An Emailer’s View of PR “Spam”

Last week, Michael Arrington of TechCrunch vented a bit about PR gone wrong, lamenting broken embargoes and lambasting bad PR practitioners whose “specialty is spamming.” Ouch! Although Lois is an exception and most PR people are more respectful, no good PR person wants to be perceived of as sending spam. Yet the fact is that  journalists all over the country still want to recieve releases via email, even from people they don’t actually know. What they don’t want are irrelevant, or just bad, pitches (or too many phone calls). 

So here are a few tips on how to make the most of the email medium without having your emails perceived of as spam.

First, follow CAN-SPAM laws.  Although press releases do not fall under the regulations of CAN SPAM, it is still a good guideline and the spirit of the law should always be followed. That means making sure your subject line is honest, sender’s mailing address is included, and, above all, a functioning opt-out is visible and easy to use.  Everyone who gets your email should be able to easily and immediately notify you that they don’t want to be on future distributions. Most importantly, once a recipient opts out, make sure you do not send releases to them again. Honoring the requests of recipients is essential and a good do-not-email list is a must!

Most PR people know that creating good lists is vital, but it is easy to ignore the lists once they’re created. As we all know, the news business is topsy-turvy at the best of times and even more so now. Keep your lists updated, tight and clean and make it easy for recipients to opt in orout. Make sure you have permission to send before you add them to the list, especially with bloggers. (I have long pondered the surprising fact that for all the advise of thought leaders to keep lists targeted–something we advise as well–the truth is that bigger lists perform better on all the metrics we track, across projects in the PR space. Inexplicable but absolutely true!)

Use the medium wisely. This means many things, such as including all the data a journalist would want to cover your story: images, video/audio, backgrounders, contact links, etc. (After all, journalists are busier than ever and have less time to do more work). But please be considerate of file size–no attachments! (Also, as an fyi, hyperlinks get stripped pretty easily so absolute URL’s are much more effective if you have that option).  

Here are a few other ways to use the medium the right way… Do not drop a bunch of names in the BCC field; your release will be perceived of as spam by filters if not people! You might also consider using e-marketing tactics, such as personalization or segmentation, to make your news more relevant to the recipients. And if you work with an email vendor or ESP, make sure they spam test each release, test for rendering across systems prior to sending, and, if possible, are white-listed with major media outlets.

Finally, give yourself an advantage by making your release look good through a preview pane even with images blocked. Email that shows up with blank boxes or as just a link won’t perform nearly as well and is more likely to be perceived as spam. Email that looks good to recipients who have mere seconds to make a judgement on the value of your release will deliver better results. Make sure journalists can see your headline, the first few sentences of the release, and the added content (bio’s, recipes, quotes, video, etc.) at a glance. Standing out from newsroom, and inbox, clutter can make all the difference.

The truth is that email is still the glue in our modern communications practices. In spite of the excitement around social media and search, email is still the place where most of us organize our lives. Most journalists still aren’t using social media (and many who are use it socially, not professionally) and while optimizing releases is a great way to increase the visibility of a website, getting your release on the front page of Google is highly unlikely.  I’m not suggesting that social media elements such as bookmarks or optimization are not useful–they definitely are and should be wisely included. I am simply pointing out that for most journalists email is still the most effective, and preferred, method of contact so using the medium wisely can give you a real advantage. And, understanding the medium’s strengths and weaknesses can keep the “spammer” label at bay.

TagsBCC field, Bloggers, CAN SPAM, deliverability, Email, Journalists, List, New Media Release, Social Media Release