You’d think it would be easy. You’ve a new brochure, catalogue, voucher 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 couple hundred regular customers, then usually there’s few problems. Send out small batches of flyers as blind copies (bcc) from MS Outlook, with a message and the attach the pdf file. For bills, they’re sent out individually. Very cost-effective.

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

Firstly, few ISPs (Xtra, iHug, Orcon etc) will appreciate you sending out a bulk emails like this. Sending more than 50 or so will often raise alarm bells and you’d be accused of spamming. Possibly shut down. Perhaps after weeks of negotiation and IT or software modifications you’ll overcome this, but then note your internet connection bills are on the increase. Especially so 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.

Quickly your IT people and/or email provider will see the obvious solution. Place the pdf file 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.

Good in Theory – Bad in Practice?

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. And if you’re sending out e-bills, you note that overdues go up, often dramatically.

Let’s say you send out say 1,000 marketing emails, yet the logs indicate only 50-100 people have clicked the link to downloaded the pdf! There seems to be a general reluctance for people 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, we have just 6% opening and reading the pdfs!

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 quite 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. A migration of just 15% per annum is now deemed a ‘success’ even though twice this amount was predicted by the ‘experts’.

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. I’ve been a huge fan of pdf technology for years. Certainly in the B2B market, sending e-brochures and e-bills makes a lot of sense today. There’s some superb toolsets around too, including transpromo options, being the inclusion of marketing promotions and offers within the bills themselves. To date most see transpromo stuff as a printing initiative, but the reality is that if it can be printed, it can be turned into a highly personalised, highly relevant pdf and emailed out too. What’s more, e-bills or flyers can be tracked electronically, which has immense benefits to both marketers AND accountants.

Actually there’s good money to be made for innovative service providers and specialist direct mailing shops, once they get their head around the fact that they still retain the key data processing and have new ‘delivery’ income. NZ Post and Xerox are the main losers, although in some market segments, migration will be slow, and for good reasons too. Paper, Xerox and NZ Post will be with us for a while yet….

However what’s critical in this online migration exercise, is that people usually prefer to have any pdf flyers/bills arrive as an email attachment, NOT a link to a website and/or tied in with complicated logins. Somehow e-billing has become the domain of IT and website developers, needless creating an other level of complexity and costs. It should have stayed with the billing people who can more easily create the needed pdfs, being an exact copy of the paper versions. It’s really a delivery issue…

Admittedly with email delivery there’s IT issues, spam filters and subject lines to consider, since these factors alone often determine if the recipient will even open the email, let alone any attached pdf file – But that’s another [big] topic.

Let’s do it right

But there’s little doubt it can all work well if done right – It’s just that almost no one does so because they simply don’t understand the human dynamics or technological issues. A few utility companies in the UK have lead the way, sending out e-bills as pdf attachments to an email. The results were that lots more people opened the bill and then paid on time. In one case, overdues dropped by over 50% which has big cashflow and overhead benefits. (read more)

If your market accepts it, and done right, pdf creation-distribution of flyers and bills saves a fortune.  Instead of around 70c-$1.00 per item, using pdfs and electronic delivery reduces this to under 20c. If transpromo options are introduced, sending out bills can actually generate additional income, over and above what’s due.

However if too few people open, then  read the pdf, it’s all a wasted exercise.

So, if you’re looking for an integrated campaign that distributes pdf flyers or e-bills the RIGHT WAY, talk to us.

email kevin@digitalmarketing.co.nz