How to follow up, without being annoying

My foolproof strategy for chasing ghosted pitch emails

When you’ve carefully crafted a pitch and found the courage to press “send”, there’s nothing as deflating as getting radio silence back.

But the reality is that only a minority of emails ever get a reply. Somewhere between 1% and 3% of PR pitch emails get a response, while a 40 to 50% pitch acceptance rate is considered good for a freelance journalist.

Editors’ inboxes are so busy, they can get hundreds of emails every day (and this will only get worse as journalists increasingly get bombarded with AI spam pitches). It means, even if an editor likes your idea, it can easily get lost in the deluge and forgotten about - unless you follow up to remind them it exists.

Photo by Scott Graham on Unsplash

The follow-up email has had some bad press over the years. I know many journalists moan about getting too many follow-ups and some have publicly called out PRs who do this. One of the most common questions I get asked when I speak to PR agencies and comms teams about working with the media is: “Is it ever OK to follow up?”.

And my answer is always: Yes - you should! …But only if you do it properly.

You could miss out on some great opportunities if you don’t take the time to follow up. As a freelance journalist, somewhere around half of my successful pitches are only commissioned after I’ve nudged the editor to check if they’re interested.

But done the wrong way, you risk annoying the journalist and burning bridges.

So today, I’m sharing my tried-and-tested method for sending a follow-up email. Feel free to steal this method or adapt it for your own pitches: