Which day is best for PR pitching?
Who doesn’t love great earned media coverage for their brand or clients?
If you’re looking to strengthen your press outreach results, you’ve come to the right place- The Q3 Propel Media Barometer has arrived!
What is the Propel Media Barometer?
The Propel Media Barometer is a quarterly data report that we share to help comms pros with their craft. Each quarter, we study hundreds of thousands of story pitches that PR pros send to journalists so we can reveal the types of story pitches that are the most successful. Perhaps even more insightful, we also determine which pitches get the least engagement from journalists and what might be going wrong when a pitch falls flat.
Whether you are pitching journalists or managing a team, these reports about the media relations landscape can make you a more effective PR pro.
Because of Propel’s PRM email integration features, we are uniquely able to anonymously aggregate data from our users’ media pitches to form deductions about journalist open & response rates, pitching preferences and the best & worst times to pitch, plus so much more.
This includes:
- The average journalist open and response rate to PR pitches
- How the length of a pitch subject line, lead and email body impact campaign results
- Which day(s) of the week see the most journalist engagement
- Analysis of embedded links and emojis in email pitches
- What time of day is best to send a PR story pitch
And much more. Download the Q3 Propel Media Barometer to learn more about the state of media relations today.
Q3 2022 Research Highlights
From analyzing approximately 500,000 new pitches that PR pros sent to journalists during Q2 2022, we can point to the specific aspects that make up the perfect pitch. Here are some of the highlights from the Q3 Media Barometer:
The average journalist response rate to PR pitches
Many of the pitching trends we found in Q2 carried into Q3, including the average time it takes for journalists to open and respond to pitches.
Perhaps most striking, there was another significant drop in the overall journalist response rate to PR pitches. From Q1 to Q2 of 2022, the average journalist response rate to media pitches fell from 3.37% to 3.25%.
This means that in just a short period of time, the average journalist response rate to media pitches decreased by about 12%.
This makes it even more dire for PR people to sharpen their pitching tactics to make sure their stories stand out from the bunch.
A short subject line is still the answer
When it comes to subject lines, shorter is still better.
In Q2, journalists responded the most to pitches with subject lines 1-5 words long with a 4.03% response rate.
On the opposite end of this spectrum, we found that pitches with subject lines with 16+ words had the lowest average journalist response rate at 2.03%.
This is an important disconnect to note because pitches with subject lines that had 16+ words were the second-most popular among PR pros, as 37% of all pitches had subject lines that were 16 words or more.
The top 10 most-pitched topic categories
Are your pitches relevant to the journalists who are receiving them?
One of the biggest reasons pitches fall flat is because they are not specific to the topics that journalists specifically cover. For example, USA Today Reporter Karen Weintraub said she receives about 250 pitches every day, and nearly two thirds of those pitches are completely irrelevant to what she covers.
So, what did PR people pitch the most about in the past few months?
The three most-pitched topics from Q2 were:
- Business & Industrial
- Tech & Computing
- Art & Entertainment
And interestingly, this is lines up with the topics that got some of the highest response rates, which were:
- Tech & Computing (3.28%)
- Food & Drink (3.26%)
- Business & Industrial (3.15%)
Below, you’ll find the 10 most-pitched topic categories from Q2 2022. See the average journalist response rate (%) that corresponds with each topic category as well.
The perfect pitch lead length
The most engaging pitch leads were 50-79 words long (3.96%) and journalists engaged the least with pitches that had leads exceeding 150 words (2.01%).
We also found that pitches with leads 30-49 words long had a slightly lower response rate (3.62%) than those with 50-79 words. This indicates that while brevity is key, it’s still important to give enough story context early on.
Which day is best for PR pitching?
When it comes to PR pitching, timing can be all the difference in meeting coverage goals.
See the breakdown of pitching volume as it relates to the amount of pitches journalists open and respond to on different days of the week:
- PR pros sent the most pitches on Tuesday (24.78%).
- Journalists responded to the most pitches on Wednesday (24.93%).
- Pitches sent later in the week face less competition and have promising engagement rates (Thursday, Friday).
- Journalists opened the least pitches on Saturday (1.45%).
- Journalists responded to the least pitches on Sunday (1.34%).
And there is more where that came from!
Check out the full Q3 Media Barometer report and start crafting your perfect pitches to make Q3 the best quarter of pitching ever!
