Regardless of your offerings to your clients, you should understand that it should be valuable to them, and you have to demonstrate its real value to clients; if not, you cannot close the deal. So, when it comes to sending emails or contacting prospects, you should seriously think about how you can introduce your offerings and solutions in an adequate way. At this point, attachments to emails can be extremely helpful.
However, you might face various issues when doing so but worry not. We’ve compiled this short guide to describe why this is problematic and how to use email attachments without any problem.
Attention and trust
Email Attachments look suspicious
It can be challenging to get others’ attention when you are cold-emailing them. Attachments are one way of doing so, but they may come off as shady and unexpected for all sorts of reasons – like including an attachment in your message without even telling the user what they’ll find inside.
Attaching a file to an email will make it look more suspicious and complicated for the recipient, who may fly into spam filters. As such, your emails could end up in either their junk folder or worse – labeled as “spam” by ISPs and mail clients, which would surely harm them reputation-wise if not dealt with quickly enough.
Solution: never send a cold email message that has an attachment or file only. Such messages or emails are not professional, and you cannot gain the trust of others through these emails. Instead, try explaining what email contains and writing a few words about the attachment you are sending as it will sound more trustworthy.
IP or domain reputation
Emails with attachments may have a negative effect
Bulk cold emails with attachments can bring more number of complaints than the others. ISP recognizes every domain before they are processed, and it can block spam content or adult links.
A high complaint rate can be troublesome as it will notify your ISP’s attention, and as a result, they will mark your email address as spam, and your cold pitches will end up in the recipient’s spam folder or blocked. Therefore, email attachments in cold emails can result in the removal of your email domain name.
Solution: Try to limit the use of attachments only. It would be more appropriate when you are sending emails to your existing clients. Alternatively, if you want to attach files in your cold emails, try to make them a bit personalized.
Attachment format
An incorrect format can result in an email block
So you still want to use email attachments for your campaign. In this situation, you should ensure that people want to know what’s inside. First of all, your email should be engaging and must convince the recipient to download and open the email attachment.
The issue is when a user gets flashy and useless stuff. In this case, most people will ignore the email and remove it.
Solution: It’s advised to use .txt, .jpg, .gif, and.pdf formats for your attachments as all these formats are common and most people recognize them.
Deliverability
When using attachments in email, verify the size
It’s essential to know the limits of your email client and server. Email attachments can make for a great way to share content with others, but if you exceed these size limitations in sending them out, it is at risk of getting caught by spam filters.
This is especially true and important for pictures and images. Keep in mind that email spammers often use images to hide the text in their emails, making it undetectable to spam filters. So, if your attached picture is too large, you are at risk of being flagged by the email client.
Solution: The recommended size for attachment files is 10 MB. If you are using Gmail, you can attach files up to 25MB in one email. However, if you want to send a bigger file through Gmail, we recommend using Google Drive. With images, try to keep them 60kb image attachments as it will keep your deliverability rate high.
Approachability
Unadjusted or Improper images in email attachments are not advisable
It’s essential to think about dimensions when emailing images. Dragging an image without taking into account how it will look on a reader’s computer screen can shift the size and position, which may affect their perception of your message in negative ways – especially if we’re talking about something sensitive like photos or videos, for example.
Solution: Remember that 53% of emails are viewed on mobile devices. Hence you need to ensure that your picture looks appropriate on both desktop computers and mobile. To ensure this, try to keep the image dimensions up to 590 px width for banners and 530 px for other images.
Lastly, keep in mind that sizing a picture from large to small is a good idea instead of stretching a small picture to larger dimensions.
HTML email attachments
Often these are not displayed correctly
An email attachment is not only a .png or .jpeg file; it can be an HTML-styled file containing text. Most companies use these files and templates in their emails for promotional content. However, the problem with these templates is that they often don’t work well on all devices and email clients.
Solution: Be careful when using HTML templates. Try to figure out email clients treat such templates before using them.
In the End
Attachments are useful, and they bring life to plain-text cold emails. Yet, you need to be extra careful when sending emails with attachments, as they have a list of pitfalls that you might face.
Before attaching any files to your email message, remember:
- Don’t send the only attachment emails.
- Try to send email attachments to your current customers rather than future customers.
- Consider the attachment format and size, dimensions limits.
- Be careful when using HTML attachments.
