Glossary
Action
A type of step in a journey which carries out pre-defined work. Most commonly, actions send messages to users on some channel e.g. email.
Campaign
In the context of a customer engagement platform like Dittofeed, “campaign” is an umbrella term used to describe a program for automating customer engagement. Growth and marking teams use the low-code interfaces commonly provided by customer engagement platforms to create campaigns.
Campaigns can be used to send messages on different channels. Journeys are a type of campaign, modeled as a sequence of steps.
CDP
An acronym for “customer data platform”. CDPs are services which provide a centralized store of user data for business applications. These business applications include CRM’s, marketing tools, business intelligence tools, and more.
Popular CDP’s include segment.com, and rudderstack.com.
Channel
A messaging outlet. Some commonly used channels include email, SMS, mobile push notifications, and in-app messaging. Customer engagement platforms which are “omni-channel” provide tools that allow messaging to be sent across all channels.
ESP
An acronym for “email service provider”. ESPs provide email infrastructure like servers, IP addresses, authentication protocols, list management tools, content filtering, and deliverability to ensure that email campaigns can be reliably delivered.
Event
A discrete unit of user activity within an application or on a website. Examples might include:
- A user visiting a page.
- A user placing items in a shopping cart.
- A user logging in or registering.
In-app Messaging
Messaging that is rendered within an application. For example, an app might render a carasoul of personalized product recommendations for a user. Companies will often deploy this type of messaging to remind users of features they aren’t using or to expose users to new products.
Integration
Dittofeed integrates with third party applications and services for several purposes.
- Data Source Integration: Imports user data into Dittofeed.
- Destination Integration: Exports user data from Dittofeed.
- Channel Integration: Used to message users.
Journey
A sequence of triggers and actions which automate the process of sending well-timed, relevant messaging to users. Journeys allow companies to automatically split users into segments, add time delays to messages, send different messaging templates based on user behavior, and much more.
Journeys automate communicating with users about things like:
- Onboarding
- Promotions
- Cart abandonment
- Loyalty programs
- Newsletters
- New feature rollouts
Journeys are a kind of campaign.
Various customer engagement platforms call journeys by different names, including: “sequences”, “workflows”, “automations” or just plainly “campaigns”.
Reverse ETL
“ETL” stands for “extract, transform, load”, and refers to the process of exporting warehoused data to business applications, like Dittofeed, CRM’s, and more.
Popular data warehouses include Snowflake, Amazon Redshift, and Google BigQuery. Popular data destinations include Salesforce, Tableau, and Amplitude.
Segment
A subset of users defined by specific parameters like demography, app usage metrics, and message responses. For example, Company X has users across the world who use their app to varying degrees, but the company only wants to send a particular message to its North American users who don’t use the app very often. Segmentation could be used to identify these users in order to message them.
Template
A standardized messaging layout, often with a visual design and variable input fields which can be programmatically altered to personalize messages.
Webhook
Webhooks allow producer applications to “push” data into consumer applications’ API’s, rather than “pull” that data from a conventional synchronous API. Webhooks allow consuming applications to receive live updates from the sending application, while avoiding polling.
Webhooks are frequently used to synchronize data sources across applications and services. For example, Dittofeed is capable of consuming segment.com’s webhooks in order to receive updates to its user data.
Workflow
Another term for a journey. Workflows are sequences of triggers and actions.
Workspace Member
Someone who has access to a Dittofeed workspace.