Create a PDF, attach it to an email, and send it to your entire database. Easy, right? Right. Effective, right? Wrong.
Email marketing is a such a powerful tool, yet so many businesses aren’t using it to their advantage.
By sending a PDF attachment to your contacts, you’re bypassing the huge potential effective email marketing has to offer. In fact, if you’re not careful, you may damage client relationships – not to mention your emails will probably end up in people’s junk or spam inboxes.
Here’s 5 reasons why PDF email newsletters aren’t effective:
1. Spam issues
Using an email server such as Outlook? You could be in for a shock. Every time a reader marks one of your PDF email newsletters as spam, you lose credibility with ISPs (Internet Service Providers). If this happens too frequently, an ISP may well block emails from your domain name, which means your customers won’t receive anything from you. What’s worse is you won’t know a thing until error messages take over your inbox.
2. Corrupted files
Annoyingly, some email servers modify your email as it passes through their system. Whilst not your fault, this can result in a corrupted PDF file, meaning you’ve just sent your database a PDF that no one can read.
3. Blocked attachments
Your PDF email may make it past an email server, but you’re not out of the woods yet. Spam filters in all major email hosting such as Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo! and Outlook may well block your attachment (the PDF) entirely. Attachment-based email viruses are growing rapidly, so to the likes of Gmail, any attachment is a potential security threat.
4. Missing forwards
Your customers may love the content within your PDF, but what happens when they want to share your email? This is a great and invaluable way to spread the word, but PDF attachments have a tendency to go missing once an email is forwarded.
5. Large databases VS PDFs
You’ve probably spent time and possibly money creating a database of your customers, clients and potential leads. The thing is, sending out a PDF attachment to hundreds, or even thousands, of emails in one go is a no-no. It’s a sure-fire way of telling email servers that you’re sending spam, plus, it’s likely that the program you use to store your database doesn’t get on with email attachments.
OK, maybe PDF email newsletters are a bad idea. So now what do I do?
Simple! HTML email newsletters.
These may sound scary, but there are programs that do all the coding behind the scenes, so you don’t have to. By sending email newsletters through these programs, which are secure and email server-friendly, you free yourself from spam issues and are able to track the activity of your email campaign.
It’s also a lot easier to manage your database in these programs, most of which automatically remove dud emails.
We use multiple programs and software to create and send email newsletters, but our favourites are MailChimp and Infusionsoft. We are able to design branded email templates to match our clients’ business, arrange content and images in a stylish, functional way, and can easily manage multiple databases at a time.