Digital Sales Dictionary

**A/B testing** — a method of comparing two versions of a webpage against each other to determine which one performs better. This can refer to comparing the landing pages for your products or testing email newsletters sent out to promote it.

Above The Fold — the portions of a webpage that are visible without scrolling. It is important to note that the position of the fold can vary based on your visitor’s monitor resolution. You should aim to briefly explain your product and include a call to action in the section of the webpage that is above the fold.

Affiliate Program — an automated marketing program where product creator recruits website or blog owners to promote his product. In return, they will receive a referral fee or commission from sales generated through to their promotion.

AIDA — stands for Attention, Interest, Desire and Action. This sales framework proposes that the selling process should contain all these steps in said order. Thus the salesperson must (1) first make the prospect aware of the product, (2) foster any interest shown, (3) stimulate the desire to buy and possess the product and, finally, (4) encourage action to purchase.

Alt text — A text caption, usually associated with an image or other media, that is displayed instead of the image if it can’t be rendered.

Anchor text — the visible, clickable text part of the hyperlink. The words contained in the anchor text are taken into account by search engines when ranking the webpage for related keywords.

Auto-responder — a program or script that automatically sends out a pre-defined message in response to any incoming emails sent to a particular email address.

**Backlink** — an incoming hyperlink from one web page to another website. The quality and quantity of the backlinks determine the rank of the webpage on search engine results page.

Benefit — unlike product features, that describe what the product can do, its dimensions and specs, product benefits show the end result of what the product can actually accomplish for the reader. For instance, if you’re selling candles, the benefit might be having a romantic evening with your loved one.

Bounce Rate — the percentage of visitors to a particular website who navigate away from the website after viewing only one page for a very short period of time. A high bounce rate is a sign that the contents of your page did not correspond to what people where expecting to find when navigating there.

**Call to Action (CTA)** — an instruction to the audience that is designed to provoke an immediate response, usually using an imperative verb such as “buy now” or “learn more.” All your marketing communication with potential buyers should have a single clear CTA.

Click-through-rate (CTR) — the number of clicks that your online ad receives divided by the number of times your ad is served, expressed as a percentage. For instance, if you had 20 clicks and 1000 impressions, then your CTR would be 2%.

Conversion — The point at which a recipient of a marketing message performs a desired action, usually a purchase.

Cost Per Click — Cost per click (CPC), also referred to as pay per click (PPC) is the amount of money spent on a single click on an internet advertisement. This is used to calculate the effectiveness of online ad campaigns and to estimate the cost per conversion for paid traffic.

Cross Selling — a selling technique, where an existing customer is offered a product or service from a different product category. For instance, it happens when an online toy store offers young Lego set buyer a hobbyhorse.

**Deliverability** — refers to ensuring email messages are delivered to the inbox and aren’t blocked by spam filters. The most common reason for message not reaching the recipient is invalid or fake email address left by subscriber.

Digital Downloads — a general term that is used to describe any products that can be stored and delivered in its electronic format. Digital goods are shipped via email or are downloaded directly from the Internet. Design assets, eBooks, pdfs, audio files and videos are all examples of digital downloads.

Double Opt-In — a confirmation sent to your email address after you subscribe to a newsletter. It is sometimes used to ensure that the email address is valid. Since you’ve already agreed to receive this newsletter on the website, and then again via clicking the link in the email, it’s referred to as double opt-in.

Drip Marketing — communication automation technique where you send, or “drip,” a pre-written set of messages to customers over time. Usually this is done through sending a set of emails, although in-app messages, or other media can also be used.

**Email marketing** — promoting the product via sending a sales letter to your email subscribers. Every email you send to announce a product launch or product discount is a part of your email marketing efforts.

Email newsletter — is a series of messages that you send out to subscribers on a regular basis (usually weekly or monthly). The content of these emails is different every week, and usually consists of a mix of your own and curated content. Email newsletters enable you to position yourself as an expert in the industry, and can be used as a channel for your products marketing.

Engagement — measurable ways of people responding to your content. Examples of user engagement are opens of your emails, retweets for your tweets and clicks on the links you post.

**Google Adwords** — is an advertising service by Google for businesses wanting to display ads on Google and its advertising network that consists of partner websites that agreed to display these ads for a compensation. With Google AdWords program you can set a monthly budget on advertising and only pay when people click on your ads.

Google Analytics — is a free web analytics service offered by Google. It allows you to analyse the sources of your traffic, identify the most popular pages and track conversions.

Guest Posting — publishing a blog post or an article on someone else’s blog. The main purpose of this is to earn a backlink to your own website or to expose the audience of the blog to your products.

**Inbound Marketing** — only marketing to people who agree to be marketed to and who can opt out at any time. This type of permission based marketing is focusing on producing high quality content that addresses the potential customers’ questions about your industry. Through inbound marketing, you can position yourself as an expert and eventually gain new customers. This can take form of a direct signup or purchase from your blog posts or an indirect one, that happens when potential customer will need your services and remember you because of your content.

Influencer Marketing — the process of developing relationships with influential people in your niche that can lead to them promoting your product or service to their audience.

**Keyword** — in search engine optimization, it is a particular word or phrase that describes the contents of a webpage. Search engines use keywords to match user search query with appropriate webpages. If your webpage is ranked high in search engine results page for keywords relevant to your product, you will receive free traffic from search engines.

KISS — the KISS principle (Keep It Simple, Stupid) recognizes that people generally want things that are simple, easy to learn and use. You should strive make things that follow the KISS principle.

**Landing Page** — a web page that is designed specifically to convert visitors into buyers, subscribers or leads. There’s usually some kind of a bribe in form of a free eBook that you get for giving your email.

Lead — a potential sales contact, more specifically it’s an individual or organization that expresses interest in your products or services. If someone downloads your free product and you get their email – you now have a lead.

Link Building — in search engine optimization it’s the process of exchanging links with other websites to increase your own site’s backlinks and quality backlinks. The ultimate goal of linking building is to improve your website’s search rankings for relevant keywords.

Long Tail Keywords — keywords that are longer and more specific and are more likely to be used by searchers with a buying intent. For instance, the “sofa” keyword has 550,000 monthly searches, whereas “elm wood veneer daybed” has about 100 monthly searches. But the last keyword has a lot more chances to convert in sale, because it indicates that the searcher is looking for something very specific.

**Marketing Automation** — refers to software and web services that allow organizations to market on multiple channels online (such as email, social media, websites, etc.) by automating repetitive tasks.

Meta Description — is an HTML element that describes your page to search engines. This is a webpage text preview you see when the website appears in the search engine result page.

**Niche** — is a small area of the larger market, specializing in one type of product or service. For instance, if design assets in general is the market, the minimal vintage logos is the niche. When operating in a niche it is easier to position yourself as an expert and gain an audience that is passionate about the same niche within the market.

NoFollow — in search engine optimization, it is a link that does not pass any “votes” from the page it is linking from, to the page it is linking to. In other words, this kind of link does not help page’s placement in the search engine results page.

**Open Rate** — is a measure of how many people on an email list open a particular email. For instance, 20% open rate would mean that of every 1000 emails delivered to the inbox, 200 were actually opened.

Organic Search — listings on search engine results pages that appear because of their relevance to the search terms. The non-organic search would therefore include pay per click advertisements.

Outreach — is the process of spreading awareness about your products by reaching out to bloggers, newsletters or website owners. By giving away your product, or asking for a review from them you gain access to potential customers you couldn’t reach otherwise.

**Paid Search** — a type of contextual advertising where an advertiser pays a fee to have their webpage shown on the top of search results.

Permission Marketing — unlike conventional interruption marketing, permission marketing is delivering anticipated and relevant messages to people who opted-in to receive them.

Persona — is a representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers. The buyer persona profile usually consists of demographics, typical behaviour patterns, motivation and goals. Buyer personas are useful for developing any promotional materials, as they allow you to get a better understanding of your potential clients.

**Ranking (Search Engine Ranking)** — the position at which a particular website appears on the search engine results page for specific query. The closer your webpage is to the top of the page – the higher your rankings.

Referrer — the URL of the webpage that directed the user to the current webpage. If instead of URL your analytics software marks referrer as ‘Direct’, this means that the user was directed to the webpage outside of his browser (like in an email, IM, etc.)

Retargeting — showing targeted ads to people who already visited your webpage. Since they are already familiar with you and what you have to offer, they are more likely to convert into buyers.

**Sales Funnel** — refers to the sales process where you generate, qualify, and close leads. The funnel part comes from the fact that the top where leads come in is the largest part and it gets smaller as leads go through the sales process and convert into paying customers.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) — is the process of affecting the visibility of a website in search engines. This is usually done by optimising the website itself, as well as building links to the website.

Sellfy — the simplest way to sell digital downloads online. We securely store and deliver your files to the buyer, offer powerful marketing and analytics tools AND pay out as soon as you make a sale. We also wrote this dictionary, hope you like it so far.

Social Media Marketing — a form of marketing that uses social networks as a marketing tool. The end goal of this type of marketing is to get more people to know about the brand.

**Target Audience** — a group of people at which a product is aimed. They are the ideal customer, and both the product itself and the marketing around it should be focused on addressing their needs.

Testimonial — a type of social proof or a recommendation from a satisfied customer, usually found on the product landing page. In general, only the testimonials that are affirming the high quality or value of the product should be used to promote the product.

Transaction Fee — a charge an intermediary collects for assisting in the sale. For example, when a buyer purchase your digital product, you are charged a transaction fee by the company you handles the storage, delivery and processes payments. For digital goods, this fee typically ranges between 5% and 50%.

**Unique Selling Point (USP)** — is a factor that makes your product different form similar products offered by competition. Examples of USP are lowest cost, highest quality or some unique feature competing products do not possess.

Unique Visitors — a count of how many different people accessed a particular webpage. One user can account for many visits, if he leaves and then comes back to the page. However he will only be counted once as a unique visitor to this page.

Up Selling — a sales technique where the seller will offer the buyer to purchase related products. This is often done to make a sale, larger than the initial. For instance, if the product was a $2 icon set with 100 icons in it, creator can then up sell the buyer by offering 1500 icons for 20$.

**Word of Mouth Marketing** — a type of marketing where casual social interactions between peers are used to promote a product. This is one of the most powerful marketing techniques, as people are more likely to trust the recommendation of someone they know.