Glossary
Email marketing
Sending offers to a list of email addresses: your own subscribers, an advertiser's base, or a rented list. A legitimate channel with your own list, spam with a bought one. Deliverability decides everything.
Also called: email traffic, mailing lists.
Affiliates with a real list (from a content site, a lead-gen funnel, a newsletter) run offers to it and to the leads the offers produce. That is a durable asset. Sending to bought lists is spam, gets domains blacklisted and is banned by most networks.
Some affiliate networks run email as a traffic type with their own rules: approved creatives, suppression lists, unsubscribe links. Ask before sending.
Related terms: DOI, Lead generation, Traffic source.