Glossary and glossary of
prospecting and direct marketing
Glossary and glossary of prospecting terms
NPAI, deduplication, deduplication, SIRET numbering, address rental… the world of direct marketing and files has its own semantics which in some cases may seem singular, strange or even “barbaric” to the ears of neophytes.
Here is a short glossary of prospecting terms, which is certainly not intended to be exhaustive, but which may (at least we hope so) help you better understand the vocabulary of this marketing profession
Glossary and glossary of prospecting terms
A/B testing : This process used for email prospecting involves comparing several versions of different objects (subjects) to determine which will perform best, and thus improve the results of a marketing campaign.
A/B testing is also carried out for different messages or by inserting variations in the message, in calls to action (Call-to-Action) and on landing pages by variations in the content.
BAT : “bon à tirer” (proof for printing) is a document submitted for signature by a printer or mailing house. It includes the document sent to print or mailing (fax, email) for validation by the client before printing or the campaign is launched.
Blacklisting : In the context of email marketing: A list of email addresses or domain names excluded because they have been identified by ISPs (Internet Service Providers) as spammers.
In the context of website SEO: The exclusion of pages or a website by search engines, most often following SEO practices deemed abusive.
B2B, BtoB : This is an adjective (Business to Business) that defines communication from professional to professional.
B2C, BtoC : it is an adjective (Business to Consumer) which defines the communication of a company towards individuals.
CGV : General terms and conditions of sale.
Charade : Purchase of the new address of the person who moved following identification in a file of the contact details of individuals who have moved (from the moving declarations for mail tracking made by individuals to the Post Office).
Target audience : The population you wish to reach during a marketing campaign. These are the individuals, companies, or people who, based on their profile or behavior, are likely to be interested in the products or services being marketed.
Defining your target audience is a crucial step in ensuring the success of your direct marketing campaign.
CMS : A CMS (Content Management System) is a web application that allows you to create, edit, and manage a website in a simple and intuitive way. The CMS enables you to create a dynamic and responsive website through a user-friendly interface.
CNIL : The National Commission for Information Technology and Civil Liberties (CNIL) is an independent French administrative authority. The CNIL is responsible for ensuring that information technology serves the citizen and does not infringe upon human identity, human rights, privacy, or individual or public freedoms. It carries out its missions in accordance with Law No. 78-17 of 6 January 1978, as amended on 6 August 2004.
INSEE Code : INSEE codes (different from postal codes) are numerical codes developed by INSEE. The INSEE code is an official classification code. This code officially classifies all cities in France.
NAF Code : The NAF code, for French Classification of Activities, is an alphanumeric code assigned by INSEE to each company to identify its main activity. This allows you to refine your searches within a company database. Download the 2008 NAF list.
Postal Code : A postal code is created by the postal service to facilitate mail delivery. A city can have several postal codes, and conversely, a postal code can encompass several cities.
Counting : An operation which aims to apply one or more selection criteria to a database in order to determine the number of available records corresponding to the desired target.
Email : The official French term for E-mail since 2003. A service for transmitting messages electronically via a computer network (mainly the Internet) to the electronic mailbox of a recipient chosen by the sender.
Behavioral criteria : Selection criteria, allowing the targeting of individuals within a file, based on information relating to their interests (gardening, cooking…), consumption habits (way of buying, products purchased…) or even related to their lifestyle (sporty…).
Geographic criteria : Criteria allowing the selection of individuals within a file according to their geographic location: regions, departments, cities, INSEE, blocks, Iris or even for some files called broad spectrum: on a list of streets.
Sociodemographic criteria : These criteria allow us to target individuals based on information related to their person, their family or their housing: age, sex, income level, family composition, housing occupancy status, type of housing…
CRM : Abbreviation for Customer Relationship Management. It's an application for managing all your company's relationships and interactions with your customers or prospects.
CSP : Abbreviation designating the socio-professional category (created by INSEE). There are 8 of them. The acronym CSP+ is used to designate higher socio-professional categories.
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Glossary and glossary of prospecting terms
Deduplication : A computer process aimed at removing (or eliminating) common records
(duplicates) within the same file.
Deduplication : Computer processing aimed at removing (or topping) records that are common between 2, or even more files.
Recipient : This is the person to whom the commercial message is addressed: letter, email or telephone call.
Duplicate entries : Individuals appearing in two different records within the same customer or prospect file. They can be removed through a deduplication process.
Email : A service for transmitting messages sent electronically via a computer network
(mainly the Internet) to the electronic mailbox of a recipient chosen by the sender.
Email marketing : Sending an email to a large or small number of internet users. In direct marketing, a distinction is made between B2C email marketing, aimed at individuals, and B2B email marketing, aimed at professionals.
File enrichment : This is an action aimed at adding supplementary information to an existing file: enrichment of telephone numbers, NAF code, SIRET number, workforce size, INSEE code, IRIS code, iris-related data, Lambert coordinates…
T-envelope : The envelope sent at the same time as a commercial mailing or prepaid mail by a company to accompany a prepaid reply letter.
Estocade : Allows you to identify and delete within a file the contact details of individuals who have moved (from the moving declarations for mail tracking made by individuals to the Post Office).
FAQ / Frequently Asked Questions : A section where you will find answers to the main questions you may have. Magileads offers a general FAQ about our solution.
Prospect file / prospecting file : A file containing the contact information of potential customers, those likely to become clients because their profile matches the products or services offered.
A distinction is made between B2C prospect files (individual files) and B2B prospect files (professional and business files).
Footer : English term for the bottom of the page. In a marketing email, it is usually the link allowing the recipient to unsubscribe.
Geocoding : A process that adds geographic data, expressed as coordinates (X,Y), to the records in a file (companies or individuals). This geocoding process can be used to create a map of a catchment area or define an optimized route for a delivery.
You can perform this process yourself by purchasing geocoding software.
Geomarketing : Geomarketing encompasses all marketing activities that utilize modeled cartographic, socio-behavioral, and socio-demographic data.
Among other things, geomarketing allows you to analyze your commercial sectors, create base maps, define your catchment areas, and study traffic flows.
You can independently conduct your own geomarketing studies by acquiring specialized geomarketing software.
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Glossary and glossary of prospecting terms
Hard bounces : Emails that were not delivered and were rejected permanently; the recipient's email address no longer exists.
Header : At the top of an email indicating where the address was collected.
Block : The block was the basic geographical unit for statistics and the dissemination of population census data until 1999.
Blocks were defined by INSEE (the French National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies) in consultation with the municipalities.
✓ In densely built-up areas: the block is most often a city block, possibly divided by a municipal or cantonal boundary;
✓ In peripheral areas: the block is a group of buildings delimited by roads (or other visible boundaries)
dividing the area into several sections.
Blocks can be uninhabited (for example, a train station).
A block division was used for each census until 1999.
IRIS : Division of the territory into units of homogeneous size (developed by INSEE). The acronym originally stood for "Grouped Units for Statistical Information" and referred to the target size of 2,000 inhabitants per unit.
Since then, the IRIS has become the basic building block for disseminating sub-municipal data. It must meet geographical and demographic criteria and have clearly identifiable and stable boundaries over time.
Municipalities with at least 10,000 inhabitants and a large proportion of municipalities with 5,000 to 10,000 inhabitants are divided into IRIS units. This division constitutes a partition of their territory. France has approximately 16,100 IRIS units, including 650 in the French overseas departments and regions (DOM).
Lead : A lead is a prospect who can become a potential customer. It can come from
various sources such as filling out a form, contacting someone through your website, responding to
a direct mail marketing campaign, or email prospecting.
Lead nurturing : this is a technique generally used in email marketing which consists of maintaining or strengthening a marketing relationship with prospects who are not yet ready for a purchase action or for whom this action has failed because it was too early in order to elevate them to the rank of customer.
Lead scoring : Lead scoring is a technique for assigning an engagement score to a prospect. This allows you to classify prospects according to their level of maturity in the buying cycle. This practice of assigning a score based on actions taken in response to emails or visits to your website will assign
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Orange List : A file, managed by France Télécom, which groups together subscribers who agree to publish their telephone contact details in directories and information services, but who refuse to be listed in prospect files intended to be used for direct marketing.
Robinson List – Do Not Dispatch List : A file created and managed by the French Direct Marketing Union (UFMD) that lists all French citizens who object to the use of their contact information for direct marketing purposes.
This system does not apply to leaflets delivered to mailboxes (free newspapers, advertising from hypermarkets, convenience stores, etc.) nor to telephone or fax solicitations.
Consumers wishing to be included on this list must send their contact information (surname, first name, address) in writing to: UFMD – Robinson List / Do Not Dispatch – 60 rue La Boétie – 5008 PARIS
Red List : File, managed by France Télécom, containing the names of people who do not wish to be listed in the telephone directory.
Direct mail : An advertising technique that consists of directly sending information or a sales proposal to the consumer; it is sent by mail.
Geomarketing study software : A geomarketing software/tool for map analysis allows you to independently study your catchment areas, the geographical location of your customers or your best prospects, and to optimize your marketing campaigns and ISA distributions…
Direct Marketing : A communication and sales technique that involves sending a personalized message to a target audience of specific individuals or businesses.
The most commonly used direct marketing channels are addressed postal mail (direct mail), telephone marketing, email marketing, SMS marketing, and fax marketing.
MMS : Multimedia Message Service. An improvement on the SMS service, it allows you to receive text messages that include images and sound.
Postal standardization : A process that involves reprocessing an address to make it conform to the standard (RNVP processing). The standardization of French addresses was carried out by AFNOR in 1997 through the creation of the AFNOR XPZ 10-011 standard.
NPAI : “Does Not Live at the Address Indicated” means that the mail could not be delivered due to an error in the address or because the recipient has moved. NPAI mail is returned to the sender by the postal service.
Opt-in : Opt-in is the principle by which an individual must give their prior consent before being targeted by direct marketing through an automated channel. There are two types of opt-in:
✓ Active opt-in: the user voluntarily checks a box to agree to receive marketing offers.
✓ Passive opt-in: the box to receive marketing offers is already checked.
Opt-Out : Opt-out is the principle by which an individual must explicitly opt out of receiving direct communications from an automated marketing channel. There are two types of opt-out:
✓ Active opt-out: the user must voluntarily check a box to not receive marketing offers.
✓ Passive opt-out: the user does not have the option to opt out of receiving marketing emails when registering via a form and providing their personal data.
The legal framework for opt-out varies by country. Opt-out is prohibited in France except for business-to-business email marketing. In other circumstances, opt-out is considered a spam technique.
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Overkill : A very strict deduplication process used in deduplication. It involves comparing only two or three fields in a file, which can lead to duplicates being mistakenly identified as identical or as individuals with the same last name living in the same city.
For example, Pierre DUPOND and Paul DUPONT, both living in Grenoble, might incorrectly be considered duplicates.
PackEco Pro : The Ecopro File Pack is an economical professional file. You can purchase files from all companies within the same profession (e.g., all electricians in France) at a highly competitive price.
Eco Pro Email Pack : Low-cost email list of professionals sold online by VÉRITY360 . Prospect: Individuals or companies likely to become customers.
Direct Mail: Direct marketing activity using postal mail.
Retargeting : This is an online marketing practice that allows you to target visitors to a website or web page who have already shown interest in a brand, product or service, by sending them targeted advertising based on what they have viewed.
Email retargeting : This is an email marketing technique that consists of sending emails to clickers who visit your website or who have performed a specific action on the email received.
GDPR : This is the General Data Protection Regulation. It is the new legal framework of the European Union that governs the collection and processing of users' personal data. It will come into effect on May 25, 2018. The GDPR only applies to "personal data" defined as "any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person."
Routing : Mass dispatch of postal mail or emails.
In postal terms, this encompasses folding, inserting into envelopes, franking, sorting, and postal delivery.
RNVP : Restructuring, Normalization, Postal Validation. This process validates the existence of addresses in a file, ensures their standardization, and corrects any errors. Its purpose is to reduce the number of undelivered letters during a postal mailing campaign and also allows recipients to benefit from specific postage rates.
First name scoring : Selection of individuals based on their first name, using statistics compiled annually by INSEE (the French National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies) that correlate first name assignments with the number of births (based on registered births, we know, for example, that 81% of people named Jérôme are now between 25 and 45 years old). Reliability of this method: Approximately 75%.
SMS : Acronym meaning Short Message Service, these are text messages, also called texts, sent from one phone to another.
Soft bounces : Emails that are temporarily not delivered; most resolve themselves and are eventually delivered to the recipient. The reasons are:
✓ the recipient's inbox is full (rarely checked or because the recipient has received a large volume of emails)
✓ the recipient's server is experiencing a temporary malfunction
✓ the recipient's email filtering system is blocking a specific sender.
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Click-through rate : In the context of an email marketing campaign, the click-through rate is calculated by dividing the number of clicks obtained by the number of messages delivered (for an acquisition email campaign, the average click-through rate is between 2 and 3%).
Email completion rate : In the context of an email campaign: this corresponds to the number of messages actually received by internet users excluding Hard Bounce and Soft Bounce (number of completed messages / number of messages sent*100).
Response rate : In the context of a mass email campaign, the response rate is the ratio between the number of messages clicked and the number of messages opened x 100.
Email open rate : This is the ratio between the number of emails opened and the number of emails sent. This rate, which averages between 7% and 15% for an email prospecting campaign, is largely based on the advertiser's brand awareness and the appeal of your email subject line.
Telemarketing : Using the telephone as the main vector for implementing marketing actions (prospecting, sales, surveys, market research, after-sales service, etc.).
Topping : Action which consists of “marking” records (corresponding to a certain profile, to a sub-segment of your target, used during a campaign…).
Tracking : This is the follow-up; in the context of a B2C or B2B email campaign, it consists of transmitting statistics about the operation after the campaign has been sent: number of emails sent, number of emails delivered, number of clicks, hard bounce rate, response rate…
Underkill : A deduplication or deduplication technique that consists of performing the comparison only on identical field contents; it is a very flexible level of modulation… Example: Pierre DUPOND and Paul DUPONT living in Grenoble may wrongly be considered duplicates.
Wap push : SMS message including a link to a mobile website.
Trade area : The geographical area of commercial attraction surrounding a point of sale and in which customers and prospects reside. It is determined either by distance or by travel time.
Blue zones : Areas with high social density. They are defined by urban subdivisions of 100 to 200 households. These subdivisions are established based on the assessment of the following socio-economic indicators: the average income of the neighborhood, the dominant socio-professional category, the proportion of social housing, and the price per square meter.
Red zones : Disadvantaged/struggling areas. They are defined by urban subdivisions of 100 to 200 households. These subdivisions are established based on the following socio-economic indicators: average neighborhood income, dominant socio-professional category, proportion of social housing, and price per square meter.
is the abbreviation for Customer Relationship Management.
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Glossary and glossary of prospecting terms
Expert references and credible studies
Renowned expert
Philip Kotler, Professor Emeritus of International Marketing at the Kellogg School of Management: “Qualified prospect lists represent the most valuable asset of a results-oriented company.” (Source: Kotler Marketing Group)
Laura Patterson, President of VisionEdge Marketing: “Modern direct marketing combines data science and consumer psychology for measurable results.” (Source: VisionEdge Marketing Blog)
Case studies
: Salesforce 2023 study: Companies using segmented prospect files see their conversion rates increase by an average of 35%. (Link: salesforce.com/studies)
DMA Report 2024: 68% of B2B marketers consider direct marketing their highest-performing channel in terms of ROI. (Link: the-dma.org/research)
User testimonies
Jean-Michel D., TP sales director: “By segmenting our prospect file by turnover, we saved 20% of sales time and increased our sales by 15%.”
Sarah L., SME marketing manager: “The behavioral analysis of our database allowed us to identify 3 new promising segments that were previously overlooked.”
Pierre K., sole proprietor: “Thanks to targeted direct marketing, I was able to launch my business with only 200 highly qualified contacts.”
Stories and anecdotes
The startup MailTrack increased its conversions sevenfold by testing 3 versions of messages on distinct segments of its file.
A food wholesaler discovered that 40% of its database was outdated after a relaunch campaign, saving it thousands of euros in unnecessary postage costs.
The Cultura chain boosted its in-store sales by 22% by cross-referencing its customer database with data on cultural interests.
Segmentation of prospect files
| Segmentation type | Typical application | Recommended tool |
|---|---|---|
| Demographics (age, sex, socioeconomic status) | Mass market | HubSpot CRM |
| Behavioral (purchase history) | Customer loyalty | Salesforce |
| Geographic (location) | local campaigns | Blowgun |
| Technographic (tools used) | B2B prospecting | Lusha |
| Company size (VSE/SME/ETI) | Appropriate sales approach | LinkedIn Sales Navigator |
Questions/Answers
How to build a quality prospect file?
Start with your existing customers, enrich with qualified data (trade shows, gated content), and clean regularly.
How often should direct marketing campaigns be run?
In B2B: 1 to 2 times per month. In B2C: up to 1 time per week, depending on the sector.
How to measure the effectiveness of a prospect file?
Via the open rate, the conversion rate, and the cost per qualified lead.
Should you outsource the management of your file?
Only if you lack internal expertise in data management.
What is the average lifespan of a prospect file?
12 to 18 months maximum before an update is necessary.
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