The Anatomy of the Perfect Pitch Email

If you need to get backlinks and generate brand awareness for clients, a great way to start is by creating original research and then pitching that research to writers. But the promotion of your work is probably the trickiest part, and a lot of it comes down to the pitch email you send to a writer.

To make this task a bit less daunting, in this episode of Whiteboard Friday, Amanda Milligan of Fractl walks you through a real pitch email that resulted in coverage of one of their stories.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Hi, everyone. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. My name is Amanda Milligan. I’m the Marketing Director at Fractl. Today I’m going to talk to you about the anatomy of the perfect pitch email.

This has to do with the digital PR space. The way that we get backlinks and brand awareness for our clients is by creating original research, new studies and surveys, and then pitching those things to writers. Now the pitching and the promotion is some of the trickiest part, and a lot of it comes down to this — the email you send to a writer.

So what I’ve done here is literally write out a real pitch email that was sent to a writer that resulted in a publication and coverage of the story. I’ll shout out to Skylar who wrote this one. What I’m going to do is walk through each piece of it, each element that we think is extremely important and that we include in all of our emails.

Human connection

So to start, I actually use this email because it didn’t delve too much into the personalization. I wanted to show an example of what happens if you can’t personalize as well. But personalization or any kind of human connection is extremely important, and it should be the lead into the body of your email.

So in this case, it’s a little more general. It says, “We all remember the horror flicks that left us sleeping with the lights on.” So that’s a more general human experience. I know I slept with the lights on when I saw “The Ring” for the first time. That’s just some way to connect with the person who’s reading it, to have them think of a memory.

However, if you actually have a chance to personalize an email, for example, if the writer has written something that resonates with you recently or you follow them on Twitter or LinkedIn and you like something that they shared, you can connect with them — you went to the same school, you have the same love of animals. We actually have a lot of people who pitched this year like pitching pictures of their animals and talking about how much they love dogs or cats.

Anything that is genuine can do …read more

Source:: Moz Blog