Words, explained

A tool that holds your email list and sends emails to it for you, automatically.

Two jobs. First it stores the addresses people give you, legally and in one place. Second it sends out a sequence of emails you wrote once, on a timetable, to each person starting from the day they joined. Somebody who signs up today gets your day-one email today, and your day-five email on Friday, with nobody pressing anything. Without one you are copying addresses into Gmail by hand, which stops working at about forty people.

An email that could not be delivered and came back.

A hard bounce means the address does not exist, and should never be mailed again. A soft bounce means something temporary, like a full mailbox. Too many hard bounces and the companies that run email start treating you as somebody who buys lists, which quietly sends everything you send to spam.

Whether your emails actually land in the inbox rather than the spam folder.

It is not about your writing. It is about your sending reputation: how many people open you, how many complain, how many of your addresses bounce, and whether your domain is set up properly. Nothing else in email matters if this is broken, because nobody is reading any of it.

Somebody gives you their email, then clicks a link in a confirmation email to prove it was really them.

You lose some people at that second step, which feels like a cost. What you gain is a list of addresses that definitely exist and definitely wanted you, which protects the deliverability of everything you send afterwards. Single opt-in builds a bigger list; double opt-in builds a list that gets read.

The useful thing you give away in exchange for an email address.

A checklist, a short guide, a template, a video. It has to solve one specific small problem quickly - "my 40-page ebook" is worse than "the one-page checklist I use before sending any email", because the second one can be finished. Nobody hands over their address for "updates".

The line of text that decides whether your email gets opened at all.

The rest of the email does not exist until this one line has done its job. Short beats long, curiosity beats cleverness, and a promise you then keep beats a trick. Open an email that tricked you once and you learn not to open the next one.