The whole picture
Team
Everything you create belongs to a team: lists, subscribers, campaigns, mailers, API tokens, domains, settings. One person may belong to several teams and move between them; what one team holds stays invisible to the others. Each member has a role: owner, editor or viewer. See Team.List
A list gathers people who agreed to receive one kind of e-mail. It carries a language, a sender, the double opt-in choice, the confirmation and welcome e-mails, a subscription form, and possibly sending hours. The same address may sit on several lists: they are then separate subscribers, each with their own status.Subscriber
A subscriber is an address on a list, with a first name, a last name, a time zone, a language, custom attributes (any field you find useful: city, date of birth, plan…) and tags. Their status is one of three:
Every subscriber also has an engagement score from 0 to 100, worked out every night from their opens and clicks.
Tag
A tag (the Tags tab) is a label put on a subscriber. An internal tag is for the team only; a preference tag appears on the subscriber’s preferences page, where they tick it or untick it themselves (“Promotions”, “New products”, say).Segment
A segment is a filter saved on a list: “the subscribers with the vip tag who opened an e-mail in the last 60 days”. It is worked out again at every use. You send a campaign, or open an automation, to a segment rather than to the whole list.Mailer
A mailer is the service that actually delivers the e-mails: SMTP, Amazon SES, Postmark, Mailgun, SendGrid, Brevo or Resend. You may configure several and choose which one serves campaigns, automations and transactional e-mails.Template
A template carries the shared layout (header, footer, styles) and an editable area that each campaign fills. Transactional templates are a different thing: see below.Campaign
A campaign is an e-mail sent once to a list or a segment. It moves through these states:Automation
An automation is a journey: a trigger (a subscription, a tag, a date, an API call…) brings a subscriber in, and they move from action to action (wait, send an automation e-mail, tag, take a branch…). Each subscriber has their own journey with a status: running, finished, stopped, goal reached, or left early.Transactional e-mail
A transactional e-mail goes to one person at the request of one of your applications: an order confirmation, an invoice, a sign-in link. It comes from a transactional template known by a name (order-confirmation) and filled with variables. It depends on no list and is not unsubscribed from.