Newsletter Sponsor Ad Copy & Spam Filters

Peter Platt VP Marketing at SMART Internet Marketing taught me a valuable lesson in email newsletter publishing this week. We ran a text ad for them in one of our newsletters last week and it tanked, tanked, tanked. Plus we hurt our circulation. It was all my fault.

While we let the advertiser say anything they want in the 8 lines of space they've bought, we control the line above their ad where it describes who the sponsor is. Frankly, this comes in handy because I can sometimes help sponsors' clicks by doing a very brief peppy intro. Peter's ad copy had an offer that he worded, "enter our "Optimize your Vacation Budget" sweepstakes. I was in a rush, so without thinking I slammed a peppier version in the sponsor line, Win a Free Vacation from SMART Internet.

Peter got 35 clicks, total. Then over the next few days readers began complaining, "how come there's no issue this week?"
Turns out my sponsor line was "caught" by many companies' and some ISPs anti-spam programs. So the issue didn't get through to a whole bunch of people.

Now that the content of your advertisements can affect your deliverability, should email publishers add a list of "forbidden terms" to their media kits? To learn more about what terms can get caught in spam filters, check out this short article by our Tech Columnist, Alexis Gutzman.

http://www.marketingsherpa.com/sample.cfm?contentID=1932