10 tips for packing your email subject lines with punch
Don’t just gloss over your subject line to get to the meat of a press release or pitch. According to this writer, it’s the most important part.
This article originally appeared on PR Daily in February 2015. PR pros take meticulous care to get press releases just right in hopes of coaxing journalists to cover their news. Few marketers and clients realize that the most important part of their communications with a journalist is not the press release at all. It’s the subject line.
Many think the press release is more important, because it can communicate all the details of a news announcement, embed a call to action and even improve a brand’s search engine rankings to drive new business leads, but what if I said that without an email subject that packs a punch, your awesome press release stands a near-zero chance of getting media coverage?
Journalists today are simply too inundated with email news pitches to open them all. They would be reading emails and press releases all day long. There wouldn’t be any time left to cover the news.
Journalists I interview as part of my PR over Coffee community in Austin report having to sort through hundreds of emails daily. On Mondays when they come back to the office, that number could easily double. This means you have mere seconds to stop a journalist in his or her tracks in hopes of getting a second, longer look.
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