Jump in your local time machine with me and let's travel back 20 years...
You've got an emergency story that your local reporter has agreed to run tomorrow, if you get him the copy by 2:00. You start by looking for the copywriter write the story. But he's on vacation, so you decide to let the English major at the front desk (who's been begging to get into marketing) write it. While he slowly pecks away at the typewriter and slogs through a pint of whiteout, you pace.
By the time you get the copy back ("It's perfect!", he says), you find that it's the quality of a "What I Did Over Summer Vacation paper" someone would write in the third grade. So you blow off your lunch and slog through it yourself. By now, it's late, so you decide you have to courier it over to get it delivered before the deadline. The courier, in his zeal to get it there on time, spills hot cocoa in his lap and swerves causing a 3-car pileup. He's escorted to the police station. The story pitch does get delivered about 3 hours later (covered in cocoa). You're relieved...until you find out that not only did they reject your story because you missed the deadline but they decided to cover the accident instead, mentioning it was caused by an overzealous courier delivering a story pitch for your company!
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Obviously this was not a realistic representation of how PR really works. But, it does illustrate one major tool that we have in our arsenal today... email!
Believe it not, most reporters and editors really like using email to receive stories and pitches. The reasons they prefer them are numerous: - There typically is not a lot of "fluff" in an email - It's easier to delete an email than to say no to you when you call to phone pitch (this, of course is a two-edged sword, but one we have to live with) - If they don't have time to review your pitch immediately, they can wait until they do have time to respond. - They can usually tell if the message is high quality or not simply by looking at the subject line. - They can save their trash can space for those pitches that come in via the mail
There are other reasons. But one of the best ways to get a story pitch out in today's market is to send it via email. It travels at the speed of light, costs approximately zero dollars, and doesn't soak up spilled cocoa unless printed (don't try this with unprinted emails).
One key to success is to use your subject line effectively. Remember that your pitch hits their box not only with all of the other pitches, but also with their regular and spam email. So yours has to stand out without sounding like spam. We usually spend half of the time spent writing a pitch working on the subject line alone -it's not something to jot down in a few seconds after you've slaved over everything else.
In your headline, it's important to:
- Describe of what you're pitching as clearly as possible
- Sound like you're providing great value
- Avoid multiple exclamation points
- those get caught in spam filters, and your reporter will never have a chance to see your pitch
- Personalize it to their needs
- Not forget to use the combination of your from line and your story pitch
- it's usually best to have your from line be something other than your email address when pitching stories, so they know who it's coming from
- Avoid words like sex, new, exclusive, revolutionary, powerful, etc.
- Not use all caps
- they're hard to read, and they look like spam
Want to know more about how to pitch via email? Click below:
How to Make Your Story Pitch Stand Out in the Email Jungle
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