Your media relations are based on your PR email list. What are you doing to maintain it?
You probably consider your contact list to be your most valuable asset as a PR professional, and for good reason. You use it to secure coverage for clients and connect with journalists.
Maintaining your email list can be difficult, especially as the media landscape is constantly changing.
Journalists may change their beat or quit a publication. Bloggers stop working on online projects and no longer check their email for new pitches. When you represent clients internationally, the situation becomes even more complex: how are you going to keep up with hundreds of publications and their constant changes?
A PR monitoring and outreach platform is not a guarantee. After signing up myself, I was surprised to see how many pitches of mine bounced back.
You can’t depend on others to find you genuine media contacts. It is our sole responsibility to maintain a healthy email list for PR.
Why is it important to maintain the health of your PR email list?
Reaching out to an inexistent contact will not get you anywhere. Your pitch may bounce, but that’s just the beginning. As a PR Manager at ZeroBounce, I’ve learned that bounces don’t only represent missed opportunities. They start to impact your sender rating when they exceed 2% or two bounces per 100 emails.
Internet service providers use your sender score to determine if you are a legitimate sender or a spammer. If you have a low score, your pitches may start to be categorized as spam. If you ignore this issue for too long, your emails might not even end up in the spam folder. They will stop getting delivered.
Five ways to keep your PR email list healthy
How can you ensure that your email list of PR pitches is always up-to-date and that your pitches reach the inbox every time?
Follow these five steps.
Email validators can do the work for you.
If you haven’t looked at your list of PRs in over six months, start with this step.
On average, 23% of email lists degrade every year. This means that a large number of media contacts may have changed. Let a reliable tool identify invalid email addresses to remove them from your database.
Email validators work fast. You can finish the job in an hour or less, depending on the number of contacts. You can also connect your email validator to your email service provider, which will allow you to clean up your list faster.
Verify every new email address.
After you have removed old contacts from your list, you should be more careful when adding new ones.
As PR professionals, it’s easy to fall into the hoarder mindset: We want to increase our reach and build relationships with more writers. Check that the contacts you’re adding to your database are valid before adding them.
You can do this for free with popular email checkers. You can check your email address in seconds by copying and pasting the address.
Because I know that bounced emails can damage my sender score and my reputation, I don’t add any new addresses to my list of PR without first checking them.
Writers who do not respond to your emails should be avoided
Journalists–especially those working at prestigious publications–get hundreds of pitches every day. You’re not surprised if you don’t receive a response from a writer for the New York Times after you send an email.
You shouldn’t be discouraged from contacting the writer or submitting another pitch if you don’t receive a response. If you have sent several emails and none were opened, this will also affect your sender score.
Your email’s relevance is determined by how your recipients respond to it. Why should your email be in the inbox if people never open it?
Emails that bounce could be a sign of a lack of engagement.
Your email list should be updated immediately.
Has anyone on your list announced via social media they have moved to a new publication? You should update their contact information immediately after congratulating them.
It will only take a few seconds to make the change. Remember to check their new email address for typos.
Subscribe to PR newsletters and keep a close eye out for these types of updates. Some of these include media personnel changes. Do not dismiss them – they are also a good source of contacts that you can reach out to.
You can build your PR database.
Has anyone ever tempted you to purchase a list of PR email addresses? I’ve thought about it but never bought a list.
It isn’t easy to know if a list of pre-made contacts is valid or legitimate. If you do decide to buy one, make sure you double-check the list before reaching out.
You could also continue to build your database. You know that even though your list grows more slowly, every new contact is relevant to the industries you cover.
You can be more helpful if you take the time to get to know each writer and their interests. You must master this one thing to gain media attention.