lure and convert new customers. Sells are made to customers that have enjoyed some form of relationship with the business.

Companies that embrace CRM find it easy marketing to customers because these customers have shown interest in their products previously and as such, it is simpler to gain the advantage based on the relationship built. One peculiar characteristic peculiar to companies that imbibe excellent customer retention practices is that their profit rises in direct correlation with the duration of the relationship with the retained customers.

A CMS саn have loads оf meanings depending оn thе ѕituаtiоnѕ аnd thе реrѕоn'ѕ оr project mоtivеѕ. To add to this complexity, аn оrgаnizаtiоn known аѕ AIIM (Aѕѕосiаtiоn fоr Infоrmаtiоn and Imаgе Mаnаgеmеnt) documented the асrоnуm ECM (Entеrрriѕе Cоntеnt Mаnаgеmеnt) and WCM (Wеb Content Management) as thеir invеntiоn and coined their own dеfinitiоn thаt suits thеir оrgаnizаtiоn'ѕ bеnеfitѕ.

AIIM сhаngеd thеir meaning of ECM a couple оf timеѕ аnd uploaded their dеfinitiоnѕ tо Wikiреdiа, whiсh iѕ now mаdе рubliс. In thе соurѕе of this writing, fоr most ѕituаtiоnѕ, whеn аn individuаl in thе web dеvеlорmеnt industry is speaking аbоut CMS (Cоntеnt Management Sуѕtеm), оr ECMS (Entеrрriѕе Content Management Sуѕtеm), hе/she might bе mоrе likеlу rеfеrring to the dеfinitiоn above.

The 'fold' is considered as an invisible line drawn horizontally across the screen at the bottom of the immediate visible content.

The “fold” is considered as an invisible line drawn horizontally across the screen at the bottom of the immediate visible content. To see below the fold content on a website, you are required to scroll down.

The main button, link or other UI element that tells the user to take an action that ends with a conversion. A “Buy Now” button on any shopping websites, a “Sign Up” button, a “Download Now” on an app landing page are all kinds of Call to Action.

For instance, let's say there are 1,000 visitors to a specific web page through a PPC (pay per click) ad.

10 of the 1000 visitors will commit to the action intended (purchase, survey, education are examples), that means the conversation rate for the particular ad is %0.01.

In essence, the larger the conversion rate, the more successful the web site. The growing pain most companies face is a decaying conversion rate as they scale their business higher with more traffic. To tackle this, marketers and businesses will trial experiments and tests to improve their conversion rate.

Conversion is a vital element in a brand’s paid search strategy. Across the digital landscape, the usual conversion rate is 2.35%. The top 25% have a conversion rate of 5.31% or higher, while the top 10% have conversion rates of 11.45% and above.

For instance, if you sent an email to 1,000 people and 500 of them opened it, your open rate would be 50%. If you sent an email to 300 people and 3 of them opened it, your open rate would be 1%.

The Open Rate measures the importance and context of an email by getting the total number of unique clicks, dividing it by the total number of unique opens, and then multiplying by 100. To put it simply, it just means how many people have clicked your email. However, open rate tracking is not an exact science.

An “open” is registered when a tracking pixel (single pixel graphic) loads. A common problem that all email marketers will face is that not all email service providers or load graphics regularly. It means that you may be getting emails that are opened but not registered.

Open Rate is particularly effective for tracking ads where a higher percentage of images is used (higher image-text ratio) because open rates vary and stand as a more useful measurement of content and creative.

For instance, let’s say that a visitor comes to your website daily, with each visit coming from a different marketing channel:

• Day 1: Organic Search
• Day 2: Display
• Day 3: Paid Search
• Day 4: Display
• Day 5: Organic Search
• Day 6: Display
• Day 7: Paid Search

The First-Touch Channel report would present 1 new engagement for Paid Search while the rest would present 0 new engagements. The Last-Touch Channel report would reveal 2 click-throughs for Paid Search, 3 for Display, and 2 for Organic Search. While a click-through is usually the most prompt response to an ad, it is not the only interface. Visitors have an option to type a company’s URL straight into the browser bar or a search engine box.

The formula to get a CTR is: Total ad clicks / Total impressions x 100

Getting a high CTR is essential to the success of your PPC (pay per click) because it directly impacts both your Quality Score and the amount you pay each time someone clicks your search ad. It is necessary to differentiate what a CTR does and does not measure.

The CTR computes the percentage of people who clicked on the ad to arrive at the merchant site; it does not include the people who did not click, yet arrived at the same site because of seeing the ad. With this, the CTR may appear as a measure of the prompt response to an ad, but not its total response. The only exception would be ads that display no identifiable information on the merchant site. In these cases, the click rate is the same as the overall rate.

Running a bucket test that directly contrasts a version against a current one helps you decide which changes are better for your app or website, and then gather data about its impact.

For example, 50% of visitors saw Variant A and resulted in a 23% conversion. The same visitors saw Variant B and resulted in a 10% conversion. Therefore, Variant A is better than Variant B.

With A/B testing, you are given the opportunity to get more out of your web traffic.

The ROI can be huge, because the little changes you make on a landing page or site can lead to more generated leads, sales, and revenue.

Incoming traffic to the site gets shared between the original (control) and the various variations without any of the visitors knowing that an experiment is taking place. Split testing contrasts two or more different strategies for opt-in forms in a controlled experiment. By experimenting and then analyzing results, you can gauge the behavior of visitors and subscribers and see where they respond best to, which allows you to enhance your email marketing campaigns. This marketing strategy is normally utilized to test changes to certain parts of a website such as registration pages, signup forms, calls to action, etc., where a measurable goal can be improved. For example, experimenting changes to an online checkout flow would help us to gauge what factors increase conversions and will lead to more orders for the merchant.

The formula for calculating AOV is simply: AOV = Revenue / Number of orders.

For example, in July, your site store’s sales were $40,000, and you had a total of $2,000 orders. $40,000 divided by $2,000 is $20. Therefore, your store’s July AOV is $20

AOV is calculated using sales per order, and not per customer. For instance, your customer bought yesterday and today. Both orders are factored into AOV, individually.

AOV is a performance metric that provides insight on how your gross profit or profit margins are doing. Let’s say you were selling three bags worth $10, $15, and $20 respectively, and the AOV is $13. This clearly indicates that majority of your sales come from the $10 bags.

To increase your AOV, you could use some proven methods such as:

• Cross-selling (add items to whatever the customer is already buying)
• Upselling (giving a better, pricier option)
• Volume discounts (get more for less)
• Free shipping
• return policy

These transactions can be business-to-business, consumer-to-consumer, business-to-consumer, or consumer-to-business.

Examples of eCommerce:

• Online Shopping – buying and selling of goods on the web. Merchants have a digital “store” where the buyers can go to, browse, and purchase them through mouse clicks. E.g. Amazon
• E-Payments (Electronic Payments) – payment processors and payment gateways; helps alleviate the long process of writing and mailing checks.
• Internet Banking – banking done in the comforts of your phone
• Online Ticketing – from air tickets to movie tickets, just about any ticket can be booked online. This saves the inefficiency of lining up at ticket counters.

Types of eCommerce:

• Business to Business (B2B)

An example of this would be a company ordering pamphlets, business cards or promotional material from an online business such as alibaba.com, aliexpress.com. or amazon.com.

• Business to Consumer (B2C)

An example of B2C is a a direct to consumer purchase such as electronics or hobbycraft purchased from a business, manufacturer or vendor online.

• Consumer to Consumer (C2C)

An example of consumer to consumer is a growing type of eCommerce around the globe. In C2C, consumers can use online marketplaces such as Etsy or eBay to sell or trade.

Its main purpose is to assist with the purchase of a product or service. Normally, the user puts the products or services in the cart and “checks out” when he is done ordering. The software then takes the payment and proceeds with the data distribution to the merchant, payment processor, and related parties. Shopping carts are vital for a merchant’s site since it connects the gap between shopping and buying.

A shopping cart normally contains these features:

• Product data storage
• A gateway for ordering, catalog, and customer service
• Rendering of product data for user display

There are two types of shopping carts online:

1. Hosted shopping carts – This type belongs to third-party firms who “hosts” and is responsible for server data, backup, maintenance, upgrades, etc. The good thing about this feature is that it’s free. The only con is the visitors are redirected to another site for payment processing.
2. Licensed shopping carts – This type belongs to owners who build their own and customize it according to their brand and customer needs. Since a licensed shopping cart is more flexible than a hosted one, it means that it will cost more.

The main purpose of social marketing is to raise brand awareness and promote specific products. SMM also seeks to establish social media presence for the brands, create shareable content and ads, and connect with the community through customer service and campaigns.

Other uses of Social Media Marketing include:

• Increase of referrals or sales leads
• Increase sales of products or services
• Providing customer service
• Establishing community growth by means of feedback
• Building of the brand’s page through word of mouth
• Updating the community of the business through special events and contests

The advantages of social media networking:

1. Cost – Advertising your brand through traditional media and other types would cost you big time. With social media, all you need is a page and shareable content. You can also advertise there and would cost less.
2. Audience Engagement/Community Growth – People like it when their voices are heard. So, having a brand engage with the community makes them feel special and “heard.”

Just like a letter, it has a sender and a receiver, and the “mailman” are services such as Outlook, Gmail and YahooMail. Both the sender and receiver have a unique address associated with a domain. For an e-mail to be sent, both users must have an active e-mail address on which to send/receive it from.

Email Marketing is one of the oldest online marketing methodologies that are heavily being practiced by marketers today.

If ESP is considered an email delivery engine, then it follows that selecting the right one for your needs is crucial to the success of your marketing. An ESP assists you with sending email marketing messages by providing a platform or tool. Their platform will most likely give you the following:

• Create an email template and/or use their preset templates
• Create an e-mail subscriber list
• Send e-mail to the subscriber list
• Analyze reports of email marketing campaigns and individual emails

An email marketer can use ESPs for various reasons, such as gaining significant data with customers’ engagement with an email and analyzing behaviour of traffic to a specific website.

Just like a letter, it has a sender and a receiver, and the “mailman” are services such as Outlook, Gmail and YahooMail. Both the sender and receiver have a unique address associated with a domain. For an e-mail to be sent, both users must have an active e-mail address on which to send/receive it from.

Email Marketing is one of the oldest online marketing methodologies that are heavily being practiced by marketers today.

If ESP is considered an email delivery engine, then it follows that selecting the right one for your needs is crucial to the success of your marketing. An ESP assists you with sending email marketing messages by providing a platform or tool. Their platform will most likely give you the following:

• Create an email template and/or use their preset templates
• Create an e-mail subscriber list
• Send e-mail to the subscriber list
• Analyze reports of email marketing campaigns and individual emails

An email marketer can use ESPs for various reasons, such as gaining significant data with customers’ engagement with an email and analyzing behaviour of traffic to a specific website.

SMTP provides the ability to transmit and deliver email messages. and is part of the application layer of the TCP/IP protocol. By utilizing a method called “store and forward,” SMTP moves your email on and across networks.

An SMTP is comprised of the following vital components:

1. Mail user agent (MUA) – a program that an end user uses to read and process email
2. Mail submission agent (MSA) – a program that accepts email messages from an MUA and cooperates with an MTA for the delivery of the email.
3. Mail transfer agent (MTA) – a program that delivers email messages from one server to another using a client-server application architecture
4. Mail delivery agent (MDA) – a program that is responsible for the delivery of email messages to a local recipient/server’s mailbox; also called an LDA (local delivery agent)

At each step, SMTP is doing its job. We don't need to comprehend or control SMTP. It is generally integrated with an email client application. SMTP functions by initiating a session between the user and receiver.

This process is done by “signing” the email message with a digital signature. A “signature” is produced by the sending mail transfer agent (MTA) by using an algorithm. It is then applied to the content of the signed fields, which generates a unique string of characters, or what we call a “hash value.” After it is generated, the public key used to generate it is stored at the listed domain. After receiving the email, the recipient MTA can verify the DKIM signature by recovering the signer's public key through DNS.

Internet service providers can confirm that the mails are sent from authorized servers by checking the DNS records, your domain and IP address of the incoming server. If the emails come from an unauthorized source, they will get labeled as spam.

For SPF to work, it requires the receiving server and the domain owner to work together. The domain owner specifies which mail servers get used in sending mail. The information is represented in an SPF record and then published in the DNS zone.

The SPF program conducts a search to confirm if the incoming mail is from an authorized source. After this query, there are some results which include but are not limited to:

Pass – this means that the delivered message fits the requirements of the domain server.

Fail – this implies that the message does not meet the requirements.

If the domain information is not published, SPF will return the messages with the tag - “unknown.”

However, when defining it using advertising and marketing terms, a landing page is referred to as a single standalone webpage, quite different from the main website that is designed to perform a specific function.

A landing page is quite different from the homepage of a website. It is any page on the website which links to other locations on the web. This implies that a landing page should not be attached to the main website by global navigation. This directs people who visit the website to your intended conversion goal and limit their options.

In the past, landing pages were the main focus of marketing efforts. Like a number of other world wide web terms, the original definition of landing pages has changed. Just the same way other Internet terms changed, so also did landing pages stray from its primary meaning. Previously, landing pages use to be the center of marketing strategies, so most sites retained a few for marketing purposes in conjunction with a homepage. The idea was based on the thinking that users would visit the personalized landing pages and then navigate to their desired pages, or click through a link to an opt-in email campaign to perform desired actions.

They can get easily identified as they are structured especially to attract the attention of search engines.

Here is a description of how these pages get delivered technically and the problems they pose.

Doorway pages can function in various ways, and there are a number of different terms by which this can get described. Doorway pages range from pages with rich, unique content to keyword-stuffed pages. Because doorway pages often get abused by users who spam search engines, they have gained a bad reputation.

Recently, machine-generated pages are produced in large numbers to redirect visitors from the actual web page requested to an entirely different page. Such doorways contribute to the clutter that web searchers and search engines are faced with

Critics are of the opinion that doorway pages are unnecessary. They oppose their usage insisting that the time and efforts wasted in generating these pages could get redirected towards the creation of pages that get fully integrated into the content of the site.

A sales funnel can be broken down into different steps based on the sales model.

A popular sales process is divided into seven phases namely:

• The Awareness Phase – A potential buyer becomes aware of the existence of a solution.

• The Interest Phase – The potential buyer shows interest in a product and conducts a search.

• The Evaluation Phase – The potential buyer or prospect company considers the solutions offered by competing companies as they move towards making a final decision.

• The Decision Phase – At this stage, a final decision gets made and negotiation begins.

• The Purchase Phase – The stage where a purchase is finally made.

• The Re-evaluation Phase – In some sales, buyers are offered an option of renewing the contract. The re-evaluation phase is when the customer who is already familiar with the product, decides whether or not to initiate a renewal of the contract.

• The Repurchase Phase – The final stage when a customer decides to repurchase a product.

Companies make use of different analytics to study and evaluate the success of their sales teams and also attract more prospects during a sales cycle.

There are a few marketers who seem to embrace the term "Growth hacking" as the process of using the available technology to grow a business.

Sadly, there are other marketers who have not changed their old way of doing business but have chosen to simply add the title “Growth Hacker” to their business profiles to attract new opportunities.

Sean Ellis, the first man in charge of the growth of Dropbox, was the same person who conceived the idea of Growth Hacking on July 26, 2010.

The term was used for the first time in a write-up titled “Find a Growth Hacker for your Startup.”

In this article, Sean defines a Growth Hacker as “a person whose true north is growth.” Due to the continual use of this term right from its first appearance and the fact that it hasn't completely died out or faded out of existence, it is clear to see that the concept is growing.