Why You Should Try Pitching on a Friday
Choosing the best time to send story pitches should be a major step in your earned media strategy. After all, journalists are receiving tons of pitches every day that can inevitably bury yours in a much larger stack.
Because it’s so important to get timing right, we study millions of real PR pitches to find out when the most are sent and when journalists engage with them the most. From here, we’re able to shed light on how to best time your outreach.
And sometimes the data introduces trends that you’d never expect– What if I told you that Friday is actually an ideal day to send out a story pitch?
We continue to see counterintuitive pitching success for Friday in our research on PR email pitches. In fact, this day of the week had a higher average journalist response rate relative to pitches sent out of any other day in Q1 of 2022.
As you can pinpoint from the graph, Friday trumps other days of the week with the highest percent of journalist responses (12%) relative to the number of pitches PR experts are dispatching (8.5%).
This illustrates that the competition communications professionals face from other pitches isn’t as severe on Friday as it is on other days of the week.
A key takeaway from this is that PR pros can capitalize on this opportunity to stand out amongst others in order to raise their chances of receiving a response from journalists. Journalists are typically busy dealing with other inquiries on weekdays, but this leaves an underrated end-of-week window for you to increase your response rate.
Early-week pitching success rings true
It’s exciting to see that new opportunities are out there regarding Friday pitching!
This is not to discount early and mid-week pitching, however. The “send vs. open vs. response times” chart above also shows that Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday are the days of the week with the greatest volume of pitches sent and opened.
Most of all, these findings should give you more insight into outreach strategies that you may not have tried before, or may not be as widely used.
Learn more about 2022 pitching trends
Curious about what else we learned in our study that could challenge your pitching strategy for the better? Access the Q2 Media Barometer report here.
We analyzed a sample of about 400,000 PR email pitches to arrive at findings like:
- The most engaging subject lines are 1-5 words long
- Pitch leads 50-79 words long got the most responses from journalists
- The best pitches were under 150 words
- Journalists open most pitches within 10 minutes of receiving them
- Wednesday has the highest amount of pitching activity
