Create & send pitches

Pitches are similar to campaigns, but more targeted and sent to a single recipient.

Much like campaigns you can attach stories, track open and click rates, follow up pitches, using all the features of the rich text editor you use for campaigns.

Unique to pitches there's a CC/BCC feature you can use to include other recipients, but note once you include CC/Bcc this is incompatible with open and click tracking, which is then disabled.

Attaching a story automatically links your pitch to it's related site.

As well as viewing all pitches in the Pitches section of the app, you also see a history of pitches in the contact activity timeline.

Composing your Pitch

Pitch header options

First, choose your sender address - this is the email a pitch appears sent from. Different Sender addresses can be set up on your account.

Then search for a contact you wish to pitch to. You can search for both names and email addresses and the search supports partial matches.

Choose CC and BCC options (only available on pitches) if needed.

Give your pitch a subject. Note if you follow up a pitch or attach a story a subject is automatically generated for you, which you can then customise if needed.

There's an advanced settings section in the pitch header which you can open. It contains an option to link a site (automatically set if you add a story) and options to track opens and clicks (automatically set by default)

Pitch editor options

The full suite of personalisation 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. NEED LINK TO A GENERAL GUIDE TO EDITOR OPTIONS

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'.

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