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Attachments in campaigns - A short guide.
Attachments in campaigns - A short guide.

Should I use attachments in a campaign? Attachment format. File size. Email deliverability.

Jelena avatar
Written by Jelena
Updated over a week ago

Attachments are a great way to give your prospects more value to the message and make your email and offer more appealing. Of course, in life, there are always pros and cons and the same goes for sending an attachment.

When it comes to cold email campaigns, attaching files to the messages may actually make you look less reliable as an email sender, anything else besides the actual text content can seem shady, thus cause some serious deliverability problems. Consider this from the recipients’ point of view: receiving a message with an attachment from an unfamiliar source will more likely look like malware.

Attaching a file to an email 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 ESP, inevitably hurting your sender’s reputation and harming your future email campaigns.

Every email file comes with a size (also called weight) that influences how the email client handles the content. The file’s weight depends on both the HTML included in the message and the images, videos, or audio files it contains. Email clients don’t have a standard set of rules for handling larger file sizes. File size can also affect the email client’s ability to receive these emails.

By now you must be completely confused about whether you could include the attachments or not.

Short answer- yes, you can, but you should definitely follow the best practices to avoid being labeled:

  1. Explaining the attachment- Having a line or two to explain the context of the attachment makes it a bit more trustworthy. Also, 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.

  2. Follow the ESPs’ rules when it comes to a file format- Every ESP has its limits on file formats. It’s best to keep your attachments in .txt, .jpg, .gif, and.pdf formats. If you still need to send a file in a different format, make sure you are using an email attachment format acceptable by your ESP.

  3. If you use attachments, make sure they don’t overload your email size-wise. Before you proceed with the attachment make sure to check the email sending limits of your ESP to know your email size limit. Also, please note that different ESP differently accepts emails with attachments and it varies from one ESP to another. There is the possibility that your email will be rejected depending on the file format and how big of a message your prospects can actually receive in their mailbox.

  4. Use links instead- You don’t have to send an actual file. Instead, you can upload the file to your server. Google Drive/ One Drive, or Dropbox. This way, your recipients can just click on the link and easily access the file online. You can also create a separate landing page for your prospects and put some additional information there. The upside is that it allows you to easily track the click rates, which is not possible with the attached files. The downside is that you should limit yourself to 3 links per email to avoid getting caught by spam filters.

  5. Save email attachments for campaigns to existing customers and warm leads Those contacts already know you so they will more likely look at the attachments.

  6. If you still need to send your prospects a file via email, try asking them if they want to get a PDF/an ebook/a video with more details on the matter. This way, you’ll have your conversation starter, which may boost your reply rate.

After reading everything previously mentioned, you decided to include some attachments in your campaigns, please note that they can be tracked if an appropriate option is selected in campaign Step 1 (Attachment tracking). Each attachment download will be recorded and shown in campaign statistics.

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