5 Ways To Get Your PR Pitch Opened, Read and Responded To – 10 Yetis Insight Blog

If you aren’t pitching your story in the good old-fashioned way (not as old-school as fax/post… I mean with your actual voice on the phone) then you’ll no doubt be relying very heavily on email for outreach.Every PR agency will use emails for their outreach approach.

Journalists get hundreds of PR pitches every day (trust me, I’ve asked the ones I’m lucky enough to be liked by), and they don’t all have the time to read everything they receive. They aren’t superhuman. They are very busy.

The subject line of your email pitch is what’s really going to sell your story. It’s your chance to shine; just one line of texts stands between you and potential coverage for your campaign or client. So, you need to make it count.

I’ve been doing a little experiment over the past week to try and demonstrate to you lovely people how you can maximise the chances of getting your PR pitch opened, read and responded to. Essentially, this is a guide – of sorts – which you can use to try and make your pitches more effective and – hopefully – more likely to result in coverage.

I’ll take it away, shall I?

The Test

I wanted to find out how receptive journalists were to different ways of pitching (mostly via email, but with some phone work thrown in for fun). I played around with my subject lines, timing and email content to see what difference the changes made to the response rate and engagement levels. I used HubSpot and its email tracker tool to see what was being opened and what was being ignored (it’s free – try it). For total disclosure, with HubSpot you sometimes don’t get an ‘open’ notification if the person you’re sending to has pictures disabled on incoming emails (no idea why… you just don’t). However, I went with it anyway and found it to be effective for my little experiment.

Some Methods I Used

1.Mentioning the media outlet I was targeting in the subject line

2.Putting ‘Pitch’ at the start of the subject line

3.Putting ‘Exclusive’ in the subject line (if it was an exclusive)

4.Putting a question in the subject line

5.Calling ahead of emailing

I sent 10 emails out for each of the methods above (50 in total) and monitored what happened afterwards in terms of open rate, replies and coverage.

The Results

All of these methods proved much more effective than putting something generic and dull in the subject line.

Most successful of them all was putting the media outlet’s name in the subject line; this seemed to increase open rates a lot for me (by around 35% when compared to those where I didn’t include the media title in the subject line). For example, my email tracking service told me straight away that the below pitch had been opened and I also had a reply from the journalist very quickly.

I think by putting the media outlet name in the subject line somehow, you’re showing that the email pitch is bespoke for them and not just something you’ve spammed every Tom, Doris and Harry with.

In terms of how quickly journalists got back to me about my pitches, I found that by writing ‘exclusive’ in the subject line I received much faster responses. The average reply time for an ‘exclusive’ pitch was 35 minutes for me, compared to around 2-3 hours for those pitches with a question in the subject line. I guess it’s something to do with the journalist not wanting to be too late to get the exclusive.

Calling ahead of emailing to lay the groundwork for the pitch is, I think, a good idea; and the best way to build relationships for media and influencer outreach. I’m not saying you can’t have some banter and a good conversation via email – you most certainly can – but an actual conversation is always the best way. Every journalist I called before sending my pitch over, to run the idea past them first, opened my subsequent email and the pitches received more ‘views’ according to my email tracking service than my other methods (an average of 4). Clearly this meant that by chatting to the journalist first and runningideas by them with the spoken word as well as the written kind, they were more invested in what I had to say.

Putting ‘pitch’ or a question in the subject line, for example ‘one for you?’ seemed to work too; although, granted, not quite as well as the other methods. I received 4 replies out of 10 emails for my outreach with ‘pitch’ in the subject line and 6 in total were opened. For those emails I sent out with a question in the subject line, I received 3 replies out of 10 and 7 were opened.

And this is what heartbreak looks like, FYI...

I now have 11 solid leads for coverage off the back of my pitches, with additional conversations still ongoing and strong “potentials” for coverage. That’s a success rate of 22% which I think it fairly decent.

Conclusion

When relying on email to pitch stories or ideas to the media, use the subject line to your advantage. It’s often a case of trial and error, but I’ve seen that even with press releases (which we’d normally just pitch with the headline as the email subject) it can be better to make your choice of words a bit more tailored.

To recap, then, five things that you can try out to increase the chances of getting your PR pitch email opened, read and responded to are calling ahead, name the media outlet you’re contacting in the subject line and putting ‘pitch’, ‘exclusive’ and a question in the subject.

Good luck and happy pitching!