In today’s world of “spoofing” legitimate senders, “phishing” emails and Trojan viruses, it is easier than ever to do significant harm to an innocent person’s computer or worse hoodwink them out of their hard earned money. The number one delivery vehicle for malware is email attachments, and for this reason Email Service Providers are increasingly sophisticated in their quest to protect their clients. What does this mean for the legitimate email marketer? Two very important things: 1) It is tougher each day to get past those ESP filters, and 2) If you DO get past the spam filters, the people receiving your email with an attachment are understandably reluctant to open them.
For these reasons, we do not currently support attaching documents in PITCHcrm. However, there are a few alternative methods:
- Include the details of your document in the body of the email itself. Although we list this one first (as it is the most obvious), we realize that this typically isn’t practical. If it were, you would not have created the document in the first place! Therefore, we have two additional suggestions, listed in the order of preference from our perspective.
- Provide your recipients with the ability to view or download the document from a legitimate sharing site. (Recommended) For this you can use a file sharing tool like Google Drive or PDF Host, just to name a few free options. These tools allow you to upload the document, and then use a web-link/URL to share with your contacts in a Pitch email, or link to it from your landing page/website.
- Post the information on your website or on a landing page, and link to that web location from your email. This is most preferable in several ways; it allows you to engage your recipient in a very active way, improving your Sender Score with the various Email Service Providers. It gets your customers to your website, where you can (if you want), display other things that might interest them. It also allows you to easily share the information to a wider market by making the page visible in your website menu/navigation; if you want to restrict access to it, you can make sure it is not visible in your navigation. If you still want to provide a document you can host it on your website or even a document sharing site (see the next tip) for easy download.
- Use the .pdf viewer on your computer to convert the .pdf file into a jpg or png (image) file type. Then insert the image file into your Pitch template using the Image content type.
Steps for Using a Sharing Site
First, upload your document to the sharing site. This process will vary depending on the site you choose, but they are all very similar and fairly easy to use. Once your document is uploaded, there will be a way to generate a link to share the document. Once you have the link, copy it and paste into the URL box of a button, image or hyperlink that you insert into your email. When your customer clicks on the button or image they will be automatically directed to view and/or download your document. When using these document sharing tools, we recommend uploading your document in PDF format that is easily displayed on all devices.
If you need more information or one-on-one training regarding this or any other topic in PITCHcrm, please search “Training” in the green Help button. There are links in the article that will appear where you can schedule time with one of our Customer Success team members.