Learn about the comparative advantages between sending those documents of high relevance to your business as attachments and continuing to use traditional mail. Evaluate the conditions offered by each one and make the most convenient choice.

Given the growing need to deliver documentation – often crucial – to your clients, we will analyze the convenience of continuing to use traditional mail or decide to take a step forward and attach these documents to your email shipments. To do this, we compare the factors that your clients attach the most importance to:

Cost: Sending a letter by post at least triples the cost of a message with attachments via email, without considering that this value varies greatly depending on the distance from the destination.

Traceability: Tracking a postal item depends on regular updates by a postal service official. On the contrary, the traceability of a shipment by email is instantaneous and automatic.

Speed: In the best of cases, a traditional shipment is estimated in hours if it is an urban and private mail; Otherwise, it can take days or even more, weeks, considering that in today’s globalized world a company can have customers on five continents. On the contrary, delivery via email occurs in a matter of minutes and to thousands of recipients included in the same shipment.

Deliverability: The deliverability of a letter is relative, since, although it reaches the destination address, it is possible that it will never reach the right person, leading to errors of appreciation in the percentage of delivery of the letters. documents. An email message goes directly to the specific recipient’s mailbox, which ensures that deliverability metrics are accurate as to who it was delivered to.

Digital environment: The growing importance of email to interact with your customers lies mainly in being a way inserted in a digital environment, much appreciated today and used as a two-way communication channel with your business. This translates into a better customer experience for your users regarding your brand, especially when it comes to relatively young consumers.Carbon footprint: Every time we send an email that reaches the inbox of a mailbox, we contribute four grams of CO2 emissions, and if the shipment has attached a document that weighs 1mbps, it is raises to 20 grams.

A traditional paper shipment has an impact on the environment at least two and a half times greater than sending an electronic message of the same characteristics, and can exceed that amount by four times depending on the distance it travels before arriving. to your destination, which greatly increases your company’s carbon emissions and leaves your corporate responsibility on the wrong foot with the society of which you are a part.

What is the best alternative to send documentation via email

Clarified since the best alternative to reach our clients with critical documentation is email, we now have two possible modalities: the first is by inserting links in the body of the message and the second is to attach the files directly to it.

Security: Inserting links to access files has quite low security levels, since hackers use precisely them to redirect to malicious sites, impersonating your company, a strategy known as phishing, whose objective is to steal data important information about your customers, such as credit card numbers and passwords. Another risk of links is what is known as spoofing, which consists of inserting viruses or malware into them so that customers provide valuable personal information without knowing that they are doing it.

21% of permission courier shipments in the world do not reach their destination; are blocked or marked as Spam.-ReturnPath-

Attaching files to a message is recognized today as the safest way to deliver documents to your clients. This is reflected, for example, in the fact that banks in Chile for several years have had in their regulations the express prohibition of including links (links) to download documents in their electronic messaging shipments.

Infrastructure: The download links require a support infrastructure of a certain complexity and often require duplicate and even triplicate repositories at various levels, to ensure document availability, making this practice one of the most expensive in the world. this aspect.

Backup: The backups of each document sent to your clients must also be hosted on this own infrastructure, whose maintenance cost is very high. Such an option is practically unfeasible for companies that send large volumes of documents in compliance with the regulation of some markets, such as banking, insurance companies, health services and the like.

Email attachments are one of the certain ways to attract your recipient’s attention.

What are email attachments? They are files that are added to the email message bringing extra value to it. These may be files of different formats, sizes, and contents.

Adding an attachment is pretty straightforward, but there are limitations, especially when it comes to email campaigns. Which is why we’ve created this short guide to explain the do’s and don’ts of attachments in emails.

The element of trust: email attachments may seem suspicious

Attachments are often used by marketers when writing a professional email as a way to give more value to the message and incentivize the user to open an email. If you are trying to reach out to a specific prospect and use attachments as a sort of personalization method, it might work.

But when we are dealing with cold emailing, including anything else besides the actual text content can seem shady.  This may sound obvious, but many marketers forget that when the recipient receives a message with an attachment from an unfamiliar source, they are likely to believe it’s malware.

Cold email isn’t a bad thing per se, but attaching a file to it makes it look far more suspicious and makes it more complicated for emails to avoid spam filters. This can put your email in the spam folder or worse, labeled by the ISP or mail client, inevitably hurting your sender’s reputation and harming your future email campaigns.

Moreover, many people ask “Should you explain attachments in business emails?” The answer is a resounding “yes”, of course. Explaining the attachment makes it a bit more trustworthy. This is why you should try not to send an email message that contains an attachment only – it doesn’t look professional at all and doesn’t raise any trust.

IP or domain reputation: attachments have a negative impact

Once again, using attachments in cold emails can throw a wrench in your campaign. Bulk cold emailing using attachments is likely to result in a high number of complaints. Every domain on the web is identified by ISP before it’s processed, allowing to block pirate content or adult web pages through the labeling of domains and IPs. A high complaint rate can catch your ISP’s attention.

In our case, the IP or email address you use for cold emailing can be flagged by ISP, and your email messages will either end up in the spam folder or completely blocked.

Therefore, email attachments in cold emails can lead to the deletion of your email domain name from a list of reputable sources. Use them only in small personalized email campaigns or with your existing clients.

Attachment formats: a wrong format can lead to an email block

So you’ve decided to use an attachment for your campaign email. You need to make sure people will feel confident and interested enough to open it. First of all, your email message in itself must convince the receiver to open/download the email attachment. If that’s not a problem, be mindful of this one rule.

Never send anything besides documents or images. In most cases, the user will never download anything besides a clearly visible document or image. It’s best to keep your attachments in .txt, .jpg, .gif, and.pdf formats.

PDFs make a great addition to any nurturing email, but they can be difficult to create and edit. You can find out how to edit a PDF easily from our friends at JotForm.

If you still need to send a file in a different format, make sure you are using an acceptable email attachment format because every ESP has its limits on file formats (for example, look through at Gmail attachment limits).

Size limits: follow email attachment limits for good deliverability

Want advice on the size of email attachments? Email servers and clients have email sending limits, so make sure you follow them. Moreover, email clients may reject your email as a whole because of its size. Try to keep your email message body within 15-100kb, with files no bigger than 10mb.

If you need to send a bigger file, it’s safer and generally more acceptable to attach a link to the file on Google Drive. Besides hosting large files, Drive will check the file for malware, solving the trust issue.

The email attachment size limits described above are considered universal if you don’t want to get caught in a spam filter.

Conclusion

While email attachments are a usual sight for marketing emails, there are certain rules you have to follow to keep your email deliverability high. If you’ve already taken care of your sender reputation and always use an email checker to clean your lists before sending, the main characteristic you still have to pay attention to is the attachment size limit – the smaller the file, the higher your chances to get into the recipient’s inbox.

Try to avoid sending files to cold leads: your email can be deleted or reported if there’s no established relationship between you and the recipient.

 

Many people make costly mistakes when writing emails with attachments. It is important that you clearly notify the recepient that your email contains one or more attachments.

What we write and how we go about communicating in emails with attachments is determined by who we are relating to. This is why when an email is sent and a file is attached to the message, the manner we communicate this differs and is determined by our relationship with the person at the other end or the purpose we seek to achieve.

What is an Email Attachment?

Email attachments are files that are attached to email messages, thereby increasing the potential value or benefit of that message to the recipient. These may be files of different formats, sizes, and contents. Attachment can be in text files, documents, spreadsheets, and PDF’s form.

Email attachment depends on whom the recipient is to you, when you are sending a casual attachment, like friends and family you don’t need to put too much emphasis on the type of files you’re attaching and emailing to your recipients. However, if the email is professional or academic for example your boss, business clients, or the head of a college, you need to think a bit more about how best to present the information you are about to send.

Why Emails with Attachments are Different

In a formal setting, when an email is attached, it could be unclear how to express this to the recipient of the email, especially in cases whereby the only important thing is the attached file and there seems to be no reason or purpose to have a body for the message.

Writing the Subject for Emails with Attachments

Some people will not open an email attachment unless they have an idea of what is attached. The title you have chosen to give your email may sometimes reflect that it is an email with an attachment and shows that the body of your message will be short. For example;

Title: Report, 2016 Carnival

Title: List of names of shortlisted candidates

The titles above do not only give a clue that your email may have attached files but they also give an idea of what to expect in the attachments.

Writing the Body for Emails with Attachments

There are ways to let the recipient of your mail be aware of the files you have attached. This you may have to do directly, stating it clearly. It is important to you that the recipient of your email sees what you have sent. You may go about it by simply letting them know in the most formal way. For example;

“Please find attached to this email a copy of my Curriculum Vitae” or “Find attached to this mail a copy of the Sales Report for the year 2016″.

In cases whereby the only important matter is the attached file, and the body of the message is not quite important, you should make the recipient aware of the files and write briefly what each file is about in the body of the message. It is vital you do not leave the part where the body of the message should be written blank even if the email attachment is the only reason you are sending the email. The body of the message can be built to center around the file(s) you have sent. Your email should also have a subject matter. It could be considered rude to leave those crucial spaces empty.

Sample Emails with Attachments

SAMPLE 1:  Writing Emails with Attachments

Good morning madam,

There are certain things to note when sending an attachment with your email.

In response to the inquiry you made concerning the list of machines and equipment available for inspection in December 2016, please find attached the list that gives the information you need.

Please, let us know if you have any questions regarding the information provided in the attachment.

Thank you.

SAMPLE 2:  Writing Emails with Attachments

Dear Sir,

Please find attached to this email pictures of the products that are available in the supermarket and the discount prices. There are five (5) attached JPEG files.

Kindly let us know if there are details that require clarification. We will be glad to help.

Best regards.