How to Perform Cold Email Outreach

Business is all about relationships: relationships with your customers, employees, manufacturers, distributors, influences, and even your competition. You cultivate and develop those relationships through a wide variety of channels, such as social media, live events, paid advertising, and both cold and warm email.

But you not only have to maintain those existing connections, you also have to reach out and make new ones. Whether for expansion, re branding, retention, or launching a new product or service, making fresh connections and forming new relationships consistently is key to business growth. And in order to do this successfully, you need the right tools in your arsenal.

Email Outreach in PR

The most important way to rise above the email masses – we send roughly 269 billion of them each day– is to make them personalized and individual. No one wants to respond to an email that was very clearly sent to dozens of other people too.

To combat that, never, ever send the exact same email to more than one person, and remember these three little words: research, research, research.

To find a few potential targets, conduct a Google search on a corresponding keyword or topic, or find the most popular content on a particular subject with a tool.  Those are the writers and bloggers you’re looking for. Or turn to a third-party solution for a ready-to-use media database.

Next, answer a few questions about them: who are you pitching, what do they usually write about, what’s their most recent, relevant success you could mention, do you have an existing connection, and most importantly, Find out everything you can about them, their body of work, their readers, their publication, and so on.

The Perfect Pitch

Every good pitch has at least three things in common: a hook, a clear call to action, and an irresistible value proposition.

The Call-to-Action

Any email – or landing page or social media post, or whatever – has one specific action you want your reader to take. A pitch isn’t any different. Be clear and explicit on what you want your reader to do.

Value Proposition

The most important element of a successful PR pitch is the value prop. It’s here that you make clear why they should cover this story, how it connects to some larger topic or issue, and why it would benefit their readers, followers, and publication.

It needs to be about them, not about you. A good pitch should be or at least seem like you’re doing them a favor, and not the other way around.