This presentation gives PR tips on how to contact the media, with email tips that also work for email marketing.

1. © 2016 Didit – All Content is Sensitive and Confidential
8 PR Tips for Email Media Pitches
That Also Apply to Email Marketing
June, 2016
Presented by Didit

2. © 2016 Didit – All Content is Sensitive and Confidential
Introduction
Some Millennials say that email is a dying medium. We disagree.
In business, email is vital for communications, especially with
people you don’t know or don’t know well. This is especially true in
marketing and public relations.
• When it comes to building credibility in business, public relations –
specifically media relations – can’t be beat.
• Email is critical in the PR media relations process. Most journalists
prefer to be contacted by email.
• PR professionals create email “pitches” to send journalists story ideas
that involve their companies or clients.
• A phone call can be disruptive to a journalist, who may be racing to
meet a deadline or immersed in work. Emails are opened when the
recipient wants to read them.
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Email Marketing Is One of the
Most Effective Forms of Lead Development
Marketing Funnel
Twitter
Email
Marketing
Facebook
L EA D S
Email marketing
facts:
1McKinsey
2Direct Marketing Association’s 2013 Statistical Fact Book
40 X more
effective than
Facebook & Twitter
combined 1
ROI of 4,300%1
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…But How Can You Get Attention with an Email?
Everyone is inundated with email these days and it’s
getting increasingly more difficult to get an email to
stand out in the crowd. So how can you motivate the
recipient to open and read your email?
READ ME FIRST!
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The Need for Perfect Emails
Writing an email pitch that works can be extremely difficult, even for
experienced professionals. As a means of self-preservation, we all
delete emails we don't see as relevant. An email has to be really
compelling to escape the delete key.
Journalists get more email than most of us. Some journalists receive
over a hundred email pitches a day from PR people, in addition to all
the other email they get. To stand out among such intense
competition and get opened and read, an email pitch has to be just
about perfect.
On the following pages are eight suggestions for effective email
pitches to journalists. Most of them are just as helpful as email
marketing tips.
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Tip #1: The Subject Line Must Be Compelling
The subject line is hugely important. Reporters don’t open all the
email they get (do you?). Emails with poorly written or boring
subject lines are very likely to be deleted.
Subject lines that are too long are cut off by email programs and
lose their impact. The limit is 50 characters (including spaces).
What makes a subject line a good one is its ability to arouse
recipients’ curiosity and compel them to open the email to find out
more. However, subject lines that are a come-on and don’t reflect
what the email is really about are very annoying and counter-
productive.
The biggest turnoff is a sales-oriented pitch in the subject line.
Needless to say, those get deleted immediately.
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What Makes a Subject Line Successful
Here’s the reaction you’d get from various subject lines sent to
journalists on an email about the launch of a new product:
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Tip #2: The Lede Is the
Second Most Crucial Part of a Pitch
The lede1 (or introductory part of a news story) is just as important in
an email pitch as it is in an actual news story. The first sentence or
two will determine whether the recipient will continue reading your
pitch or not.
Examples of bad ledes are those that:
• Contain mixed metaphors (“The president will put the ship of state on its
feet.” From Dictionary.com)
• Contain unintelligible industry acronyms (“Are you going to ACS? If so,
would you be interested in talking to our CEO about the CAA and its
impact on GHG?” Translation: Are you going to the American Chemical
Society meeting? If so, would you be interested in talking to our CEO
about the Clean Air Act and its impact on greenhouse gas?”
• Start by apologizing, which just makes you seem lacking in confidence.
(“Hi, I apologize for taking up your time, but…”)
1Many years ago, the words lede and lead were interchangeable. While “lead” became the preferred
spelling, journalists hung onto the alternate spelling and still use it at jargon that means the opening
sentence or two of a news story.
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Tip #3: Brevity Is Key to Getting Read
In the body of your email, get to the point immediately
by providing basic facts: who, what, when, where, why
and how. Don’t sell, tell. Then write another paragraph
with more details, including why the recipient should
care about this story and how it’s different from what’s
already been covered in the media.
Your whole email pitch should not be longer than a
laptop screen. If it’s too long, it’s likely to go into the
trash because it will look like it’s going to take too
much time to digest.
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Tip #4: Make it Easier for
A Reporter to Buy Your Pitch
You’ll have a better chance of media coverage if you offer some
neutral sources of information in your email pitch that will
round out your story and provide other points of view.
For example, if you provide contact information for an analyst
who can confirm a new industry trend, and for a distributor who
can back up that trend with sales statistics, you can save a
reporter time, because journalists must have additional sources
– without them, they’d simply be promoting your company, which
no good journalist would do.
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What Not to Do
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Tip #5: Never Send
Email Attachments to a Journalist
If you have a news release to share, put it in the
body of the email, under your pitch and signature,
don’t send an attached document. If there are other
documents such as photos or videos that would help
the journalist, refer to them in your email and either
provide a safe link to them or offer to send them if
the reporter is interested.
Only if you get a “yes, please send” response should
you send an attachment.
Most journalists will not open attachments from
people they don’t know well. This is a common
media policy to avoid viruses.
JPEG
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Tip #6: Don’t Pitch a Product
Email pitches that promote products or companies are
generally ineffective. This is the number one error
people make when they don’t have experience in
media relations. Reporters don’t write about products
(unless they’re reviewing them or their publications
include a new product section), they tell stories.
A successful pitch suggests an outline for a story that
is not overtly promotional. An approach that often
works is to position your product or company as part of
a new trend and give other evidence of the trend. Or
provide information about the background of a product
or company that makes it part of a story (for example,
where the product idea came from, what gave an
entrepreneur the idea to start a company, or the
reasoning behind a particular corporate action).
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Tip #7: Don’t Pitch a Story That
Has Already Been in the Media
Don’t write an email pitch before you find out if the story you’re
suggesting has already been told in the media. If it has been, you’ll need
another story angle. For example, if you find that the article,
“Unbreakable Porcelain on 46% of Wedding Registries,” has already
been written, your pitch on the same topic won’t be used unless you can
come up with a totally different angle. Journalists are highly unlikely to
write stories that have already been told.
Sometimes a client will say, “Did you see that article in today’s New York
Post about tableware that’s popular with Millennial wedding couples?
You’ve got to contact her – if she’s interested in what’s popular in
tableware, I’ll bet she’ll write about ours.” Uh…no. You see, she just
wrote a story on trends in tableware. Even if she loves tableware and
finds yours delightful, her editors won’t let her write another tableware
trends article after they’ve just published one, unless it somehow moves
the old story forward into really newsworthy territory.
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Don’t Pitch a Story That
Has Already Been in the Media, Cont’d
A story that has already been told doesn’t refer only to a
story in the journalist’s own media outlet. Even worse is
suggesting a story just published by a competing media
outlet. This really irritates journalists.
Think about it from their viewpoint: a competitor got the
story out before they did. All organizations want to be
seen as leaders, not followers. It’s not likely that a story in
one media outlet will appear in another one unless there
is a fresh angle to the story. The exception is very big
news, such as a political scandal, a bankruptcy, a new
Apple product, etc.
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Tip #8: Don’t Send Your Pitch to the
Wrong Reporters or Media Outlets
Don’t pitch a story to the wrong journalists or
inappropriate media outlets. Do your homework about
the media outlets and journalists you’re contacting.
If you pitch a story about a new kind of unbreakable
porcelain dishware to a journalist who only writes
restaurant reviews, or send a reporter who covers
hospitals a pitch about a new drug, you’ll annoy the
journalist.
If you’re not sure whether the media outlet and journalist
are a good fit for what you’re pitching, find out by
searching to see what the journalist has written before
and whether the media outlet uses the type of story you
want to tell.
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Final Words
These media relations tips are by no means a
comprehensive guide for how to contact the media, but
they do reflect frequent mistakes made by untrained
and inexperienced people. If you’re a business owner
or startup entrepreneur and want to give it a try, learn
how to do it properly by reading everything about
media relations you can get your hands on. It’s a very
time-consuming activity, even for trained and
experienced people, which is one reason to consider
hiring an outside company to help.
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Thanks for Viewing This SlideShare
If this presentation was helpful to you, download our
free ebook, “PR for Small Business:”
For information about the public relations capabilities of
Bridge Global Strategies, a Didit Company, please visit
our website or contact:
Lucy Siegel
Executive Vice President
Didit Communications
http://www.bridgeny.com
lucy.siegel@didit.com
212-583-1043
212-583-1079 (direct)
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