You're Leaving Fingerprints All Over the Place!

If you didn’t already know…

Every email you send gets fingerprinted by the ISPs to help them determine if your email should go to the inbox or the spam box.

When monetizing your newsletter you must understand how it works.

What is email fingerprinting?

Two of the biggest factors when analyzing an email’s fingerprint are the subject line and the body content.

That helps the mailbox providers decide if you deserve to hit the inbox.

Advertisers are fingerprinted like crazy!

I took a look at an offer that’s been getting mailed recently and here is the truth.

In 30 days, the same subject line and creative were emailed by 57 different newsletters.

You can see in the snapshot below how all the subject lines are exactly the same and are being sent by different domains.

Each one of the emails has the exact same copy in the body of the email which can be seen below.

The problem here is that the ISPs can easily identify this and see that they are simply promotional emails.

Now here’s where it gets tricky.

The advertisers want you to use their exact copy because they’ve tested it and know that it will convert for them.

The copy has also been approved by their legal compliance department.

So you're often stuck with sending their copy, but unfortunately so are 57 other newsletters.

What can you do?

Here are 3 strategies you can implement.

1) Request unique copy from the advertiser.

This is the ideal scenario. If you have a good relationship with the advertiser, ask them if you can write your own copy and have them approve it. Or ask them to create unique copy just for you.

2) Use their copy as an Advertorial on your website.

I’ve been utilizing this technique for years. Not wanting to send offers that I knew would get fingerprinted easily, I started adding the offer creative to my website as an article and clearly label it as sponsored.

This solved two issues. Fingerprinting was now out the window, and I wasn’t using the advertiser’s tracking link in my email which is another queue to the ISPs that it’s a promo.

3) Embed the entire copy within your newsletter.

By including all the other content and sections of your newsletter with the advertiser’s offer copy, you can still make your newsletter more unique than a standard dedicated offer email.

I consider these more sponsorships or native-style formats which can help with its deliverability.

The main issue with this strategy is you will most likely get a lot less traffic to the offer than you were hoping for.

Now that you know what I do to hide my fingerprints, what are you going to do?

Don’t forget to wipe down your computer,
Chris Miquel

Follow me on Twitter: @miqchris

Or on LinkedIn: chrismiquel