Create & send pitches

Pitches are similar to campaigns, but designed for more targeted, one-to-one outreach.

You can use the same rich text editor and many of the same tools you use for campaigns, including attaching stories, sending follow-ups, and tracking engagement.

Pitches also include options built for direct outreach, such as adding Cc or Bcc recipients when needed. If you attach a story, the pitch is automatically linked to the related site.

You can view all pitches in the Pitches section of the app, and see a contact’s pitch history in their activity timeline.

Composing your Pitch

Pitch header options

First, choose your sender address. This is the email address your pitch appears to be sent from. Different sender addresses can be set up in your account.

Next, search for the contact you want to pitch to. You can search by name or email address, and partial matches are supported.

You can also add Cc or Bcc recipients to a pitch. Click the Cc or Bcc button next to the To field, then select contacts from your list. Repeat this if you want to add more Cc or Bcc recipients.

Give your pitch a subject. If you’re following up on a pitch or attaching a story, a subject is automatically generated for you, which you can customise if needed.

You can open advanced settings in the pitch header for additional options. Here, you can link a site, which is automatically set if you add a story, and choose whether to track pitch opens, link clicks, or both. Tracking is enabled by default for the main recipient, but is not available for Cc or Bcc recipients.

Pitch editor options

The full suite of personalization options are available to you if you type `%` - currently first name, last name and full name variables, which are substituted with contact information when the pitch is sent.

If you used a value like "first name", you can click it to add a fallback value, so "Hi %first name!" could be replaced with "Hi there!" if the contact didn't have a first name set.

Text within the editor can be formatted and aligned much like our stories, with bold, italic, superscript, subscript, highlighted text, and you can also embed a number of things to make your pitch more dynamic and easier to read. Many things from the story editor can be used.

Attaching a story to your pitches

One of the key benefits of Prezly is reusing content efficiently. When pitching to a lot of people, it's much faster to write a story on your site, then attach it to a pitch.

Attached story options menu

Once you add a story you can choose whether to embed the whole story, or include an introduction only, along with a host of other options like including a site header and footer, aligning the embedded story and more.

Adding an unsubscribe link when you don't have an attached story

Please note it's a requirement to include an unsubscribe link in pitches. If you attach a story we include an unsubscribe link for free (as that comes with the newsroom).

If you aren't attaching a story, you can manually add an unsubscribe link using the editor link tool. Highlight some test (as shown in screenshots below), choose the link tool then choose 'common links' > 'Link to unsubscribe'.

Sending your pitch

Once you've finished composing your pitch, and depending on your work flow, you can:

Following up pitches

There are many ways to follow up pitches, from the grid, from a sent pitch view, and from the contact itself.

FAQ

Not seeing the custom sender address you added?

Make sure you've verified your sender domain in your Account settings

When trying to add a contact to your Pitch, there is a chance you may not be able to select or add a given email address. There are a few reasons this can happen.

Need to clean up draft pitches?

If you have a lot of draft pitches you can delete them from the drafts view