Glossary
If you already run lifecycle email somewhere else, you know all of this. You just call it something else. Here is the whole vocabulary, mapped.
The short version
| If you say | Where you say it | Mara calls it |
|---|---|---|
| loop | Loops | program |
| flow | Klaviyo | program |
| sequence | Sequenzy, Encharge | program |
| campaign (an automation) | Customer.io | program |
| campaign, broadcast (a one-off) | Loops, Klaviyo, Resend | nothing, she doesn't |
| audience (your whole list) | Loops | contacts |
| segment | Customer.io, Klaviyo, Encharge | segment |
| subscriber, profile | most tools | contact |
| goal | Loops, Customer.io | goal |
| A/B test, split test | most tools | variants |
The terms, in full
Program. One lifecycle email sequence Mara runs end to end: the trigger that starts it, the emails, the waits between them, the branches. A welcome series is a program. So is a win-back. This is also the billing unit, which is why the word is on the pricing page: Starter runs three at once, Growth runs ten.
Your tool probably calls this a flow, a loop, a sequence, or a campaign.
Customer journey. The path a customer walks through your product: visitor, signed up, activated, paid, retained. It is not an email artifact. It is the thing programs hang off. Mara draws it as a map, you edit the states to match your product, and you mark one as your goal.
Most sending tools have no equivalent, because most sending tools do not model your product at all.
State. One stage on that journey. "Activated" is a state.
Goal. The one state you are working toward. It is your value metric. Loops and Customer.io both shipped a feature called Goals in 2026 and it means roughly the same thing here.
Segment. A group of contacts matched by rules. Same word Customer.io, Klaviyo, Encharge and Userlist use.
One warning if you are coming from Loops: Loops uses "audience" for your entire contact list. Mara does not use that word at all, precisely because it means two different things depending on where you last worked. Everyone in your account is your contacts. A rules-matched slice of them is a segment.
Contact. A person. Not a subscriber, because they are a person using your product, not a person on a mailing list. The distinction matters for the bill: contacts are unlimited on both plans, so a dormant signup costs nothing and stays available for the win-back you have not written yet.
Email. One message to one recipient. Send is the act of delivering one.
Step. One email inside a program.
Variants. The alternative copies Mara writes for a single step and tests against each other on live sends. Your tool calls this an A/B test. The difference is who does it: she writes the variants, splits the sends, reads the results, shifts share to the winner, and rewrites the loser without being asked.
Reply. An inbound message from a contact. Mara reads it, classifies it, and drafts an answer.
The words we don't use
Campaign. Genuinely ambiguous. At Customer.io it means an automation. At Loops, Klaviyo and Resend it means a one-off blast. Context cannot disambiguate it, so it is not in the product anywhere.
Broadcast, newsletter. Not vocabulary, product scope: Mara only writes triggered programs. If your main sending job is a Tuesday newsletter, she is the wrong hire and the comparison pages say so.
Flow. Klaviyo's word for a program. Avoided so "program" always means one thing.
The parts with no equivalent anywhere
These are the ones worth reading, because no tool you have used has them.
Needs you. The approval queue, and your home page. Every email Mara writes lands here as pending approval before it can send.
This is the part that surprises people most, so it is worth being blunt about it: every other tool goes prompt, configured, live. Mara drafts and then stops. If you have just arrived and it looks like nothing is sending, that is not a setup problem. Your programs are running. They are waiting on you. New accounts cannot skip the first approval, and win-back, churn-save and expansion always come back for review even after you switch on autopilot.
Playbook. The Learning Ledger: what Mara has worked out about your program, written down with the evidence, and applied to future drafts. It fills up as you correct her.
Customer Voice. Themes mined from what your customers actually wrote back, quoted verbatim, ranked, exportable, with a "mark shipped" that drafts the you-asked-we-built-it email.
Verdict. Whether a program is proven to move your goal, measured against a held-back control group. Distinct from the funnel, which shows reach and is labeled as correlation.
Still stuck on a word
Ask Mara in chat. She knows this vocabulary and will happily translate from whatever you used before.