How to Master the Follow-Up Email After Your PR Pitch
Looking for a better way to follow up with journalists about your PR pitches? You’ve come to the right place.
With Propel, you can now schedule highly tailored Gmail and Outlook follow-ups all in one place with just a few clicks!
The follow-up email after your PR pitch can be the difference between an ignored email and coverage in major publications and blogs.
To help you succeed with your follow-up email strategy after the initial pitch, here are a few best practices that you should use to increase the odds of getting your story picked up.
1. Did they respond?
After sending out your pitch to a relevant source and they don't immediately cover your story, it’s inevitable that you will receive one of two responses:
1) nothing at all, or 2) you will hear back with an ‘I’ll pass on this one, but good luck!’ or ‘We’re all set, thanks!’
Even if you don’t get a response at all, this doesn’t have to be the end of your outreach.
When the time is right, you can use this as an opportunity to follow up by sharing why your news deserves coverage and how it will benefit an outlet’s audience.
2. When to move on
It’s never a good strategy to pester journalists to the point that they never want to cover your stories, but it’s also important to be open to sending a follow-up email when the time is right.
Through Propel’s Gmail and Outlook integrations you can see how many times a journalist has opened your email, which can be helpful for gauging their interest in the story topic and deciding when is appropriate to start following up.
According to our research on thousands of PR pitches that our users send through the Propel platform, journalists only respond to about 3% of the pitches they receive.
And after two days have passed, there is less than a 17% chance that a journalist will respond to a pitch at all.
So, if you feel confident that your story is worth it and you sent a strong, tailored initial pitch, it’s definitely worth a quick follow-up email after a few days have passed and you haven’t heard anything back.
3. Tips for crafting your follow-up
Don't let your PR pitch fall through the cracks– follow up with these best practices!
- Streamline your approach. It can be challenging to try and keep track of all your different pitches through your inbox or sent mail. With the Propel follow-up pitching feature, scramble no more! This tool allows you to follow up with all your unresolved pitches with just a few quick clicks.
- Add value. It might be tempting to send a follow-up email just to bump your message to the top of the inbox, but this might not get you the reaction you’re looking for. Many journalists are receiving hundreds of emails every day, so this will likely flood their inbox even further. Instead, use your follow-up email to add a little more value to the journalist and explain why the story is ideal for them to cover.
- Be ready. Once you follow up with your journalist contact(s), make sure you’re ready and available to hear back from them! Time is of the essence, and they might need more information to be able to move forward with your news story. Make sure you’re readily available with all the key information that they might need to run your story and meet their own deadlines.
- Accept no for an answer. Many journalists report that a big reason why they avoid responding to many pitches is because a ‘no’ often leads to a much longer conversation that they don’t have time for. In our recent webinar with special guest Lisa Rozner from CBS New York, we learned that Rozner tends not to respond to pitches she doesn’t want to cover for this very reason.
Want to save hours of time by following up with our PR tools? Book a demo with our team to learn more!
