Lose the Lingo and Lose the Lost Looks

Two years ago, Electrum Branding found ourselves using common marketing acronyms when discussing branding projects with our clients. Fortunately, the glassy eyed, slack jawed, lost look on our clients’ faces alerted us that we were using jargon – a communication catastrophe.

To remedy the situation, we posted a blog, Jargon: The Communication Killer, to educate our clients and to remind us to stop and explain these terms when they came up in future discussions.

Since then, the lexicon of lingo has continued to grow – motivating us to compile the following list. We hope you find it helpful. If not, feel free to start nodding off or drooling if you catch us using any of the following terms without an explanation.

A/B Testing
A/B Testing evaluates two versions of the same item to determine which one achieves more of the desired outcome. A/B testing can be used to test a variety of things such as a website landing page’s call to action, an email’s subject line, or a catalog’s product description. For example, in a recent A/B Test in the Electrum parking lot, we learned that snowy egrets prefer their Minis with racing stripes.

B2C
Business to consumer (B2C) refers to businesses that cater to consumers rather than other businesses.

CMS
A Content Managed System (CMS) is a web application makes it easy for a layman to make content edits to a website.

CX
The Customer Experience (CX) is the product of a customer’s interaction with a brand and can be impacted by the friendliness or helpfulness of the staff, the perceived value of the purchase price, the satisfaction with the product purchased, and much more. CX has such a strong impact on customer loyalty that businesses are becoming more focused on delivering a positive experience at every customer touchpoint.

ROI
In marketing, Return on Investment (ROI) refers to the profits a business realizes with the money invested for a particular ad or promotion. Using simple numbers, if you spent $10,000 on an annual print campaign and $100,000 for media placement over the year, the campaign cost is $110,000. If your campaign results are $5,000,000 gross profits from the campaign, your ROI is $4,890,000.

RT
On Twitter, a retweet (RT) allows you to quickly re-post and share someone else’s tweet with all of your followers.

UGC
User Generated Content (UGC) describes any form of content such as video, blogs, photos, product reviews, and other forms of media that was created by consumers or end-users that is publicly available to others via social media channels.

Are you guilty of using industry jargon or lingo in your customer communications? Contact the brand messaging experts at Electrum Branding to ensure that your brand messaging is clear and effective.