Cold email and lead data glossary

B2B data enrichment adds missing fields, such as email, phone, owner name, website or industry, to records you already hold about companies or contacts.

Bounce rate is the share of sent emails that were returned as undeliverable, usually reported as bounces divided by emails sent.

CAN-SPAM is the US federal law that sets rules for commercial email, including business-to-business email, and gives recipients the right to stop receiving it.

A catch-all email domain is one whose mail server accepts mail for any address at the domain, whether or not that mailbox exists.

A cold email is a one-to-one business email sent to someone who has not contacted you before, usually to start a sales conversation.

A data broker is a business that collects and sells personal information about people it has no direct relationship with; several US states require brokers to register.

Data decay is the steady loss of accuracy in a contact list as businesses close, move, rebrand, change phone numbers and close mailboxes.

DKIM is an email signature: the sending server signs each message with a private key, and the receiver checks it against a public key published in the sender's DNS.

DMARC is a DNS record that tells receiving servers what to do with mail that fails SPF and DKIM alignment for your domain, and where to send reports about it.

The National Do Not Call Registry is the US list of phone numbers whose subscribers have asked not to receive telemarketing calls.

Email deliverability is the ability of your messages to reach recipients' inboxes rather than bouncing or landing in spam.

Email permutation is generating likely addresses for a person by combining their name with a company domain in common patterns, such as first.last@ or flast@.

An email sequence is a planned series of messages to one prospect, sent on a schedule and stopped automatically when they reply.

Email warm-up is the practice of raising a new inbox's or domain's sending volume gradually, so mailbox providers build a reputation for it before it sends at full volume.

Firmographics are the descriptive facts about a company, such as industry, location, size, age and structure, used to segment and target businesses.

A free-mail address is an email at a consumer mailbox provider such as Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, iCloud, AOL or an internet provider's mail service, rather than at the business's own domain.

A Google Business Profile is the free listing a business manages for its appearance in Google Search and Maps, with its name, phone, hours, website, rating and reviews.

A hard bounce is a permanent delivery failure: the receiving server says the address or domain does not exist and will never accept the message.

An ideal customer profile is a description of the kind of company that gets the most value from what you sell and is most likely to buy it.

A lead list is a set of companies or people you intend to contact, with the fields needed to reach and qualify them, such as name, phone, email, website and location.

Lead scoring ranks prospects by how well they fit your ideal customer profile and how reachable or ready they are, so the best ones are contacted first.

An MX record is the DNS entry that names the mail servers which receive email for a domain, each with a priority number.

One-click unsubscribe lets a recipient opt out from a button in their mail app, without visiting a page or confirming, using the List-Unsubscribe and List-Unsubscribe-Post headers.

Reply rate is the share of people emailed who replied, usually counted per prospect across a whole sequence rather than per message.

A role address is an email address for a function rather than a person, such as info@, office@, sales@ or support@.

A secondary sending domain is a separate domain, usually a close variant of the main one, used only for outbound email so that reputation problems cannot reach the main domain.

Sender reputation is the score mailbox providers keep for a sending domain and IP address, built from how recipients and servers have responded to its past mail.

SMTP verification checks whether an email address can receive mail by asking the domain's mail server about the mailbox, without sending a message.

Spam complaint rate is the share of delivered messages that recipients marked as spam.

Spam trigger words are words and phrases associated with unwanted mail, such as "100% free", "act now" or "limited time", that can push a message toward the spam folder or put a reader off.

SPF is a DNS record that lists which servers are allowed to send email for a domain, so a receiving server can check that a message came from one of them.

A suppression list is the set of addresses, domains or numbers you must never contact again, checked before every send regardless of which list a contact came from.

The TCPA is the US federal law that restricts autodialed, prerecorded and artificial-voice calls and texts, and underpins the Do Not Call rules.

A toll-free number is a US phone number with an 800, 888, 877, 866, 855, 844 or 833 prefix, where the business pays for incoming calls instead of the caller.

Total addressable market is the full number of potential customers, or the revenue they represent, for a product if it reached every one of them.