Personalized Pitches, Meaningful Coverage
Largely behind us are the days of the dreaded “spray and pray” approach that PR pros and journalists know all too well. Sending broad, identical pitches to hundreds of journalists oftentimes leads to low response rates and annoyed recipients. Personalized pitching allows you to build relationships with your contacts and in turn produce meaningful coverage.
With Propel’s Gmail and Outlook integration, tailoring pitches is easy, efficient, and effective. After you have written out a pitch or used one of your templates, you have several options to choose from: send, send mail merge, schedule mail merge, or generate drafts.
By clicking on Generate Drafts, all of your pitches will be automatically moved to your draft folder. Your variables (such as {first name} and {publication}) will be updated to reflect your contact’s specific information, so you can see exactly what the pitch will look like before you send it.
From there, you have the ability to personalize each email individually to reflect your specific relationship. Let’s say you saw a journalist at an event (remember those?) or read a new article that they published - mentioning these recent interactions will encourage dialogue and improve relations, eventually leading to quality coverage.
Also, many journalists complain about receiving irrelevant pitches. By tailoring the first line of your email, you are able to immediately explain how this pitch will be relevant and worth the recipient’s time.
The Best of Both Worlds
You no longer have to choose between sending out a high number of pitches each day that are broad and identical, or only sending out a few personalized pitches. Propel’s Generate Drafts feature is designed to help you get out as many personalized pitches as you want, in an extraordinarily time efficient manner. We give you time back in your day, to spend on the more strategic parts of PR – such as developing a new story angle, researching highly relevant targets to pitch, or landing a new client.
