Pithy Pitches

March 6, 2009 on 1:20 pm | In Content Marketing, Email Marketing, Journalism, Media, Media Relations, News, PR, Public Relations | 3 Comments

Your painstakingly crafted email pitch is completely customized and ready to send to the in box of that carefully targeted reporter. There it goes! Did you hear that? That was your email pitch being deleted.

Here’s why: You didn’t spend more time on the subject line than you did on the email body. Ragan has a feature entitled Email subject lines in eight words or less that provides some good examples of subject lines that worked. One of my favorites was,

“Colorado: Help bring a cow into the world”: This kind of subject line is hard to resist—and Greg Morton, group director of PR for Praco PR in Denver, was counting on just that reaction when he penned this subject line for his client, the Colorado Tourism Office.

In a previous post, THINKing provided Six Tips For Perfect Email Media Pitches. One of the primary tips,

Brevity is the soul of wit. Shakespeare could have been giving media relations tips when he penned this gem several hundred years ago. If you can’t get to the point in your subject line in 10 words or less, you need to work on your message. Keep the subject line short and to the point, and include the time frame if it is important to the pitch.

Burrelle’sLuce has a tip sheet on the topic that you may want to register to receive.

What are you waiting for? Start pitching.

Other Posts Of Interest

  • http://www.linkedin.com/in/tressalynne Tressa Robbins

    Great advice! The only thing I’d add to this is to be sure you don’t exaggerate or create a headline that sounds great but isn’t really representative of the story that follows. I’ve seen folks try to get a bit “too” creative with the headline / subject line…FAIL.

  • http://www.my-creativeteam.com Harry Hoover

    Good point, Tressa. To maintain your credibility with reporters, you need to keep it true.

  • http://fx-forex-trading-education.blogspot.com Simonn

    Good post, your post could really help me in my work. Hopefully this will help increase my traffic more. Thanks for sharing.

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