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46. Marketing Acronyms to Actionable Terms Explained

• Samantha Burmeister • Episode 46

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In this episode, Samantha continues her marketing vocabulary series, breaking down the terms online business owners hear constantly but rarely get a clear definition for. She moves through funnel terminology, email language, money terms, and big picture strategy words, defining each one in plain language and grounding it with a concrete example.

This is part two of a two part series. Samantha covers this because she's noticed that people throw around words like funnel, landing page, and revenue interchangeably, when they mean different things and matter for different reasons.

What You'll Learn

  • Why every business already has a funnel, even if it's the simplest possible version
  • The difference between an opt-in page, a landing page, and a sales page (and which one closes the sale)
  • What a lead magnet is, and why a freebie and a lead magnet aren't the same thing
  • The four money terms get confused most: revenue, cash collected, sales, and profit
  • Why "evergreen" doesn't mean less selling, it means selling all the time
  • A simple way to think about list segmentation using a convenience store

Resources Mentioned

Connect with me:

Nomad Copy Services → sales pages, emails, websites, and more.

Get on my calendar → if you’d like me to write your sales copy for you!

Free Opt-In Copy Bot → Write high-converting opt-in pages in minutes

Watch episodes with subtitles on my YouTube 

Nomad Copy Agency writes copy that CONVERTS for service-based businesses. Inquire about done-for-you services here.

Hey, hey, and welcome back to Copy I'm Sam, your resident sales copywriter and marketing expert, and this is part two of the series that I kicked off last week. Talking about marketing acronyms that you might not know, and today we're taking those acronyms and turning them into words. Just kidding. We're not talking about the same exact acronyms, but similar concepts as those marketing terms and concepts that you may not know. Everybody kind of uses these words sometimes interchangeably, sometimes slightly differently, and nobody really stops to define them. So as somebody with a marketing degree and 10 years of experience in sales, I've been running my business since 2019, which feels rude that that's been seven years, but it has. I'm gonna talk to you about these marketing terms as somebody who, lives and breathes them, but understands that if you're not a trained marketer, you might not understand them. So we're gonna start big picture, and then get more specific as we go through. So I'm gonna talk about funnels and every stage of the funnel, where you might find things like opt-in pages, sales pages, landing pages, and not be sure of the difference between them. We're gonna talk about what happens after the funnel, like sales and the difference between sales and revenue. We're gonna talk about your emails and the difference between, a nurture email and a broadcast email. So starting with big picture, then dialing in on each specific part and, we'll see where this goes. All right? Let's dive in So the first word that I wanna discuss is funnel itself, because people kind of use this word often and don't really know what it is. But I would argue, that if you have a business, you have a funnel. Full stop. A funnel is simply a path that takes someone from finding out about you to buying from you. It can be so simple. For example, if you're hanging out locally and you are looking for somebody to clean your house, you could type in your hometown and house cleaning, and people are going to come onto your awareness, you're gonna click onto the website, and you're gonna make a booking for somebody to come out and clean your house. That is their funnel, Now, that would be an SEO-focused funnel, or maybe they have Google Ads running so that you showed up at the top of their search. But that is a very simple funnel that just takes people from problem aware, which would be the top of the funnel, abbreviated as TOFU. So top of funnel means that they have a problem. Middle means that they are solution aware, that you can offer them a solution, and then takes them to bottom of funnel, where they purchase from you. So that is a funnel. It can be super simple. In online business, we often like to have things like freebies and welcome sequences, which I'll get into here in a minute, that then take us to landing and opt-in pages, that then take us through a more elaborate purchase sequence. But they can be super simple. Even in online business, they can be super simple. So that is a funnel. It takes people from being a bunch of people floating out in the universe and then gives them a distinct path to follow to become a customer. Now, inside that funnel, I mentioned that you might have ads, which are simply Google or Meta ads typically. Again, I speak to online business owners, so if you are a physical business owner, one, probably not the podcast for you, but two, you may have something like a billboard, a business card, where regardless of if you're an online or in-person business, you might be attending network events, whether that's virtual or in person. So you're going to have that top of funnel experience. But regardless, you're gonna take them to a page. That might be an opt-in page. Here's your first vocab. An opt-in page has one job, and that is to get somebody's email address. Bonus points if you get their first name or can ask a market research question. But typically, you just want their email address so that you can bring them into the middle of the funnel where you teach them more about you. Typically, in exchange for their email address, you're giving them something like a free guide, a checklist, a discount. We've all been on those e-commerce websites where you get to, like, spin a wheel to potentially get a discount. It-- you might give them a free service or a meet and greet in exchange for their email. There's very few distractions on that page. It's very simple. I actually have a bot that is free that you can use to write it. It's called the Opt-In Copy Bot, and I will make sure that that is in the link in the show notes. But an opt-in page is very simple and just gets their email address. Honestly, an opt-in page, you've even seen pop-ups online, that could count as opt-in page copy. You may have heard, though, of a landing page. A landing page is a bit more broad, and it's kind of an umbrella term. It can mean an opt-in page. It can mean a sales page, but a landing page is something that somebody lands on after clicking an ad or a link or a post that you want them to go to. It could be any kind of sales page. My goal here is to make sure that you understand what all of the marketing jargon is that's floating around us. So when people say landing page, they may mean an opt-in page, or they may mean something else entirely here. So get some context if you ever hear somebody talking about a landing page. So the landing page is the umbrella term. Underneath that is the opt-in page, which would be just get somebody's email. But a sales page has a different job, and it also falls under that landing page umbrella, that a sales page is not just collecting an email. It is making the case for why somebody should buy from you. You may have your checkout on that page, or you may have a separate checkout page, which is different from a sales page, 'cause a sales page would then click through to a checkout page. But the sales page is where you lay out the offer, the price. You probably have testimonials, FAQs on this page. It is making a case for somebody to not just give you their email but give you their money. This page exists to close the sale rather than to start the relationship, which is what makes it so different from an opt-in page. So in conclusion the pages in a funnel is that an opt-in page collects an email, a sales page closes the sale, and the landing page is the broader umbrella that these both live under. So what goes on an opt-in page? Well, it depends on what people are opting into. You want their email, but they want something else. And what they want is what you have, and that's what we would call a lead magnet. That is the free thing that you are giving them in order to get their information to turn them into a client. These lead magnets are typically free. That would be the difference between a freebie and a lead magnet, is a freebie is always a lead magnet, but a lead magnet is not always a freebie. It's kind of one of those a square is a rectangle, but a rectangle isn't a square kind of things. A lead magnet is the thing that you are doing to get them onto your list. So for example, I have my launch emails, every single email that you need. I discount that to a dollar to turn it into a lead magnet. I don't make it free, but I do give it for an extremely low price so that it's a lead magnet. So your freebie or your lead magnet is the thing that you're offering on an opt-in page to get their email. Could be a checklist, a template, a mini training, a quiz, a spin-the-wheel opportunity. I've seen people do scratch cards, yes, even online. But it's designed to solve one small and specific problem super quickly and lead your new lead, toward your bigger offer. That is your lead magnet. On this page, you're probably measuring some things, and a big one that you would measure would be your bounce rate. That's the percentage of people who land on your page and leave without doing anything. That would be no clicking, no scrolling, no engagement on this page. They just bounce. So a high bounce rate would usually mean one of two things, either, that the wrong people are landing on your page, or that the right people are landing on a page that doesn't immediately make sense to them. Either way, the fix for this is great copy, either in the ad that they're clicking into that gets them to that page or the copy on the page so that it makes sense for the people that it is right for. So that's your bounce rate. The fix to a bad bounce rate is great copy. Again, the opt-in copy bot is gonna be a huge helper to help you write great copy on your landing and opt-in pages, and that is linked in the show notes. So that's funnels and pages and what you would wanna pay attention to. That's some language that goes into that bucket. Next bucket that I wanna talk through some vocab in is email-specific terms, because email is its own sweet little sector of marketing. The first one that I wanna dig into is the difference between broadcast emails and nurture emails. A broadcast email is a one-time email that you send to your list. Usually, it's about something that's happening right now. So those are when somebody says, "Oh, you should write your weekly newsletter, your monthly newsletter." That's typically a broadcast email. A nurture email tends to be part of an automated sequence, but you can use broadcast, nurture, and newsletter interchangeably. A nurture email keeps people warm, keeps people understanding what it is that you do and sell between launches or between sales. A newsletter tends to be more newsletter style, where it's gonna have categories, and a broadcast email is something that just gets pushed out to typically your full list all at once. So a broadcast, you may be broadcasting your nurtures or your newsletters, but all of them tend to be used interchangeably. The one that I see overused most is newsletter, when people say, "Oh, I have to send a weekly newsletter." Babe, no you don't. You can send an email a week that does anything. I really encourage you to think more about your weekly or monthly or biweekly, whatever your cadence is, emails, as broadcasts rather than newsletters. I think that takes a lot of the pressure off of sending a large email to a large group of people. And honestly, if you stop seeing it as a newsletter and start seeing it as a broadcast and an opportunity, your chances of making a sale are a lot higher because you're not shying away from the sale. You're seeing these weekly emails as an opportunity Next email term is list segmentation. So we might talk about your list, your segments, or your tags within your email service provider or your ESP, as you learned in the last episode. Segmentation is just splitting your email list into smaller groups based on something that they have in common, typically something that would be a pain point so that you can solve it with some of your offers. So for example, if you have digital products that are better for new business owners, you might have a segment of your list that you have found out through either surveying your audience or based on audience behavior or metadata that you have. Again, these are like more, I would say like 201 level marketing terms. If you can find out information about the people on your list, you can segment them so that then you can just send product updates for your small ticket products to people who might be a little bit newer in business. But you might have a list segment of people that you've talked to before who you know are making a certain amount, who might be ready for your high-level coaching program. They might be in a completely separate segment. This is great so that you can sell multiple things to different types of people based on what they need. Let's use an example here. Let's say that you walk into a convenience store. You can see the signs around the convenience store when you walk in. You're gonna see beverages, you're gonna see ice, you're gonna see pay for your gas, you're gonna see snacks, and then you're gonna see where the restrooms are. Those are calls to action that help segment the list. If you're just on a road trip and you need a quick bathroom break, you're gonna head straight towards the bathroom sign. If you are out and about and you're on a walk and you're in your neighborhood, then you're gonna head straight towards the beverage sign 'cause you might be thirsty. Those are different lists, and then they're gonna put all of the offers for thirsty people inside of the beverage fridges. They're not gonna disperse the energy drinks and the coffee drinks and the soda drinks and the flavored water drinks throughout the store. They're just gonna put all the beverages on the back wall because they know that this segment of their audience is thirsty. They're looking for one thing, and that is some version of hydration or energy that comes from a liquid, right? So think of list segmentation in that way, as like a convenience store where then you just get to target, so you're not gonna put offers for your beverages in the bathroom. It doesn't make sense, right? So think of your list segmentation like that. Final one in this category is funnel management. This is just the ongoing work of looking at your funnel and adjusting it. So looking at your funnel and seeing are people buying after the first email or the fifth email, or are they unsubscribing after the fifth email? That might mean that there's something wrong with your fifth email. So if you're getting a ton of email signups but no sales, then you might wanna look at your welcome sequence. You may wanna look at how people are getting into your freebie in the first place to see why they might not be buying. Funnel management is just the habit of looking at where your funnel might be having a leak, and instead of assuming the whole thing is broken, seeing where you can make tweaks to manage it rather than redo it Next category of terms here for online business is money terms. This is something where I am not a bookkeeper and I am not a financial guru. I do pay a lot of attention to my numbers, and I work with a lot of people who are in accounting or are CFPs or certified financial planners. A lot of my clients are. So I know a lot about this, and talk to your bookkeeper or your accountant if you have questions. So the first term here is revenue versus cash collected versus sales and profit. I think these four different terms, sales, profit, cash collected, and revenue, all mean four different things, and they get grouped in together. So first of all, revenue is the total value of what you have sold. So for example, if you sold a 12-month payment plan worth $1,200, so 100 bucks a month, your revenue might count that full 1,200 even if you haven't received all the payments yet. Cash collected is the money that you've actually collected, and sales used to kinda mean the same thing as revenue, but it could also mean, like, how many sales you made. So some people use this interchangeably. So let's say that you sold 10 of these $100 a month packages, then you may say that you've made 10 sales, but it could also be congruent with the word revenue. And finally, profit, this is the one that actually matters, and this is why people get so up in arms about people sharing their revenue numbers after a launch. So some popular launches might say like, "Oh, I had a six-figure launch, a seven-figure launch," et cetera. Profit is what matters because this is the one that the IRS honestly taxes you on, so I think that's why it matters the most. The other ones matter to calculate your profit. But profit is just what's left after you subtract your expenses from the revenue that you made in the year or the cash collected in the year. So it's entirely possible, and I think this is just kind of overlooked in online business, it's entirely possible to have a great revenue month but have it be a terrible profit month. So for example, if somebody's launching and they have a six-figure launch, but they spent $50,000 on ads and another $50,000 on contractors, they might have had a really successful launch sales-wise and revenue-wise, but they might have made zero profit. So profit is one that matters probably the most, again, because that's what you have left. That's what you have to live on. That's what you have to pay taxes on, again. So, profit basically just tells us what we actually get to keep. And then another money-focused term is recurring revenue versus reoccurring revenue. So there's just an O in there. Recurring revenue is the financial term. It means income that repeats on a predictable schedule. So that is recurring revenue. Typically, that's a membership or subscription. If you tuned into the last episode, that's your MRR, your monthly recurring revenue reoccurring, isn't the right word here. It's just a common misspelling, but I see people say it all the time online. They typically just mean recurring revenue. And I just wanted to put that in there because I've talked about vocab several times online, and for whatever reason, that's one that just really rubs people the wrong way. So just know it's recurring revenue, not reoccurring revenue. Learn something new every day. Okay. Last section, bigger picture here, for as far as terms is just strategic terms. So we've talked through the funnel, top, middle, and bottom of funnel. We've talked through how they go through the funnel, which is the opt-in and landing pages. Then they get your emails, which could be a welcome sequence. And then afterwards, if they don't buy anything, if they never become bottom of funnel, then they end up living in your broadcast and your nurtures, or if they buy something from you, they might still be getting those same emails. We basically kind of pop people back into the middle of funnel to keep them engaged and let them know that you still exist. Again, a real-world example of this middle of funnel is, let's say that you go to the mall and you buy something at Macy's. You've gone through the bottom of their funnel. You've purchased something, but when you put in your email to get your receipt, you're gonna start getting emails from them. They've just put you back in that middle of funnel, putting new things in front of you, hoping that you will buy something. They've probably also segmented you, because if you went to Macy's, and bought three pairs of Levi's jeans, and they're all women's jeans, they're probably going to, in their marketing, have you segmented so that you see more women's clothing. You might see women's T-shirts and hoodies. You might get an email that tells you when all Levi's stuff is on sale. So they may have segmented you there. So when we think about emails and we think about nurture emails, you're still very much in a funnel. It just might not be quite as obvious and quite as sales forward Okay, so final terms that I just want you to understand, even on a surface level, is evergreen marketing. We talk about launching a lot here because my bread and butter as a salesperson is in launching. I love helping people sell. I write sales pages. I write sales emails. I have worked with, I don't even know, 20-plus six-figure launchers. Like, I, I know what I'm doing in sales. But a lot of people say, "Oh my gosh, launching is awful. It stresses me out and so tiring., I just wanna take this course evergreen." We hear evergreen, evergreen marketing, evergreen selling. Evergreen means that something works continuously without being time-sensitive or needing to be live. An evergreen funnel runs the same way all the way through the year, and somebody can opt in or purchase today or six months from now or whenever. The thing about it that I always warn people is that evergreen just means that you are always selling. So rather than launching, say, twice a year, evergreen means that you are constantly selling into that program. And that's why funnels are so important, because a lot of times if you just get people into your top of funnel and you sell to them correctly through the funnel, they will end up in your evergreen or always open offers. Evergreen is often considered the opposite of a launch because people hate going really hard into selling on a launch, but your copy and your funnels have to be working super hard throughout the year to make evergreen selling and evergreen marketing work. Both of them have their place. Launches create a ton of bursts of attention and cash. Evergreen, if you do it right, creates steady, predictable income in the background. Not recurring, but predictable And, a lot of businesses do both. A lot of them have strong evergreen systems and an income injection when they either run a flash sale or a launch. Another one, this is for my data nerds, is attribution. Attribution, you'll hear, is figuring out which marketing channel deserves credit for a sale. So for example, if you're on TikTok and Instagram and Threads, and those are the only places that you sell, and you're trying to figure out where you should put more time into, you need to know where to attribute your sale to. So that's attribution. It's notoriously messy. I highly recommend using UTM links. I have a friend who created a UTM tracker that I will put the link in the show notes so that you've got it. But attribution is tough, because most people work with your brand across multiple platforms. So they might find you on Threads, then follow you on Instagram, end up opting in, seeing your emails, and then you're promoting the same thing on email as you are on Instagram. Attribution is great to know, and it's super helpful to have that data in your back pocket. Again, that might be a KPI of yours, is to get a certain number of clicks or follows from a specific platform. But ultimately, it also shows us how important it is to be talking about our offers in multiple places. Another marketing term that we hear all the time is organic versus paid. Organic is reach and traffic that you get without paying for it, and paid is the opposite. That's ads. So organic is when, say, somebody finds your podcast through a search or finds your reel, and paid just means that you're buying their attention on Meta or Alphabet/Google. Neither one is necessarily better. I always recommend some variation, but if your entire strategy depends on an algorithm showing your content to the right people, that might be a bit of a fragile plan, which is why there's also other organic reach opportunities like affiliate marketing. But the strongest businesses and the launches that I've seen go best recently, have both a paid strategy and an organic strategy. And then within launching, there's a lot of terms. Let me see if I can just zoom through these. Open cart is the first day. That is when you open enrollment to your offer. A promotion period would be how long you are promoting the open cart. Pre-launch is the weeks or even months leading up to when you open your cart. That typically means that there's some sort of webinar or launch event that you're building your list during that time. Close cart is the day that you close. There's upsells and downsells on the back end, which are just opportunities to sell more to the people who already purchased or sell a different offer to the people who chose not to. And then similar to a launch is a flash sale. That is basically a mini launch, but you take something that you already offer that's pretty easy to sell and easy to deliver on, and you try to get either a cash injection in your business by selling a lot more of it, or you flash sale it to, get some attention as part of your pre-launch, which I think is really interesting. We're gonna talk more about that in the next couple of weeks. So that's typical during your launch. A lot of times too, people will use a funnel for evergreen for a while, and then launch. And then they'll bring more people into their funnel and then launch to the new audience. So that's why building your list continually is super important. What did we talk about? Funnel terms, like an opt-in versus a landing page versus a sales page. We talked about lead magnets. We talked about bounce rates. In emails, we talked about a broadcast versus a nurture, segmenting, funnel management. We talked about money terms like revenue and cash collected. We kind of cleared that up with the recurring revenue. Shout out to Threads for calling me out on the recurring versus reoccurring, and strategy terms like evergreen strategy, attribution, organic versus paid, and how we are launching. I think there's a lot of marketing terms in there, and a lot of these also are specific to small business. I went to marketing school, so if you have other questions about marketing terms that I did not cover today, shoot me a DM and let me know. You can find me on Instagram. I'm @nomad.copy. You can find me on LinkedIn. My name is Samantha Burmeister. I'll have that linked in the show notes. If you'd like to work with me and have my brain on your next launch, I do launch strategy as well as writing the copy for the launch, and you can get on my calendar at nomadcopyagency.com/contact. All right. This has been one of my longer episodes. Thanks for sticking around, and you will hear from me again next week. Have a great one, and I hope you're enjoying your summer.