Glossary

Physical outbound: sending tracked, personalized mail to named decision-makers to book meetings — and how it differs from direct mail marketing and gifting.

Executive mail is personalized physical mail sent by courier to a named senior executive, designed to pass gatekeepers and land directly on their desk.

A dimensional mailer is a mail piece with physical depth — a box, tube, or padded pack — used because packages get opened at far higher rates than flat mail.

Lumpy mail is an envelope with a small object inside that can be felt through the packaging — the lump provokes curiosity and gets the piece opened.

A courier envelope is a flat document envelope shipped via FedEx, UPS, or DHL — individually tracked, priority-handled, and hand-delivered to the recipient.

A buying committee is the group of people at a company who collectively evaluate and approve a B2B purchase — economic buyer, champion, users, and reviewers.

The economic buyer is the person in a B2B deal with final authority to release budget for the purchase — the one who can say yes when everyone else can only recommend.

A sales champion is a person inside a prospect account who actively advocates for your solution when you're not in the room — with influence and personal stake.

Mail-room screening is how corporate mail operations sort and filter inbound mail before it reaches employees — and where most B2B marketing mail quietly dies.

Gatekeeper screening is the filtering of calls, mail, and visitors by people who protect a decision-maker's time — EAs, receptionists, and front-desk staff.

A verified business address is confirmed, before mailing, to be both a real deliverable location and the place where a specific named contact currently works.

Address hygiene is the ongoing practice of keeping mailing-list address data accurate, standardized, and current — correction, dedupe, completion, and updates.

NCOA processing matches a mailing list against the USPS National Change of Address database to update addresses for people and businesses that have moved.

Per-piece tracking gives every individual mail piece its own tracking ID so its movement and delivery can be followed in real time, enabling timed follow-up.

Delivery confirmation is carrier-recorded proof a mail piece arrived — a delivery scan with timestamp and location, sometimes backed by a recipient signature.

Signature-required delivery means a carrier collects a signature at handoff, creating proof that a piece reached a person — not just a building.

Direct mail automation is software that lets teams create, trigger, and send physical mail campaigns programmatically, without touching a printer.

A print API lets developers send physical mail programmatically — an API call triggers printing and postal delivery. Lob and PostGrid define the category.

A gifting platform lets sales and marketing teams send gifts — e-gift cards, swag, curated items — to prospects at scale. Sendoso and Reachdesk lead the category.

Tactile marketing is a martech-era term for using physical, touchable materials — mail, packages, printed pieces — to create impressions digital channels can't.

Response rate is the percentage of campaign recipients who take a measurable action. The number depends heavily on list type and how responses are counted.

Matchback attribution compares converters against a campaign's mail file to credit responses that arrived through untracked channels.

A PURL is a unique web address created for one recipient of a campaign, so a visit is attributable to that specific person. Common in direct mail tracking.

Intent signals are behavioral data points suggesting an account is actively researching a problem or purchase — used to prioritize outbound effort.

A trigger event is a discrete occurrence at a company — funding, exec hires, expansion — that creates a natural, timely opening for outreach.

Multi-threading means building relationships with multiple stakeholders in a target account instead of relying on one contact. Here's why it matters.

Account tiering segments a target list into tiers by fit and value, so effort and budget concentrate on the accounts that matter most.

A sales cadence is a structured sequence of outreach touches — emails, calls, social, mail — scheduled over a set period against a prospect.

A pattern interrupt breaks the routine a prospect runs on autopilot — an unexpected touch that earns real attention instead of reflexive deletion.

Cost per meeting is total outbound cost — hard costs plus rep time — divided by qualified meetings booked. The cleanest way to compare channels.