At Newsworthy, we talk about multimedia attachments quite a bit. Photos, videos, audio files, PDFs, and other documents will enhance the material in your news stories. However, even though we call these files “attachments,” you shouldn’t “attach” them to the press releases you distribute by email.

Attaching files directly to emails can cause deliverability problems. So how do you deliver this valuable content to the media? The answer is to include hyperlinks to your extra content in your emails rather than attaching the files themselves. This can be a little trickier than simply attaching a file, but even if you don’t have your own website, there are plenty of online options for hosting files, and most newswires will provide this service for you.

Let’s take a closer look at why email attachments create problems and how the use of hyperlinks can help solve them.

Spam

If you aren’t recognized as a “safe sender” by a recipient, emails with files attached will be more likely to get caught in that individual’s spam filter than emails without attachments. This started a couple years ago when marketers realized that anti-spam software at the time was only scanning the text in their email messages, and not the content of their attachments. They quickly began sending marketing material as PDFs, spreadsheets and photos.

Since that time, anti-spam software makers have cracked down on attachments. Most programs now examine the contents of incoming documents. If they find anything suspicious in your material, your message will be diverted to a spam filter. In other words, everything you add to your emailed press release essentially increases the chance of it appearing as spam.

It’s important to be recognized as a “safe sender” in newsrooms. Reach out to the individual news outlets you’re targeting and ask them to whitelist your email address. This means a lot of initial legwork and plenty of maintenance over time if you aren’t using a newswire, but it’s worth the effort.

Space

The files you send along with your emails take up extra space in your recipients’ mailboxes. If your file is large (as many audio and video files are), there’s a chance your message may be denied. This could happen for one of two reasons:

First, your recipient’s mailbox could be full. Most email servers have upper limits of storage space associated with every email address. If your recipient isn’t cleaning out their inbox regularly, large emails may not fit in their overcrowded mailbox. Even though most commercial email clients have set the bar pretty high regarding available storage space (Gmail accounts allow between 7 GB and 25 GB) many corporate email accounts have a much smaller capacity.

Second, most email providers set limitations on the overall size of each outgoing and incoming message. These size restrictions will vary from one email client to the next. Unfortunately there’s no way to know a recipient’s limit before sending an email. If a file exceeds the account’s limits, you will receive an “undeliverable” message. While these size restrictions shouldn’t affect most press releases, they could affect emails with large audio or video files attached.

Links

Most of the scenarios I mentioned above are unlikely to happen with traditional press releases. As I mentioned before, the upper limits on email sizes are very high. However, just to be safe, here’s what you should do:

Send a barebones (text only) press release to your email recipients. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting to avoid distributing multimedia files with your press releases. Photos, audio and video are the frosting on the cake that is your press release. And we all love frosting, right?

Instead of “attaching” files to the press releases you send by email, host your files online and link to them in the text of your release. If possible, host the files on your website and direct traffic there. Check with your webmaster. He or she can insert codes to track the traffic on these pages. You’ll get a feel for the level of exposure your releases are getting.

If you don’t have the resources to host files on your website, there are plenty of tools available online for file hosting. Here are a few popular options:

• Flickr
• ImageShack
• YouTube
• Dropbox
• SmugMug

Make it one of your goals to get the people reading your press releases onto your website. This means, creating an online archive of press releases and related multimedia files and linking to the information in every news piece you send by email. Every click will bring you one step closer to your audience.