Juan Carlos MoraGetting journalists to open and respond to your PR outreach emails is both a science and an art. But the perfect subject line won’t get you anywhere if you don’t offer something that the journalist wants.
Successful PR is about building relationships, and Mailtrack can help you make the right moves at each stage of an outreach campaign. Mailtrack can give you intel on when your recipients open your email or click the links inside so you can know the best times to respond or follow up.
What is Mailtrack?
Mailtrack is a Google Chrome extension that includes Mailtrack Campaign, which lets you track mass emails in Gmail to up to 10,000 emails per day. It installs in one click and provides unlimited email tracking for free.
Mailtrack lets you know if your emails have been read, when they were opened, and how many times they’ve been opened.
Plus, no one needs to take any extra actions when they read your emails—the read receipt is given to you automatically, with no imposition put onto your readers at all.
Mailtrack sends you desktop and email notifications for different events, like when your email is opened or when a link is clicked. In the dashboard, you can track email metrics at a glance and customize your notifications.
Why is it useful for PR outreach?
Whether you’re a PR professional or you’re tasked with running the PR at your company, Mailtrack can help you stay on top of your communications with journalists and other influencers. Specifically, you can:
- track open rates
- know when to send a follow-up email
- see when recipients click on the links in your emails
Track open frequency
In the early stages of communicating with a journalist, you may just want to send a couple of informative or helpful emails that aren’t pitches. With Mailtrack, you can see if they are opening your messages, which can tell you if you’re sending helpful information or not.
And when it comes time to send a pitch, you’ll know exactly when they open the message. Tracking opens can also let you know if the types of pitches you send are effective.
In comparison to other email tracking programs, Mailtrack is quick to set up and easy to use. You don’t have to plan a whole day to learn about different features since it’s all intuitive and contained in a Chrome extension.
Send timely follow-ups
Now that you’re tracking email open rates, you’ll know when is the right time to follow up. Mailtrack’s hot conversation feature will alert you if your email has been opened more than once in a short time frame. This can indicate the journalist forwarded the email or came back to it to reread the information. It can be a good time to send a follow-up message at this point.
Also, with Mailtrack’s Monitor Reply feature, you can get a notification when your recipient hasn’t replied to an email in 24 hours. This ensures you won’t miss a follow-up opportunity even if you have a busy schedule.
And if someone gets back to your email after some time away, Mailtrack can help with that too. The Revival feature gives a special notification when someone reads your email after a significant delay, so you can jump on a reply before they disappear again.
Check clicks
Mailtrack also notifies you when a link is clicked in your email. Perhaps you’ve sent a link to a new company case study or market research report. Seeing click rates can help you track whether or not a journalist is interested in your pitch. And if they opened the email but never clicked the link, you can rework your offer and come back with something different.
Outreach is all about providing value
Journalists hate mass emails, but they get a lot of them, unfortunately. You can increase your chances of getting a response by following them on social media, sharing their articles, and nurturing a relationship before sending a pitch. Then, you’ll be able to pitch them something they want to write about.
Things can get complicated when you’re in this process with multiple journalists. Mailtrack makes tracking PR emails easy so you can focus on creating the right pitches about your company story.
By using Mailtrack, you can see more precisely where journalists lose interest. By comparing open rates, reply rates, and link-click rates, you can see where you need to improve, be it your subject line, your email pitch, or even the linked content. With such a tool, you can improve your process bit by bit until you’re grabbing media attention like a true pro.
