Become a Home Based Travel Agent

Have you ever listened to a webinar, attended a class, or read an article about email marketing and wondered what the heck they were talking about? The use of acronyms and abbreviated terminology almost makes it seem as if it is a foreign language. Sometimes instructors, writers and speakers seem to forget that not everyone understands the terminology they are using might well seem like Greek or Pig Latin to someone else. In the travel industry we throw around acronyms like they are confetti. A recent list I found online shows at least 75, such as ATME, ASTA, NACTA, ARC, VTC, CLIA, CTC, CTIE, MCC and the list goes on.

I realized that I find myself dazed and confused over terminology in the email-marketing world as some web terms have me scratching my head. Some make sense and others do not and at best it can be confusing. I decided to do some research for my own knowledge base and figured I would share my new found knowledge with our readers. Most of these terms will relate to email marketing. Here are 15 that you might already know or might find useful for your email-marketing dictionary.

Bounce: An email that is rejected by the receiving mail system is said to have bounced. An email can be returned as "bounced" for many reasons, such as having an unknown alias (username), nonexistent domain name, or full inbox. Tip: Pay particular attention to the number and rate of bounced emails, both of which could negatively affect your overall deliverability.

CAN-SPAM Act: The first of it’s kind and signed into law in December of 2003 by President Bush to set standards for sending commercial email in the United States. Updated information can be found by following this link.

Tip: This act is the minimum standard for sending commercial email in the United States. Most email service providers (ESPs) have much stricter requirements.

Click-through rate (CTR): CTR can be measured in different ways. The most common, however, is clicks divided by emails sent. For example, if you sent an email to 100 people and 12 of them clicked on one or more links, your click-through rate would be 12%.

Tip: When sending out marketing emails, be sure to decide which links you want people to click and design your piece to reach that goal.

Deliverability: The number of emails that are sent minus those that bounce equals deliverability.

Tip: There is sometimes a difference between deliverability and inbox deliverability. The most important number is how many emails reach the recipient’s inboxes.

Email service provider (ESP): Broadly defined as a company providing email services such as but not limited to email marketing and bulk email services. An ESP may provide tracking information showing the status of email sent to each member of an address list. ESPs also often provide the ability to segment an address list into interest groups or categories, allowing the user to send targeted information to people who they believe will value the correspondence.

Tip: Not all ESPs are created equal. Much like people (and cars), they come in all shapes, sizes, and colors. Find the ESP that best fits your business needs.

Hard bounce: A hard bounce is an e-mail message that has been returned to the sender because the recipient's address is invalid. A hard bounce might occur because the domain name doesn't exist or because the recipient is unknown. In most cases, emails that have hard-bounced will never be delivered.

Tip: Hard bounces are often the result of sending email to an old or purchased list. A high number of hard bounces will have a negative impact on your overall deliverability and domain reputation, making it harder to send emails in the future.

Inbox deliverability rate: This term refers to the proportion of emails that reach the intended recipients' inboxes for a given email campaign. Put another way, it's determined by emails sent minus those that bounced, dropped, lost, blocked, filtered as spam, etc.

Tip: There are many email delivery services (Return Path, Pivotal Veracity, etc.) that can help determine your inbox deliverability.")

Open rate: Basically, open rate is the number of emails opened compared with the number sent. If you send a campaign to a list of 100 addresses, and 22 emails were opened, you'd have a 22% open rate. However, not all ESPs measure open rate the same way. Some count a click as an "open." Some count those delivered (sent minus bounced) as the denominator. It gets even stickier if you consider that "opens" are really just a measure of an email that's rendered in one's inbox, and so does not necessarily mean the message has been read. (The industry is moving to standardize the way open rates are measured.)

Tip: Before using open rate as a metric for success, be sure your business knows how it's being measured.

Joanie Ogg CTC MCC
Joanie Ogg Marketing Group
Editor

Joanie Ogg is a thirty-five year veteran of the travel industry and has been involved with the independent contractor evolution since 1988. She is the principal of Joanie Ogg Marketing Group, which specializes in consulting and speaking on the topic of Home-Based Travel. She also provides marketing and sales for wide variety of products under the umbrella HomeBasedTravelAgent.com.

A demonstrated industry leader, Joanie most recently served as the President of the National Association of Commissioned Travel Agents (NACTA) and TravelSellers. She and her husband Tom acquired NACTA in 1996 and sold it to The American Society of Travel Agents (ASTA) in 2000. Joanie’s tenure in the travel industry includes owning and operating one of the first successful host agency models. She has owned and operated several storefront travel agencies (both commercial and leisure), as well as a Hawaii wholesale tour company.

Her decades of success have garnered her numerous accolades over the years. Her accomplishments have been recognized by receipt of two Lifetime Achievement Awards from major trade groups, being named as one of the “100 Most Powerful Women in Travel” by Travel Agent magazine on several occasions, voted as “Travel Agent of the Year” by the readers of Travel Trade magazine, and has been recognized by many other industry organizations throughout her tenure in the industry. In 2008 Joanie Ogg was inducted into the CLIA Hall of Fame, an honor held by some of the most influential executives in the travel industry.

Joanie is a Master Cruise Counselor (MCC) and a Certified Travel Counselor (CTC). Joanie has co-authored two popular travel industry books for cruise specialists and home-based travel agents and has authored hundreds of travel trade articles. She has inspired tens of thousands of travel agents attending her presentations at trade events, cruise seminars, international trade gatherings and numerous local educational venues throughout the United States. With a time-honored background and forward-looking vision, she is often featured as a speaker at many of the travel industry’s major conferences and events. Joanie’s speaking talents are widely sought as a travel industry emcee by the most recognized travel organizations. She has emceed such events as Cruise-A-Thons, ASTA’s CruiseFest, The Trade Show, The Travel Institute Forum and all of NACTA’s National and International Conferences.


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