Journalists often get hundreds of emails from PR practitioners every day. The unfortunate reality is that most of these pitches are never read, let alone responded to. This has several significant implications. A lot of PR efforts are wasted, and journalists are frustrated with all the noise cluttering their inboxes.

How do you make your pitches stand out? We will attempt to answer that question here and show you how you can use Meltwater's Influencer product as a feedback loop to refine your pitches over time to improve your pitching performance and earn impactful media coverage.

Pitches sent through Meltwater use email tracking (unless you've requested to have it turned off), which generate a set of engagement metrics that present a valuable and objective feedback loop to offer insight into how well the pitches you sent resonated.

Below, we cover how to interpret your results to find opportunities to optimize future pitching efforts to increase effectiveness via the following:

Open rate tells you what percentage of recipients opened emails (it doesn't mean that they read the whole email). It should be considered as a baseline metric to gauge the relevance of your targeting and your messaging. The percentage is calculated by dividing the number of unique opens by the number of delivered emails. If your open rate is low it means that you need to re-evaluate your targeting and/or messaging.

Tip: assume that your recipients only read the subject line and the first sentence in your email. Your focus should be on why this is valuable to your recipient(s). Personalized. Relevant. Brief.

To review further details into the engagement with your latest release, on the Outreach page open your sent release and select the 'Open Rate' tab.

Email engagement is split into three tiers:

Click to open rate is a much stronger indicator of relevance and interest than the open rate because the recipients click on links in your email to seek further information. The percentage is calculated by dividing the number of people who clicked a link within your email by the total number of people who opened it (unique clicks divided by unique opens). The higher the percentage, the better the engagement!

Tips: in addition to keeping your pitch brief, personalized and focused on why it's valuable to whom you're pitching - make it easy for the journalist to explore additional resources that can help them develop the story (e.g. links to a calendar to schedule an interview, press kit, original research, infographics, etc.). Most journalists are extremely busy and write up to several stories per day. Demonstration of empathy goes a long way.

*Please note that any clicks on the unsubscribe link in the footer of the email are excluded from the calculation.

The unsubscribe rate is a really important metric to watch. Any journalists that unsubscribe from receiving future emails from you is a clear signal that you need to do a better job with your targeting and messaging. The screenshot shared above shows an unsubscribe rate of 16.7%. This is a major red flag (the pitches are essentially considered spam by several recipients). This metric should be zero. The percentage is calculated by dividing the number of unique unsubscribed email addresses from the number of delivered emails. Any emails sent to journalists that have unsubscribed will be automatically blocked.

Tips: follow the tips outlined above and remove any unsubscribed influencers from your lists.

What’s the impact on my metrics when I send pitches to a general email address that may have more than one recipient (e.g. a pressroom email address).

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