The vocabulary of B2B outreach, explained

The blocklist holds the addresses and domains you must never contact: people who unsubscribed, existing customers, competitors, sensitive accounts. It applies automatically to every campaign you run. Emailing someone who unsubscribed is the most expensive mistake in outreach, because it earns you a complaint, not just silence.

Also written: blacklist, exclusion list

A bounce is an email refused by the recipient's server, which sends it back to you instead of delivering it. A hard bounce is final: the address does not exist, or no longer exists. A soft bounce is temporary: mailbox full, server unavailable. Past 5% bounces on a campaign, your domain reputation starts to degrade.

Also written: bounces, hard bounce, soft bounce

A catch-all domain accepts every email sent to it, even the ones meant for mailboxes that do not exist. The practical consequence: there is no way to check whether an address is valid, since the server says yes to everything. Verification tools class these addresses as risky, without ever being able to settle the question.

Also written: catch all, catch-all address

DKIM is a cryptographic signature added to every email, proving the message really comes from your domain and was not altered on the way. The recipient checks the signature against a key published in your DNS. It is the second of the three records to set up before you start any outreach.

Also written: DKIM key, DKIM signature

DMARC tells mailbox providers what to do when an email claims to come from your domain but fails the SPF and DKIM checks: let it through, quarantine it, or reject it. Since 2024, Google and Yahoo require it for any sending at volume.

Also written: DMARC policy, p=reject, p=none

Domain reputation is the score mailbox providers give your domain name, and it decides whether your emails land in the inbox or in spam. It takes weeks to build and a handful of sends to destroy. Bounces, complaints and spam traps push it down; consistency and the replies you get push it up.

Also written: sending domain reputation, sender reputation

The ICP, or ideal customer profile, is the precise description of the type of company you sell to best: industry, size, situation, problem. It is not a broad target but a narrow filter. A poorly defined ICP shows up straight away in your reply rate, however much care went into the message.

Also written: ideal customer profile

A lead is a contact who has shown interest, for example by filling in a form or replying to a message. A prospect is a contact who matches your target but has not shown anything yet. The distinction matters: in cold email you work on prospects, and the whole point of the campaign is to turn them into leads.

Also written: leads

The MX record is the DNS line that says which server receives mail for a domain name. It is what you query to find out whether an address is hosted at Google, Microsoft or somewhere else, and therefore which procedure to use to connect it. A domain with no MX record cannot receive any email: every address on it bounces.

Also written: MX record, MX entry

Scraping means automatically extracting information displayed on a web page and pulling it into a file. In outreach, you scrape LinkedIn profiles to get name, job title and company. Scraping never gives you the email address: LinkedIn does not display it, so an enrichment step has to follow.

Also written: scrape, scraped, scraper

SMTP is the protocol used to send an email, as opposed to IMAP, which is used to read it. When an outreach tool connects to your mailbox over SMTP, it gets the right to send on your behalf, without going through your email interface. That is what makes automated sending possible.

A spam trap is an email address that belongs to nobody and exists only to spot senders who email without consent. Some are created from scratch by mailbox providers, others are old real addresses reactivated after being abandoned. Emailing a single one is enough to sink a domain's reputation.

Also written: spam traps, honeypot

SPF is a DNS record that lists the servers allowed to send email on behalf of your domain. Without it, anyone can spoof your address, and mailbox providers know it: they treat any domain without one with suspicion. It goes hand in hand with DKIM and DMARC.

Also written: SPF record, Sender Policy Framework

Spintax is a notation that holds several wordings in the same spot in a message, separated by a vertical bar, and the tool picks one at random on every send. Two prospects then get slightly different sentences. You use it to stop hundreds of strictly identical messages going out from the same mailbox.

Also written: spin syntax

The tracking domain is the domain that hosts the links and the tracking pixel in your campaigns. Using your tool's domain means sharing the reputation of all its customers; using your own makes you independent. It is a five minute DNS setup that costs you dearly if you neglect it.

Also written: custom tracking domain

Unsubscribing is the option you give recipients to stop receiving your messages. In outreach, a clearly visible unsubscribe link brings down the number of spam complaints, and those weigh far more heavily on your reputation than an unsubscribe does.

Also written: unsubscribes, opt-out, unsubscribe link

Warm-up is the gradual ramp-up of a brand new sending mailbox, to build it a reputation before you use it for outreach. In practice, the tool exchanges emails with a network of mailboxes that reply to each other. Count on two to three weeks before you can send in earnest.

Also written: warm up, warmup, mailbox warm-up