Pitching by email? Here's how to make sure it gets read

Five easy edits to your subject line to make sure editors open your email

We all get too many emails. In my personal inbox alone over the last 48 hours, I've received multiple messages notifying me about online purchases and deliveries (with an extra “can you please leave us feedback” message for each one), some insurance I’ve forgotten to renew, an implausible number of messages from my son’s school and a message from my mum asking what slippers I want for my birthday (yes, I’m in my rock ’n’ roll era). Just finding time to read them all - including newsletters like this - can feel impossible some days.

But journalists’ work inboxes are another level. On top of all the usual emails everyone needs to send and receive to carry out their work, journalists get a daily deluge of press release emails and pitches. I’ve managed to remove myself from enough mailing lists that I now only get around 30-60 of these a day - about 95% of them completely irrelevant to me. When I was a staff journalist on a national newspaper, I averaged 200-400 but my record was about 650 emails in a day - and this was pre-pandemic, pre-working-from-home, so everyone was probably sending and receiving fewer emails because we actually talked in the office.

My record is receiving about 650 emails in a day.

Why does this matter? Because if you’re trying to get an editor or journalist to read your pitch, you need to make sure you stand out from this sea of emails so that yours is actually opened and not ignored.

Here’s a little snapshot of part of my inbox from a couple of weeks ago - the one I've blacked out is the only one I opened:

Please don’t mention the other 83,290 emails in my inbox…

As you can see, it can be hard to make your email stand out from the masses of other stuff clogging up journalists’ inboxes.

So can you ensure your pitch is read? There are no hard-and-fast rules (or everyone would do the same thing). You probably already know that I both receive pitches and pitch to editors every day - more about me here - and I’ve found these five subject line tweaks have really helped improve my success rate when pitching by email:

1. Show why you’re emailing in the first 1-2 words