Getting your press releases noticed by the media is an arduous task. However, email marketing strategies that boost relationship-building, personalization, segmentation, and appropriate follow-up can increase the chances of your message being well-received.
Public relations and email marketing work together for various forms of communication including event invitations, brand news, product releases and thought leadership articles. By coordinating their efforts, both teams can ensure that their messaging is consistent and impactful.
For example, if a cloud security platform introduces additional features in their software tool, an email announcing this feature release can be sent out to subscribers. Similarly, an industry report can be shared with the desired audience via email to build brand awareness and strengthen audience engagement.
In this blog post, we’ll discuss seven crucial things to understand while using press releases in emails.
How can public relations and email marketing teams work best together?
Email marketing and public relations might be two distinct functions, yet their crossover creates a powerhouse of opportunities. The lack of coordination between these two can result in campaign failures, inconsistent branding and missing opportunities. However, here’s how they can work best together:
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Collaboration
Your email marketing campaigns must align with the overall PR strategy, your brand building process, and complement your brand voice.
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Data sharing
Your email marketing team must share data on email campaign performance and audience engagement. It helps you strategize and improve your PR efforts.
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Coordination
To create an impactful PR strategy, you must coordinate email campaign timing. You can use email marketing to create a buzz when your event or product is fresh in the audience’s minds.
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Combining strengths
You can use the strengths of both functions, like the email marketing team’s data-driven approach and the PR team’s storytelling skills, to create a successful campaign.
When public relations and email marketing teams work together, they can create powerful campaigns that boost engagement and brand awareness.
#1 Use email marketing to build rapport with journalists or publishers
According to a study, journalists can receive well over 100 emails per day. Therefore, you need to start by sending short emails complementing a niche journalist on their work.
You must understand their tone and try to create personalized emails. Instead of bombarding them with multiple mails, send only one mail.
Apart from conventional emails, you can send them pitch or insights on a story they’re covering.
Once familiar with their style, habits and stories, you can contact them a few months before a big product reveal or the latest feature.
#2 Craft a personalized media pitch
Creating a personalized media pitch takes time and effort. Usually, senders create a draft and send Blind Carbon Copy (BCC) emails to different journalists and media houses, which is a bad practice. Hence, you can personalize your emails using an email marketing platform using these attributes:
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Address them respectfully
Journalists receive hundreds of press releases every day. If you don’t start your email by talking about them, they’ll lose interest.
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Avoid grammatical errors
Always check for grammatical errors. Mistakes in your emails signify that you must be more serious about a joint relationship with the media.
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Don’t send giant emails
Emails should not be big. It should be half the size of a letter written on paper.
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Introduce yourself
Before talking to a media representative, you must introduce yourself and your company.
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Electronic signature
E-signatures in an email are a sign of politeness in business communication.
A personalized media pitch helps build a strong relationship and can take your email marketing efforts to the next level. However, email decision makers directly instead of a generic company address such as contact@xyz.com or support@abc.com.
#3 Emphasize the relevance of your story in emails
According to a study, a journalist opens only 3 percent of media pitches sent to them. The best way to grab a journalist’s attention is by highlighting the most important point of your story.
You emphasize the relevance of your story by creating a personalized and targeted email. By email marketing, you can highlight the key points of your account and explain why it is newsworthy.
As a writer, you must balance visual elements(videos, photos, designs or gifs) and readable content to make it more appealing. Later on, you can use email to follow up with the journalist and provide additional information or answer any questions they might have.
#4 Use an apt press release email format
Your email should follow a basic structure with an interesting subject line to boost open rates. It should have an opening that’s personalized to each recipient.
The email body should have your brand’s value proposition and social proof to demonstrate the relevance and credibility of your story. Eventually, you can add a call-to-action to encourage replies and further engagement.
Following these rules can boost the chances of the journalist opening, reading, and acting on your email. You can use pre-built responsive email templates to streamline your work.
#5 Write an engaging subject line
Subject lines decide whether your mail will be read or marked as spam. 69 percent of email recipients report email spam based on the subject line.
Your subject line should be catchy, relevant, and not hit below the belt. An ideal subject line with 6-10 words has a 21 percent open rate.
You can follow other best practices, such as personalizing the subject line, offering an exclusive story, providing no clickbait content, and not writing subject lines in caps.
#6 Say no to attachments
Refrain from attaching your press release as a PDF, as it might be blocked or filtered as spam. Although you can add links to press kits and creatives, sharing PDFs might not be the best idea.
By adding a link, you can share the preferred multimedia content, company details, and additional resources to use in the story.
This way, you can signify your organization and dedication to the story. By providing everything, you are making their work easier and simple.
#7 Improve your PR with timing, persistence and technology
Timing is an important element when it comes to press releases. If you send your press releases in the early morning or after working hours, there are very low chances of your email getting noticed.
Hence, you must research the best day and time to publish your press release. Knowing the time zones of your targeted journalist also comes in handy. According to a study, Thursday is the best day to send a press release, with an average open rate of 26 percent.
The best day to email a press release
According to a poll, journalists expect you to wait 3 to 7 days before sending a follow-up email. You can provide them with additional details and politely request and thank them for covering your story.
Since it takes a lot of time, the best way would be to streamline your email outreach efforts with an email automation software. Track every email you send to your dedicated audience in terms of opens, clicks, and responses and use from over 500+ outreach email templates to automate your PR efforts. You can also use their smart template suggestions feature to evaluate your PR email against various metrics and determine what may make your email less engaging and lead to lower opens.
In closing
Sending press releases in emails can be the best resolution for every team that wants to distribute their message. From building a rapport to using the latest technology, all these efforts can boost your PR strategy and help you generate better results.
Take your PR strategy to the next level by following the best practices of email marketing. Create compelling press releases to grab attention, interest and retain journalists. Customize emails smoothly and enhance your media coverage.
