What makes me open an email

Or: How to make sure your pitch gets read

You’ve probably heard lots of hyperbolic stories about the state of journalist’s inboxes and how hard it is to get your email to stand out from the deluge.

Is this actually true though, or just an excuse journalists use to avoid bothering to get back to you? To find out, I thought I’d do a mini audit of my own inbox this week and share with you what’s really going on in there…

My idea of hell as I try - and constantly fail - to aim for inbox zero. Photo by Brian J. Tromp on Unsplash

First, a disclaimer: I’ve recently purged myself from a whole load of mailing lists so I get far fewer emails than I used to. I’m also now a freelance journalist but I know from my previous experience that staff journalists (those directly employed by publications and who have an official publication email address) get a LOT more emails.

I took a pretty calm Thursday last week and did a quick count. I’d received 51 emails that day, of which:

• 32 were PR pitches or press releases (including commentary/quotes on breaking news).

• 9 were from my editors, consultancy clients or interviewees.

• the rest were a random mix of newsletters I subscribe to, admin stuff and me sending email notes to myself as a reminder to do things (like write this newsletter!).

So even in a quiet inbox by journalists’ standards, nearly two thirds of the emails I received were contacts from PRs.

And of those 32 pitches, how many did I actually open, read and engage with?

Two.

So why these two? What made them so different from the rest of the stuff landing in my inbox?

I’ve written here about how you can tweak you subject line to maximise your chances of an editor opening your email. But I thought I’d share what actually makes me click “open” when I see an email drop.