Periodic Fable

Recently I’ve been finding that a lot of emails promoting events and conferences, and even company newsletters, are arriving in my inbox just in image form – or PDF – with an email saying no more than “see attachment”. I find these very frustrating and here’s why.

Am I the only one who sees this as really bad practice? Maybe I’m old fashioned – I am still very cautious about using HTML emails! – but there are several reasons as a community manager and blogger that I find this very frustrating.

• Many people can’t see images in email or have them stripped out – that includes small businesses, educational institutions and large companies! I haven’t allowed images in my email since I started to get offensive images in spam emails many years ago. And if you’re reading email on a Blackberry or other mobile – you haven’t a hope!
• Many of these attachments are too large for small email quotas.
• It’s quicker to see the text (in my email software for example I have to click to see an image or a PDF then open a program to see it in – but text is there to glance at straightaway)
• It’s quicker to scan a few lines of text in a small Email window than to have to scroll round a large coloured image or page on the screen to glean the details of the event.
• With text I can easily cut and paste the event info into my calendar and am much more likely to do so.
• With text I can easily cut and paste the event or information into forums and news in any of the many communities I run (for a recent advert for an education event I could have quickly advertised it to 1000 teachers!). I don’t want to have to retype from an image or open a PDF where the layout often precludes cutting and pasting.
• With text I can easily cut and paste into any one of several blogs and create a post about the event that’s more than an advert and thus even better promotion in the blogosphere and on Google. I haven’t time to retype information – and remember – I’m usually doing this as a favour.
• Images and PDFs are designed for print purposes – as flyers or posters – and aren’t appropriate for digital delivery.

I’m not saying don’t send attractive flyers or adverts (although please check the size before clogging up our inboxes). Just let us have the text AS WELL!

With so many of these image-only attachments arriving I’m beginning to think I’m the only person who feels this way. Apart from the adverts looking good if you print them out and post them on a wall or leave them on a table – what good reason is there for delivering email marketing like this? Please let me know.

Originally published on reachfurther.com