Every quarter, Propel PRM comes out with its Media Barometer, looking at pitching data from over 400,000 real pitches sent through its platform. The company does this by anonymizing and aggregating pitches sent via its Gmail and Outlook widgets to determine pitching metrics such as optimal subject line length to get a pitch opened, optimal pitch length to get a response, optimal day of the week to send a pitch out, and much more. 

This is done so that PR professionals can fine-tune their media campaigns with actionable data insights. For the most recent Media Barometer, Propel looked at how communicators pitched the media over the first quarter to understand how PR professionals can best adapt to the changing media landscape. 

Journalist response rates rose to their highest level ever recorded at 3.43%.

Given the frustrations of ad response rates and the growing complexities of organic ranking, Propel’s findings this quarter were quite hopeful.

A response can be anything from a no thank you to we’ll take the story. This rate is higher than the same time last year when journalists were responding to less than 3% of all pitches sent to them. Perhaps most interesting, this uptick in responses coincides with the highest rate of journalist layoffs since the 2008 financial crisis. 

Propel believes that one of the driving factors behind this increase in pitch response rates is that PR professionals are increasingly incorporating AI into their workflows. This means that it’s easier to draft a personalized pitch or press release that genuinely resonates with journalists. With the rise of AI-powered media databases and their increased implementation, it appears that communicators are finding more relevant journalists for their campaigns and reaching out to them for the first time. This is as opposed to the old-fashioned spray-and-pray method, in which PR professionals would pitch any remotely relevant journalist.

The company also found that while the highest number of pitches were sent on Tuesdays, journalists were most likely to respond on Thursdays. It was also found that the majority of pitches that garnered responses were replied to within 4 hours of the pitch being sent and that most stories were published between three days and one week after a pitch being sent. 

Finally, the pitches with the highest response rates were those between 50 and 150 words. Journalists are swamped with email pitches, and with approximately 7 PR professionals to each journalist in the US alone, it appears that people in the media appreciate short and to the point. This enables them to quickly decide if the story is for them and whether to send the idea to an editor for approval. 

In addition to these pitching statistics, Propel is seeing a marked rise in the number of pitches to new media outlets. For instance, pitches to podcasts continued to increase, with these pitches being responded to over 10% of the time. Also, there was an increase in pitches to social media influencers, with 92% being opened and 37% being responded to.

Download the Propel Q2 2024 Media Barometer for free to get these insights and more.

Download Your Free Copy of the Q2 2024 Propel Media Barometer

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Originally Published on Martech Zone: This Year, Journalists Are Responded More Than Ever To Public Relations Pitches