HOW DO JOURNALIST RELATIONSHIPS IMPACT EMAIL PERFORMANCE?

Summary from the TLDR Marketing newsletter

Building relationships with journalists drives far better email performance. An analysis of 1.3m emails showed warm outreach achieves a 56.4% open rate and 20.1% reply rate, compared to 38.4% and 1.06% for cold outreach. Recency matters because journalists who replied within 90 days are about 30x more likely to respond again, but engagement is still higher than cold outreach after 6 months. The results were consistent across 17 agencies, with some seeing reply rates up to 40x higher when relationships were strong. Simple tactics like sending relevant pitches, reaching out without an ask, and responding quickly help build and maintain these relationships.