Here’s an oddball study from PR Newswire that attempts to answer one of the great questions of our time: Why do journalists ignore emails from public relations people?
At its
best, PR email relies on all the same tools as B2B marketing: AI, profiling, personalization, cadencing. Yet reporters are often annoyed by it. This survey of 1,000 journalists in the Asia-Pacific
region identified these automatic turnoffs:
- Overt marketing — 21%
- Lack of useful content — 21%
- Unclear email subject line —
18%
- Insufficient details — 12%
- Brand is not well known or has a bad reputation — 8%
Any reporter can all tell you a thing or two about overt
marketing. Not a single press release, even those with legitimate news, fails to use the word “leading” when describing a company. And the hype, going on from there, is usually over the
top.
On the positive side, here are the multimedia elements prized by journalists:
- High-resolution photos — 29%
- Video — 25%
- Infographics — 21%
And here’s what journalists consider when they get event invitations:
- News value — 43%
- Use in maintaining a
relationship — 25%
- Transport subsidies — 11%
Most of that sounds right. Reporters may disagree on the subject of transport subsidies.
But now let’s
get into dangerous territory. Here are some personal irritants:
Embargoitis — Sure, I appreciate it when someone gives me a heads up on a pending story. And I
scrupulously honor embargoes to which I’ve agreed.. But I rarely write these things up until the very last minute, anyway. And it’s starting to become overwhelming — I’m
getting numerous emails per day with the word “EMBARGO” right there in the subject line. Sometimes the embargoes are a month in advance. Then you get an email changing the date. Hey,
chums, you’re overestimating my clerical abilities.
Stress Test — Every week, it seems, companies put out white papers and studies. Sometimes I
want to read these reports even if I don’t end up covering them. Instead of attaching a PDF to the press release, however, they make you go through a registration process. You have to sign in,
assert that you’re not a robot and tell them your company size (information most of us don’t even have). These PR leads are fed right into the sales funnel — often, I’m called
by a sales rep moments after filling out the request. What a waste of time for both of us. Worse, the sales rep usually has no idea that their company has issued a report. And I have to explain, as
politely as possible, that I’m not a prospect. They ought to look at these processes — they might be scaring away actual leads that come in through search.
Drowning
in PR — Like any reporter, I build relationships with certain PR people over time. I trust them, and their emails are always personal. One such person introduced herself by feeding
me a hot tip on a story that had nothing to do with her client; to this day, I’ll open her emails before anyone else’s. But I’m receiving on an increasing number of PR emails about
news outside my subject area — announcements of the opening of the Indianapolis 500, scheduling of the upcoming competitive exams for jobs somewhere. Even the personalization has a batch and
blast quality to it: They uniformly start by saying, “Hi, Ray, hope you had a good weekend.” It’s one thing to wish someone a good weekend on Friday. It’s another to
retroactively hope you had one — on Wednesday.