Converting marketing prospects into marketing opportunities through email outreach is more than just sending out an email to the right person. PR is all about relationships, a company’s relationship with customers, employees, journalists, influencers, and even the competition. In order to do PR well, a company can develop these relationships through cold and warm outreach, social media, live events, paid advertising, and other strategies.
When it comes to cold warm outreach, a meaningful way to stand out from the crowd is to make personalize your approach. Research and customization play a vital role in effective email marketing.
What is email marketing?
Email marketing is the process of sending out messages and information about a company through email to targeted consumers. Email marketing can be used to increase sales, improve brand loyalty, and deliver critical information. Building an email marketing strategy provides you with the means to reach out to potential customers, attract possible media outlets, and retain existing customers by encouraging repeat visits.
Email marketing involves sending emails to get the attention of media outlets and their target audiences. A perfect email pitch should have a hook, a clear call-to-action, and a great value proposition. The hook is the unique story angle that your company is pitching and it should connect to your topic or story. It is the first thing that a journalist will read and will determine whether they open the email or not. The call-to-action is the part of an email that includes a specific action that you want your target audience to take after reading the email. In order to create an effective call-to-action, you need to decide what you want the recipient to do after reading your email. Regardless of whether you are trying to achieve media coverage or publishing an update, you need to be clear on the call-to-action.
The value proposition is also fundamental because it is where you make clear to a journalist or media outlet why they should cover the story, how the subject of your story connects to a larger topic or issue, and why it would benefit their target and potential audience. Many brands make the mistake of assuming that when you’re sending a cold email you don’t need to bother with personalizing it. On the contrary, if you don’t customize your email, then a journalist might not even open it.
How Pressfarm can help
Email marketing is an essential part of any company’s marketing strategy. However, since it involves so many steps, some components may not get the proper attention. If you’re struggling to create an effective email marketing strategy, you can turn to PR agencies and professionals like Pressfarm. By helping you create email pitches, press releases, press kits, and guest posts, this team of experts can help you create the kind of content that will stand out in a journalist’s inbox and get people talking about you.
Beyond content creation, Pressfarm’s distribution strategy has helped many brands across different industries to boost their online visibility. By submitting your content to respected media outlets and startup directories, Pressfarm can help your brand feature in relevant search results across different search engines. Additionally, with a custom media list from the account executive, you can connect with the best journalists to help you tell your brand story.
Types of cold emails in marketing
1) Media pitch email
A media pitch email is an email you send when you’re trying to pitch information about your company’s product or service to journalists and people with influence in your industry. The aim of this email is to obtain media coverage and get extra exposure for the company. We will look at some tips later on in this article.
2) Brand pitch email
You also send a brand pitch email when you’re trying to obtain media attention. However, rather than contacting journalists, you may suggest a collaboration between your company and another brand that is a thought leader in your industry. This collaboration can be a win-win for both parties.
3) Link building email
This type of email is designed to boost your SEO by getting an inbound link back to one of your company’s resources. For example, you could earn links to your website, your blog, or your social media accounts.
Other email formats can include:
- A content promotion email that can help a company get more mentions, links, or coverage.
- Networking emails that can help companies to start developing relationships with target journalists and audiences.
- A sales email that aims to sell a product/service or move it down the sales funnel.
Cold outreach tips for Digital PR
Before even sending out an email, you need to follow the following steps to improve your performance in your email marketing campaign.
1) Identify the ideal prospects & their needs
A common mistake that brands make when doing email marketing is jumping into it without fully understanding the positives, negatives, and possible issues that may arise from it. By not taking the time to understand your target audience’s needs, you run the risk of getting your cold emails deleted or getting marked as spam. To avoid this, you need to do your research and figure out what kind of content will fulfill your audience’s needs. Once you know this, you can craft your email for a specific audience. During your research, you should also consider who the journalist is, their body of work, their readers, and their publication.
2) Eye-catching subject lines
As mentioned before, your hook or subject line is what a journalist will read first when they spot your email pitch. The main reason why email pitches are not read is that their subject line is generic, boring, repetitive, or unprofessional. By creating eye-catching subject lines customized to the time, situation, and type of person you are dealing with, you might just have a higher open rate with your cold emails.
3) Cut to the chase
With so many demands and deadlines, journalists don’t have time to waste on useless information. Rather than writing an email that is long-winded and full of fluff and formalities, you should cut to the chase as soon as possible. Your email should be short, informative, and to the point.
4) Focus on the value you’re offering
Good public relations depends on a mutually beneficial relationship between your company and the journalist you’re pitching. Nevertheless, it takes some time and patience to build positive relationships with your media contacts. At the beginning of this relationship, it is upon you to send the first email and get the journalist’s attention. Since this is a new relationship, the target journalist may likely have little to no information about the company.
In this case, you should discuss the topic of the email and focus on how your story can benefit the journalist. Perhaps it can help them achieve higher authority in the industry. Alternatively, it might provide them with information that will help their target audience solve a problem.
5) Include all contact information
One benefit of including all contact information is it provides many channels for target journalists and audiences to contact the company. It also builds a higher level of trust in the industry because it legitimizes the business and establishes credibility.
6) Consistent follow-up emails
While it may not be a good idea to continually bombard or harass journalists with follow-up emails, having a well-constructed follow-up email can be the reason why journalists take more interest in your brand. You should also create a crisis management plan for follow-up emails that you keep on hand if you get a negative response to your initial cold outreach email. This plan could include emails for prospects who did not open the email. You should also account for those who didn’t respond, and those who responded negatively.
7) Follow the referral technique
Referrals are among the most effective & efficient ways to get new customers. By asking existing customers to recommend your company, you can encourage brand loyalty and reach a wider audience.
Conclusion
Cold outreach can seem like a rather daunting task. From the research process to distribution, it takes a lot of time and effort to achieve media coverage. However, if you combine these tips with some help from a PR professional, you can achieve success with your media outreach efforts.