A sponsor in your issue

A confirmed booking finds the issue going out on its date by itself, and then waits in the composer for you to place it. The finding is automatic. The placing is a button, because where a sponsored item sits in a running order is an editorial decision and a booking that quietly rewrote somebody’s issue would be worse than a click.

How a booking finds the issue

Whichever happens second joins the two together: scheduling an issue for a date that already has bookings, or confirming a booking for a date that already has an issue scheduled.

Schedule an issue and every confirmed booking for that day is attached to it, with the confirmation message telling you how many. Confirm a booking and Issue Mint looks for a draft or scheduled issue already set to go out that day. A draft with no send time yet has no date to match on, so nothing happens until you schedule it, and then the join runs the other way. Dates are compared in your newsletter’s own timezone rather than in ours, which matters for anybody sending late in the evening or in the small hours.

An issue that has already sent is skipped. Attaching a sponsor to something sitting in people’s inboxes would record a placement that never ran.

The panel in the composer

Sponsors booked for an issue’s date appear as their own panel in the composer, above the running order.

Each line names the sponsor, the slot type and the price you agreed, along with the destination link if one was captured when you confirmed. Beside it is one button, reading “add the link” or “add the banner” depending on whether the slot type takes an image. Once placed, the line reads “in this issue” instead, so a glance at the panel tells you whether you have honoured everything you sold. The panel is absent entirely on an issue with nothing booked for its date.

What the button does

Pressing it adds one sponsored item to the issue, at the end of the uncategorised items, marked as sponsored.

The title is the sponsor name you confirmed, and the destination is the link you gave. Where no link was captured, the item is created with a placeholder destination, and nothing stops you sending an issue that still has one, so fill it in while you are there. From there it behaves like any other item you can drag, reorder and write under, which is covered in sponsored items. Pressing the button twice does not produce two sponsors.

What you write underneath is the part worth spending a minute on. A sponsored link with a line of your own copy reads like the rest of your issue. One with a slogan pasted off a press release reads like an advert, and your readers can tell the difference immediately.

Banners

A booking on a slot type that takes an image asks for artwork rather than copy, and the item renders as a full-width image instead of a headline.

Upload a PNG, JPG or WEBP up to 2 MB, with alt text of up to 250 characters so the banner still says something to a reader whose mail client blocks images. SVG is refused because mail clients do not render it. Removing the image turns the item back into an ordinary sponsored link, and replacing it is a single upload.

What the reader sees

A sponsored item carries the word “Sponsored” above it, in the email, on your website, and in the plain text version of the issue.

In the email it is a small label above the title or the banner. On your archive website the item sits in a lightly tinted block with the same label, and its link is marked as sponsored in the underlying markup, which is what search engines expect of a paid placement. In the plain text part, the title is prefixed with [SPONSORED]. There is no setting that removes the label anywhere, which is the correct answer for everybody involved.

Clicks on a sponsored link

A sponsored link is tracked exactly like every other link in the issue, and its clicks appear in the issue report next to the rest.

That number is the one worth quoting in a renewal conversation, and it is the reason link tracking is worth having switched on before you sell anything. Issue Mint adds its own campaign parameters to the destination without overwriting any the sponsor put there themselves, so a tracking link they supplied keeps reporting into their own system as well as yours.

A slot sold outside Issue Mint

A booking is not required for a sponsored item to exist. Any item in an issue can be marked as sponsored with a tick, and it then behaves in every way like one that came from a booking.

Use that for a sponsor you agreed with over email, a swap with another newsletter, or a house advert for something of your own. The grid and the enquiry inbox are there to save you a spreadsheet, not to stand between you and your own issue.