Question: In last month's article, Email Preheaders Work, So Make Them Work For You, you advocated putting a small piece of hidden text in the email. Won't that add to the overall spam score?

Answer: I'm always grateful to readers when they force me to look at an issue from an angle I never considered. In my excitement over finding a quick and easy way to make my teaser text pop, I didn't realize that I was advocating a trick commonly used by spammers.

It turns out that there's a name for this practice: "hidden text salting." Spammers do it to trick spam content filters into thinking that an email message has a higher text-to-HTML ratio than it actually does or to make spammy keywords less noticeable by increasing the volume of benign keywords.

To answer your question, spam content filters don't appear to penalize hidden text salting – yet. I closely monitor the Inside Lyris HQ newsletter using Lyris HQ Deliverability Tools, which checks the message against 30 different spam filters. In the two months that I used a small snippet of hidden text, my overall spam score remained low and my inbox delivery didn't decrease.

That said, when I consulted the Email Marketer's Club, a social-networking site where you can get advice from other email marketers, the general consensus was that this situation will not last. The technology exists for content filters to easily spot hidden text, and it's only a matter of time before they start penalizing email marketers who use it.

I no longer advocate using hidden text, and I'm happy to say there's a less-troublesome alternative that's equally effective. Put a 1 pixel x 1 pixel clear graphic image at the very top of your email, and add your desired teaser text to the image's Alt attribute. Both Outlook 2007 and Gmail display the Alt copy as teaser text in the inbox.

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About The Author

Anita M. Taylor is online marketing manager at Oversee.net.

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