How To Be Pleasantly Persistent In Your Media Follow-Ups

Are you being “pleasantly persistent” in your follow ups with the media?

 

Or are you being radio silent? 🔇

 

Once you’ve sent a pitch, you must follow up! It’s ok to be the one who asks the questions!

 

We are all human and we miss things, and the truth is members of the media get HUNDREDS of pitches each day. So being pleasantly persistent in your follow ups puts your pitch back at the top of their inbox. Maybe your email went to their spam, which happens a lot if you include links/hyperlinks.

 

Being “pleasantly persistent” means: don’t be demanding, but let them know that you are checking in and making sure they received your information and you’d love to know what they think about it. I get a lot of responses on my followup email(s) because I’m pleasantly persistent and POLITE.

 

One of the number one things I get asked is: how often do I follow up and how many times? What do you say in your follow ups? Here is where I spill it all! So, take out your notebook because you’re gonna want to write this down.

 

When to follow up and how often:

A good rule of thumb is you can follow up about once a week. It can be a little sooner than that if it’s a timely topic, 2-3 days later. Keep in mind, you want to be following up enough to stay on their radar, but not reaching out every single day. I would follow up a number of 3 times in total, and if you don’t hear back, leave it at that. At that point, it’s time to send a new pitch on a new topic or to a different media outlet.

 

Keep it simple and polite:

 

According to: CP Communications, even if you are getting annoyed that you have not heard back from them, above all be polite. You make more friends with honey than vinegar; the media have deadlines to meet so take that into account when talking to them on the phone or writing a follow up email. 

 

It’s also good to keep it simple when emailing or calling the media. They are usually short on time, so it’s important to be more effective and get straight to the point, in a polite manner. One or two sentences are usually enough to simply state you are following up on an initial pitch sent through. 

 

Making a follow up phone call or sending polite and professional follow up emails will help to create a positive relationship with the media which can be an invaluable resource for you.

 

So, what should the follow up email look like? Here is a brief example:

 

Hey XX, 

 

I wanted to follow up since I know you are probably short on time and might not have seen my last email and I think it might be of interest to your audience:

 

We ran a study analyzing Amazon bestsellers from the past five years and found some really interesting trends, including:

 

– Women authors sell on average 4X as many books as male ones

– But there are more male authors than female ones in almost every category…Excluding horror and fantasy!

 

I think [publication’s] readers might find these results interesting. Happy to provide details if you’d like. (Your contact information)

 

Best,

Katie

 

(Media Bio)

 

How are you being “pleasantly persistent” today? Whether it’s following up on a pitch or with a client – comment below and share your tips about how you are staying on top of mind and securing those deals. 💪