Today, I am going to tell you about what Sitecore Send is and some of the basic terminologies you must know before working with Sitecore Send.
Sitecore Send is an AI-powered, microservices-based, API-first, cloud-native email marketing automation platform designed to help businesses create and manage email marketing campaigns. It enables business users and marketers to design and execute contextual and personalized email campaigns using customer behavior data, along with robust automation and tracking features.
Sitecore Send offers a comprehensive suite of features to help businesses create engaging emails, track campaign performance, and optimize campaigns for improved results. It simplifies the process of email creation and distribution, allowing marketers and business users to deliver omnichannel customer engagement without any coding required.
In my previous blog, I provided a detailed explanation of the topic introduction to Sitecore Send. You can read about it here.
Basic Terminologies
You need to be familiar with the basic terminology used in Sitecore Send, an email marketing platform, to get the most out of it. Here are a few key terms you should be familiar with:
Campaign - A campaign in Sitecore Send is a newsletter that businesses can send to their recipients or customers to achieve a specific outcome. They can use them for email marketing, service updates, sales confirmations, and whatever else they might need.
"Campaign" in Sitecore Send usually refers to a marketing campaign or strategy that includes distributing several emails or messages to a certain recipient list. Sitecore Send campaigns are used for product promotion, updating customers with the latest releases, and customer engagement.
Audience - An audience represents a group of recipients that businesses can target with your email marketing campaign. Audiences can be segmented based on various criteria like demographics, behavior, and preferences. By effectively managing and utilizing audiences in Sitecore Send, businesses can create more personalized and impactful email marketing campaigns.
Segmentation - Segmentation is the process of dividing the recipient lists into smaller, more targeted groups based on specific criteria and characteristics. This allows businesses to tailor the messaging and campaigns to different segments, hence, improving engagement and effectiveness.
Automation - Sitecore Send provides an option to automatically trigger emails based on real-time user behavior, such as when they forget or abandon their carts.
Sitecore Send allows businesses to create their automation from scratch or use out-of-the-box recipes. Drive revenue by sending automated emails to the right customers at the right time. Businesses can also use predefined rules and triggers to send emails automatically based on specific actions or events, such as welcome emails, birthday greetings, or cart abandonment reminders.
Active Contacts - Active contacts are those who have subscribed to the mailing list and have not opted out. They are the primary recipients of email campaigns.
Unsubscribed Contacts - Unsubscribed contacts are those who have opted out of receiving emails. They will not receive any future email campaigns unless they re-subscribe.
Bounced Contacts - Bounced contacts are those email addresses that could not receive the mail due to some issues. There are two types of bounces:
Hard Bounce: Permanent delivery failure due to reasons like an invalid email address.
Soft Bounce: Temporary delivery failure due to reasons like a full inbox or a temporary server issue.
Archived Contacts - Archived contacts are those who have been manually moved to an archive list. They are not deleted but are not active recipients of your campaigns.
Sender Policy Framework (SPF) - A technique for email authentication that helps to guard against email spoofing, by confirming that an email is coming from a legitimate server.
DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) - DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) is an email authentication method designed to detect forged sender addresses in email (email spoofing), a technique often used in phishing and email spam.
DKIM allows the receiver to check that an email that claimed to have come from a specific domain was indeed authorized by the owner of that domain.
Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance (DMARC) - An email authentication protocol that helps prevent email spoofing by aligning SPF and DKIM mechanisms and providing instructions to email receivers on how to handle unauthenticated emails.
Sender - A sender is the name and email address that the recipients see in the “From” field of their inbox when they receive the newsletter. The default sender for the account is the account owner with Sitecore Send. Businesses can add as many senders to the account as they want.
Email List - An email list is a list of the subscribers. It is a good idea to start by making some custom fields for inputting data that businesses collect from the subscribers. Later on, they can use these fields inside the newsletters to give them a personal touch. Custom fields are also used in the segmentation filtering to divide the lists in creative ways.
Template - Pre-designed email layouts that businesses can use to create consistent and visually appealing emails without starting from scratch each time. Businesses can also customize the same as required. Templates help in maintaining consistency and also save time.
Workflow - A sequence of automated steps, actions, or conditions in an email marketing campaign that defines how and when emails need to be triggered. Workflows can include sending emails, waiting periods, decision points, and more.
Audience discovery - Sitecore Send provides an option to leverage AI and machine learning to create predictive segments for the campaigns with audience discovery. It helps to identify the audiences based on their behavior and preferences and use this information to optimize email marketing campaigns through personalized content.
Reports and dashboards - Sitecore Send helps to get insights from reports and dashboards to monitor campaign performance and revenues, and track email recipients with live data. It also allows access to advanced real-time analytics to make data-driven decisions.
Open Rate - The percentage of recipients who open the email out of the total number of emails delivered. It is a key metric for assessing the effectiveness of the campaign subject lines and overall email engagement.
Click Rate - The percentage of recipients who click on one or more links within the email. This metric indicates how well the campaign email content and CTAs are performing.
These are the main terminologies you must know before starting with Sitecore Send.
References
Introduction to Sitecore Send - https://doc.sitecore.com/send/en/users/sitecore-send/introduction-to-sitecore-send.html
Sitecore Send API Documentation - https://doc.sitecore.com/send/en/developers/api-documentation/index-en.html