How to craft a successful cold email pitch
We’ve all been there—you pitch a great story idea to the media, only to be met with silence, or even worse, rejection.
What went wrong? Why isn’t your PR email pitch being responded to? Today, we’re sharing a new guide about how to get on journalists’ radars and the best ways to make your cold PR email pitches sizzle.
What is a cold PR pitch?
A cold pitch is a story pitch sent to a reporter you’ve never met and with whom you have no prior relationship. Therefore, it needs to be especially well-crafted in order to avoid coming across as spam or filling journalists’ inboxes with the dreaded ‘never-hear-from-them-again’ reaction.
Here are a few tips on how to craft cold PR pitches that will get you the meaningful coverage you’re after.
Connect before email outreach
Successful PR email pitching boils down to one key factor: relationships.
In today’s fast-paced news cycle, it’s not always enough to send out an email and hope that someone will cover your news story or review your product or service.
One way you can sway the odds of coverage is to build up relationships with journalists so that they trust you and want to cover what you have to say before your first email lands in their inbox.
But how do you even begin fostering this connection? A great place to build and maintain new relationships with journalists is via social media channels. Twitter is particularly booming with PR pros and journalists, and is therefore the perfect place to organically engage with journalists’ content pre-pitch.
A best practice for this is following reporters on Twitter and retweeting or replying to their tweets. If a topic you or your client is an expert in is trending on Twitter, consider sharing an insightful link on the subject and asking for feedback from reporters who cover that beat—you may even pick up some new followers in return!
Do your homework
There is a lot of competition in the world of PR pitching. Did you know that journalists can receive up to 100 pitches in a day?
To break through all the noise, you must work hard to find a journalist’s personal interest in your content idea. Do your research to understand what topics each journalist covers, and only reach out to them when you have something new and relevant to add on topics that pertain to their beat.
And don’t make them snore!
This is not the time to pour your heart out or get chatty. You only have a few seconds to grab a journalist’s attention and express why they should move forward with your story idea over others.
PR pitching best practices follow those of email marketing that recommend a snappy, concise subject line and email body.
Our latest research shows the most successful subject lines in getting journalist responses were only 1-5 words long. And the most engaging email body length is under 150 words.
Ask yourself, will this message lead to my Call to Action (CTA)? The pitch should include nothing more and nothing less.
New free guide to a sizzling PR pitch
Download our new free guide, “How to craft a successful cold email pitch,” to find out more about how you can start optimizing your cold PR email pitches.
In it you’ll find:
- What cold PR email pitching is and how it compares to other types of cold outreach
- How to start building relationships with journalists prior to any email outreach via social media channels like Twitter
- What it means to provide support to the media without a personal agenda
- How to choose the right journalists to reach out to without prior exchanges
- The danger of sending pitches that comes across sales-y or promotional and how to avoid this
- What it means to direct the journalist to a clear CTA, specific to media relations
- The importance of sharing your story in a concise, unique way that stands out from the rest
How can Propel boost your media relations? Take it for a spin by making a free account today.
