PDF Flyers or Bills to Distribute?

Last Updated on Friday, 11 December 2009 12:12 Written by Kevin Friday, 11 December 2009 07:29

 You’d think it would be easy. You’ve a new brochure, catalogue or monthly bill you want to get out to your customer base. You just want to save on paper and stamps, so it makes sense to email out a pdf.

If you’re a small businessperson with only a few hundred regular customers, then usually there’s few problems. Send out small batches of 30-50 as blind copies (bcc) from MS Outlook, with a message and the attach the pdf file.

However if your customer base is in the thousands, you’ve suddenly a major technological and logistical problem.

Firstly, few ISPs (Xtra, Orcon etc) will appreciate you sending out a bulk campaign like this. Sending more than 50 will often raise alarm bells with ISPs, who could accuse you of spamming and shut you down. Perhaps then after weeks of negotiation and IT processes to get past this, you’ll overcome this, but then start to note your ISP bills will rise, eating into your monthly GB allowance, especially if you send the pdf as an attachment and the file itself is several MB in size. i.e. 5MB x 5000 recipients = 25GB of traffic data, which is often a businesses entire monthly allocation. Result? Higher telecom/ISP bill

Quickly your IT geeks and email provider (if you have one) will see the solution. Place the pdf on your website, with a link in the email for people to download. That way, the data transfer requirement and allowance becomes your customers problem, not yours. Sounds a great idea. The problem is that your website and email logs tell you that very few people are downloading the file and [hopefully] reading it or printing it out!

Show me the numbers!

You send out say 1,000 emails, yet only 50-100 people have downloaded the pdf! There seems to be a reluctance to click on links within emails. In fact a typical industry ‘click-through’ rate is only 20%. If we tie this in with the industry 30% figure for those that even open the email, add in the 20% of these that then download the file, and we have just 6% opening and reading the email!

Now we may have saved 70% of our costs by going to email, but if the result is that over 90% of our customers or prospects don’t even see see the material, we’ve a major problem on our hands… 

Unfortunately this story is common. It’s a quirk the banking people have noted too when they migrated from paper to email distribution. e-Billing was inevitably set up to send out an email with a link, for people to then login and download/view the bill online. They found that it took a while for people to want to go through this process. Bills became overdue and complaints came in, with many reverting back to paper versions. What can we learn from all this?

Firstly, there’s nothing wrong with sending out pdf bills or brochures, if that’s what your customers prefer and you can save some cash. However what people seem to want is to have the bill arrive as an attachment, not a link to a website and/or tied in with complicated logins. With email too there’s the subject of subject lines to consider too, since this alone often determines if the recipient will open the email, let alone the attached pdf file – But that’s another topic.

There is hope

But it can work well if done right. Utilities in the UK that used the pdf attachment to an email (instead of a link), found that many more people would then open the bill and subsequently have it paid, on time. In one case, overdues dropped by over 50% which has big cashflow and overhead benefits.

So, if you’re looking for an integrated print-email campaign that distributes pdfs the right way, talk to us. Phone Kevin at 027 244 4884 or email kevin.trye@actionmail.co.nz