5 Reasons Why PDF Newsletters Don’t Work

Marketing is arguably the backbone of every successful business. There are different marketing strategies that you can use to promote your business. One of them is email marketing. However, the way you use email marketing will determine its effectiveness.

Unfortunately, many people don’t take advantage of the great potential that email marketing carries. Sending email attachments as PDFs deprives you of the benefits that come with email marketing. Most of your emails could end up as junk files and this may damage customer relations.

Here are 5 reasons why PDF newsletters don’t work:

1 Spam issues

This is one of the major reasons why PDF newsletters aren’t effective. If you are using an email server like Outlook, you won’t believe how disadvantaged you be. When a user marks as spam your PDF email newsletter, your credibility with Internet Service Providers (ISPs) is lost.

If this trend continues over a long period of time, an internet service provider may decide to block emails associated with your domain name. This means that your customers won’t be able to receive emails from you anymore.

2 They don’t drive traffic back to your website

A good newsletter should introduce your products and services to prospective customers as well as drive them to your website for more information. After getting to your website, they will have an opportunity to read the entire article and check other pages.

But this is not possible with PDF email attachments. The format doesn’t allow customers to view links and get directions to your website for more information.

3 PDFs can’t be tracked

An ideal newsletter should help you to perform different things including tracking the performance of your website. For example, you should be able to see which articles got many views, understand who opened the newsletter and pushed to the website via links, and even get to know which articles engaged readers more.

However, the options for PDF email attachments are very limited. The only thing you can do is track someone who opened an email follows the PDF link. You won’t be able to see which articles they viewed after opening the PDF file. This means you will have limited data to understand which topics are popular among your readers.

4 No SEO advantage

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a great digital marketing tool. Creating unique and targeted content has the benefit of ranking your page highly on Google. Anyone searching for content related to your business is likely to come across your page and click.

Creating and putting SEO content on password protect PDFs blocks it away from Google. Considering the importance of SEO marketing, using PDFs will greatly disadvantage you.

5 Corrupted files

However much you will not want to believe it, some email servers have the ability to modify your email as it gets through their system. Although this may not be your fault, you will end up sending unreadable PDF files to your customers.

In general, newsletters are great when it comes to marketing. But using PDF newsletters is not very effective.