Why is .PDF not used more for email marketing? I was recently at a business meeting of a sucessful business owner - he stated how most of their Electronic Marketing was done by .PDF email attachments. This makes alot of sense to me. PDF documents when used for promotions are much neater and "classier" than any .html page. Having said this, I did a small pilot run of marketing by .pdf and my own test message that was added to the list of only 30 emails addresses - the test message went to the spam folder! My question is this: 1) Why is .PDF not used for email marketing more often? 2) If .PDF documents sent en masse are a flag to spam filters - is there any way I can bypass this?
Sorry jacobean. I don't understand what you did. Did you try to send yourself an email with a PDF attachment? Actually, I never thought about sending a pdf. Sounds interesting. If you are talking about sending an email with a PDF attachment, I can offer a few things. Be sure to have some text in the body of your email. I would say you would probably need at least 50 words. The reason for this is that many ISPs, mailservers etc will block messages with little content and an attachment of any kind. This method is commonly used for spreading viruses. With regards to a pdf looking better than html, I will have to disagree a little on that one. There are plenty of good looking html email templates you can use. I've seen some that look better then some of my websites. But, the problem there is that many of us choose not to receive html emails and use plain text. In that case, the pdf would be the way to go... I gotta think about this for awhile. Sounds like it would be worth trying..
Yes, I used another email account of mine as a test account...but the the email message went straight to spam. I think the idea is great - lets face it everyone is using .html and as you said some people have it blocked. When you use .PDF it immedialtely stands out...but why do so few people use it? There must be some reason? Any takers on this?
yeah attachments on an e-zine are usually looked at as bad/possible viruses. The m ain reason why people dont use pdf files is that most people who do e-zines will place them in straight text via email, but however they like to place them inside ebooks. And most of the download sites only accept executables and installation programs, most .pdf files are not excepted at software sites.
also i dont like downloading things to my computer from random email newsletters for example there is probably 1 out of 30 that i would go the extra mile of downloading and storing it on my computer
A little known fact is that pdf files are actually crawled and indexed by the search engines - I love pdf marketing - create content with links to your site and give it away. Great viral marketing method. Offer your pdf file to your subscribers, and just have them download it off of your website
I love PDFs. Plus they are compact no additional files needed like images are embdeded. minus you need additional softwares like Acrobat, etc. or plugins to view in browser the files must be downloaded to your system to view it sometimes it will halt your system for few mins when you try to view in browser as the pdf is downloading in background.
I see a lot of people spamming torrent trackers with PDF files all the time. Does that count as marketing as well?
I have to agree that PDF marketing works. I've created pdf's as pre-sells for some products then submitted the pdf's to pdf sharing sites. They've had some good results.
If you can, I'd ask this business owner how he/she is able to get these emails past the spam folders. My guess is that his list is extreemely friendly to his offers in order to allow attachments to get through to the "inbox." If you find out the answer, I'd be very interested as I'm sure this forum would be as well.
But the thing is from my experience, I rarely see v_iagra and super bonus lottery schemes use .PDF for their marketing?
Honestly, I I think the downloading is probably the main reason why most people stay away from this form. That may also be why its going straight to spam.
Now I wish I asked that business owner - what exact method his firm uses that makes his .PDF so successful? Maybe his staff cold calls in advance, gets the email address and then sends...I wished I went into specifics now.
If you want to give people pdf files in your email, you could give them a link to a download page with a link on that page to the pdf file. You may want to put a link to adobe reader on the download page too because some people may not have adobe on their computer and wouldn't be able to open the pdf file.