Cold Emails and Credibility: The New Age of PR Strategies

Mm, that's good.

And welcome to a new episode of Digital Coffee Marketing Brew.

I'm your host, Brett Dyster.

But this week we're gonna be talking about the integration between PR and marketing.

I know a lot of you PR pros and marketers know that we're, we're similar, but we're different.

But a lot of people don't really know that we're actually similar and different at the same time.

They just kind of lump us all together and think we do the same thing, which is not really true of marketing is mostly, and can be focused more on sales.

NPR is mostly about the brand recognition, reputation, and all other fun stuff here.

But with me, I have Carson with me and he is basically an expert in this.

He has a company that just helps with other companies, just trying to bridge the gap between this, integrate it, and make it seem like a well oiled machine to boost your sales, which we all actually want to boost our sales because that's how businesses grow.

But let's welcome him.

So welcome Carson to the show.

Yeah, thanks for having me and much appreciated.

Good intro there.

And I guess the only other thing I would say for now is PR marketing.

They are vastly different.

But at the end of the day, when you're looking at it from a growth perspective, you need those touch points.

You need perception just in order to, well, get sales.

Really?

Yeah.

And the first question asks all my guests is, are you a coffee or tea drinker?

Ooh, technically I'm neither.

I'll go with tea just because I haven't fallen into the trap of drinking coffee.

Try and stay away from caffeine, try and stay away from sugar.

But like a nice tea when I'm feeling sick does help.

Like a green tea, black tea.

Like, what do you actually have, like a preferred type of tea?

Not really.

I just put a ton of lemon in the tea so it helps my throat whenever I'm sick.

And that's about it, really.

Gotcha.

I gave a brief explanation about your expertise.

Can you give our listeners a little bit more about what you do?

Yeah.

So I run Spit Solutions.

It is a public relations firm.

Everything we do, whether it's from client acquisition, getting our clients featured, like, we just use cold email to do it.

So we're basically a cold email agency kind of propped up as a branding agency.

And really our value prop is to either help control the narrative, increase credibility, or get eyeballs and exposure out there so that you can get in front of either your ideal clients, which may be an investor, it may be a huge B2B company, or it may be a business to.

It may just be a normal consumer at the end of the day.

And everything we're looking to do within that is basically take them to the next step, logically dispel any sales objections if at all possible, and present our clients as the people that can actually solve their problem or instilled confidence within that prospect that my client can solve the problem.

Got you.

So do you actually think that most businesses do well with integration between marketing and pr?

I mean, we all know that you have to integrate every team together and they should actually like be integrated together to actually help the business grow.

But do you think a lot of businesses actually do that?

I would say somewhat.

And the reason why I say somewhat is because a lot of the businesses that we work with, granted, if they have coverage before they go through it in a weird way, like they might use something like harrow or quoted just to get an as seen on banner.

Like, nothing wrong with that.

At the end of the day, however, that's not really going to do a ton with like controlling the narrative.

Like controlling the narrative.

And what I mean by that is having the message you want to get out there.

Like, think of it like this.

If you're going to post on LinkedIn, if you're going to make a sales asset, if you're going to make something share value, you can put that exact same thing into articles, pitch yourself out for that, or use editorials where you can write specifically on that, get that featured, and then market that to your audience.

From what we've seen, it's either that or the companies that we work with that have gotten featured in the past, they might not use it enough in their sales process.

Like, for example, a lot of companies we work with, if they have a ton of press, like they may not even do something as simple as an as seen on banner.

A lot of the time we see a lot of companies we work with, if they use it in their ads, it works relatively well even for like new companies too.

One of them, one of the companies we worked with, they were a new E commerce brand, like just founded.

We gave them a couple quick hits for press.

They used that press to get their products into stores in the Los Angeles, California area.

And they ultimately ended up, I think they're at close to mid six, close to seven figure run rate in like four or five months.

But not everyone can do that, of course.

And I think the other aspect too is really just integrating it properly so that the messaging is out there.

Like the messaging, obviously using it, people don't use it enough.

And really getting placements, the other thing.

Gotcha.

And I mean, we're talking about cold emails and everything.

So what's.

If you actually have it all set up, so what's the next step?

Once you have kind of the campaign set up the emails, how do you actually effectively do this for the betterment of marketing and pr?

Because each one of them have their own different goals.

Because obviously they do have their own different, I guess, ways of dealing with the public.

Yeah, and I would divide cold email into two or three different categories, technically, maybe three or four.

It's the tech and infrastructure set up.

Like, you never want to send out cold emails from your main domain if you're doing more than like 20 or 30 a day, just because if you have a website linked to it, you will hit spam.

You cannot recover from getting hit in spam if you have a website linked to it, just due to IP and technical issues.

So always buy burner domains.

Just buy.

Like, for example, if Your website is marketingbrew.com, just buy something like getmarketingbrew.com and set that up.

The other component with it, I would say, is scripting.

Scripting is the least important at the end of the day, but really you want something short, sweet, that they can reply with interest.

It kind of depends on what you're offering.

If you know you're either selling a hot offer or a hot story, give them as much as possible that they need to take it to next steps.

However, if you're pitching something that's kind of a bit more lukewarm, or maybe something that may not have as much general interest, you do still want to include all that information, but you do want to make it short, sweet, and kind of as clear as possible just so that they're more likely to reply with interest.

I'm sure, like, you probably get, what, a couple dozen, maybe a hundred emails per day.

And some of them, the ones I get are getting a lot shorter, a lot clearer, easier to reply to.

But in the past they've been hundreds of words.

No one really cares.

No one wants to read them.

Is that what you've seen?

Yeah, for the most part.

I mean, I've seen various different types of links.

I've seen various different types of, I guess, subject lines, because the subject line is what is actually going to make the person open the email.

But then you have the iOS, I guess, new rule changes where the iPhone just opens all of them for you.

So you don't really know your open rate anymore.

It's more the CTR or the click through rate is what I'm, what I feel like is the best metric right now.

Is that, is that correct?

I would say it depends where you're, depends where you're trafficking someone and depends on the platform.

If you're doing warm email marketing to a list that's opted in off of an ad, I'd say click through rates is probably the best.

If you're doing cold email marketing, I wouldn't even bother including links or images or anything like that.

You can probably get away with one at a low volume.

But if you do this at scale, which most organizations need to do because, well, they need clients, right at the end of the day it is going to hit spam.

We can't even track open rates because from what we've tested over sending out, I think we've sent out about a couple hundred K, maybe a million over the course of this year.

Cold emails, like for clients to get people featured.

And then just for ourselves, we haven't seen any positive difference by having open rate on only negative difference like scripts that I would say like open rate stuff does fall into, that does fall into the setup just because you want to make sure that you're hitting the inbox.

The only two things that we track is its reply rates which is just the interest and it's either the percent of people that take that next step.

So that's either meeting book rate or that is basically getting someone featured.

And the only two things we've seen that actually affect the second stat, which is like the likelihood that someone does something is how quick you are to reply technically what you're offering.

And I would say it's also really how quality your replies are in the first place.

Like if someone asks for example, oh, can you give me more info on the CEO?

And you give a one sentence blurb, not going to be great.

However, if you give them everything that they're looking for, everything that they can possibly think of, then that's going to make it a lot easier.

But again, scripts are kind of the least important thing from what we've seen.

Really at the end of the day it is targeting to a sense and we look at targeting and list building through a couple of different things.

I will go in depth just because like doing this for a cold perspective and doing this for pr, way different and you can do it a lot simpler.

For cold you can go two approaches.

You can go like spray and pray, get everyone that could Potentially fit a list, Just hit them.

And you can also go very targeted.

Neither of them are good or bad in my approach.

Obviously, if you can do targeted, always do targeted.

However, from what we've seen, we haven't seen a huge difference in adding on spray and press.

So I would do both.

But from a PR perspective, how we look at it, because we're always, we're reaching out to the same contacts day in, day outs, we can burn our media contacts very easily.

I've seen it.

It's pretty common.

There's a couple of resources.

I don't know if you've seen these, but there are a couple of resources where various journalists will post some of the worst PR outreach emails they get and they're essentially blacklisted from the entire community.

Have you seen those by any chance?

I've been on both ends, so I've done the pitching.

But how I've done it before is I actually read some of the articles that they do.

And I also understand what the journalist is actually like reporting on.

Because if you don't, then yeah, you get, you make bad pitches.

So you have to do, you have to put in the work to actually do it.

And if the journalist is going to post you as like, what are you doing?

Then that PR pro is either overworked and they have too much like a small team or by themselves, too much going on where they can't actually do it, or they're just lazy and just haven't actually done anything to actually read it.

So, yeah, I've seen kind of both.

I've seen for podcasts, like, oh, we love your podcast.

And like, it's, it's a guest pitch, but it's like, I'm like, you obviously don't know what my podcast is if you're guest pitching somebody that doesn't even fit what I actually do.

But that's mostly cold emails because they don't actually listen, even though they say it's a great podcast.

Like, they're trying to like give me compliments, but then they don't actually listen to it.

And I'm like, well, why should I, why should I respond to you if you're just not going to pay.

Pay attention to what I actually do.

Yeah, exactly.

And I found that there's two ways to go about that.

I'm, I'm a big fan of Alex Berman.

Like, I've met with him a few times.

What's used to work really well, I'd say before 2023, was just doing like a personalized first line.

Maybe it's something like, hey, love your show.

Digital coffee marketing brew.

Great job featuring, I don't know, featuring Carson or something like that.

That's a good first line.

What I've found to be a lot more effective for journalists and for just general B2B cold email is keeping it more structured and keeping it more relevant on something that they could already benefit from.

Like for example, if you're going to reach out to a journalist and your client is.

Let me think of an example.

If your client is a business person and let's say you want to talk about like kind of integrate them into, I don't know, like current news like Israel, Hamas, big thing.

Maybe one pitch you look at is Israel Israeli based business owner, how the war is affecting Israeli or Palestinian based businesses.

What I would do to build out a hyper targeted list, I would really look at all business reporters and then you can go off of that in the first place.

And then you look at business reporters in the Middle east.

You can look at reporters who cover like world global events, but really you can look at reporters who cover similar stuff.

We just do a lot of keyword search within Muckrak.

That's really the easiest thing we've done.

Whether it's by topic, if the topics is narrowed down enough, or whether it's by similar articles that they covered in the past.

From what I've seen, if you're pitching something that's the exact same thing as what they've just covered, that doesn't work because they've just covered it.

But if you're pitching something that's 20, 30% or maybe an updated development in the story, that does work and that does get a lot of interest.

And it is relatively easy to build like a 20, maybe 50 person list of journalists.

And generally not all of the time, but generally if you have something that hyper targeted, you don't need to write a person personalized first line.

If you, if you need to, you can build that out.

Like there's a couple of ways to go about it.

Like you can put everything in Google sheets, you can put the link to where they write.

You can use GPT4 API integrations to actually get some of their last articles written and then turn that into a personalized first line if you really want to.

However, from what we've seen, it does take a lot of setup to build, but it does work.

What's easier for most people and what's more actionable for most people to do is just building out targeted based on keywords, based on previous articles written, you can mention that if you want to, but if you want to do a bit more bulk cold email, just targeting the right people at the end of the day.

Got you.

And then moving on to a little bit of LinkedIn.

Because LinkedIn does have a lot of cold emails.

Like, how do you bridge that gap?

Because I get a lot of them and they're all sales calls.

And I'm like, that's not the point of LinkedIn.

Stop.

Stop requesting connections from me.

And then go straight to your sales pitch, hardcore.

And I'm like, well, I'm not responding to you now because that's not the point.

I mean, how.

How do you bridge that gap?

Because I feel like a lot of people don't understand that.

They go, oh, let's connect.

So I connect and like, okay, here's my services.

And I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, slow it down.

Like, I get this.

We're all in business, but you kind of form a, like a relationship.

So how do you do that with the.

With the cold emails?

I know, it's pretty hard.

Yeah.

And there's two ways we go about it.

There's intent.

Oh, I say intent data loosely because the only real intent data that we look at for client acquisition is if they're a recent hire.

And we can just mention that, like, hey, recent hire, saw you just got.

So you just got promoted to whatever, cmo, xyz.

Would you be open to looking at PR services in your marketing plan or something like that?

I have never seen anyone say F off or get out of here by doing something simple like that just because, well, CMOs, they get hired, they're going to make marketing changes, they're going to build up marketing plan.

Right.

That's one way to go about it.

But for general, like, general outreach, it's really using the law of reciprocity.

At the end of the day, like, for you personally, if I was to come up to you and say, hey, like, do you want to get featured in Forbes?

Sure.

You could say yes, if it's like an active thing, but probably not, right?

Yeah, it depends.

I mean, Forbes is big, but it's not like, I have a feeling it's not what it used to be, but it's still like a recognizable, like, news site.

Yeah, exactly.

And if I said, for example, like, hey, would you want to be on my podcast or I'm writing a couple articles, could I interview you, would you be more likely to say yes there?

Yeah, because, I mean, you asked me and you kind of like, this seems like a more reciprocity than, hey, here's my services, pay me.

Exactly.

And with that, what's nice is you can kind of get rid of the unqualified people by targeting way higher businesses.

Those higher caliber businesses, they're going to say yes at an exponential rate.

And obviously, if you're going to do free work, like everything that I've seen work now is free work.

We take on a lot of clients just by doing free stuff and then upselling them on the back end.

It builds a relationship, makes you seem like a human.

You don't really have to sell because I didn't even try.

I just did this because I was trying to get case studies of a couple large businesses, but we ended up signing a couple eight, nine figure businesses when we were relatively new just because we did free work.

And they brought it up like, oh, can you get us placed anywhere else?

I was like, oh, yeah, let's explore it.

Right?

So that's something that I haven't seen a lot of people do.

Give your best stuff out for free.

I'm seeing it with content, but the thing is everyone's doing it with content.

Do it with your service.

People running ads, give out two free ad creatives, right?

Do something like that.

If you're doing short form video production, send over like five short form clips of this podcast, for example.

If you're doing.

I don't, I don't really know how you do this for SEO, but maybe you do like a free article.

I don't know, I'm not an SEO person, but that's what we've seen work.

And at the end of the day, no one says no.

The reply rates from what I've tested go up about 200, 300%.

Like for example, if I'm doing a normal PR pitch, email, maybe like 3% reply rate off of first email.

If I'm pitching well, if I'm saying, hey, do you want to get featured?

100% people say yes, 78% reply rate.

And if you follow up, it gets to about 15, 16% too.

So it's almost like a trial period.

Like here, I'm going to give you this so you can see what I can do.

And if you like the results, then obviously we can discuss payment options for that.

But you at least like give them your work or your best work and then they go, okay, I want to buy.

Yeah, exactly.

And if they don't like the service at the end of the day, usually they'll tell you why.

Or maybe they'll tell you, hey, this isn't top of mind right now, but let's reconnect in two or three months.

And even if they do connect in two or three months, you're going to be top of mind because who are they more likely to remember?

The guy who already did, did work for you and performed and made you money, or the guy who's pitching them over cold email.

Is there a limit on how much you want to do for free?

Because I know, I mean, people always want to get new businesses, but is there that limit?

Because, I mean, at the end of the day it's work for you and you don't want to like overdo it too.

So is there like that, that balance that you should consider as well?

Yeah, there is at the end of the day.

And it kind of just depends on what you can deliver, how you can deliver it at the end of the day.

Like, for example, because we do this with pr, right?

Like, I'm not going to get someone featured in Forbes or Entrepreneur or New York Times or Wall Street Journal for free just because even if I had the capabilities to do that consistently, regularly, I likely couldn't just due to optics, scope, being able to guarantee it.

What I prefer to do is give them something that they find valuable and something that doesn't take a lot of time commitment from them or you or a lot of effort or even a lot of cost.

If it costs you to do it.

Factor it in for cost per lead, obviously, because you can reach out to bigger businesses.

Wouldn't worry too much about cost per lead, but make it scalable.

Because at the end of the day, like you are running a business, you do want to have the most amount of dollars coming in.

So I think those are the key things that I would look at.

And for the most part, I would say everyone listening should or could be able to think of something valuable that moves the needle that actually either helps hit the exact same goals that, that I can't think, but that kind of go into why your clients actually buy from you or make them feel like they're a king or a queen so they're more likely to buy premium service from you.

So it's almost like what we've been talking the whole time is the integration between PR and marketing with your free trial.

Because your pr, you're, you're outreaching to people, you're showing them your work.

And then the sales part comes after that with the marketing side of it.

Yeah, it's perception at the end of the day and obviously shaping Perception is the easiest thing in the world.

Like I would count referrals as part of pr, right?

Just because it's perception on you, someone refers you out, they're coming in with a good perception on you, obviously, like personal branding, company branding, like we do want to manufacture that at scale.

Just because one to one relationships, can you scale it?

Sure.

But online social media like press allows you to scale everything to an exponential level.

Like one thing we look at is like Google presence, right?

Like if someone's doing their due diligence on you, your company, like what are they going to find, what are they going to search up?

How can you get around their biggest objections so they're most likely to hit that next step, whether it's a call, email to sign up, free trial coming into your store, whatever it is.

And so eventually we're going to have like the blurred lines between marketing and PR too much now because they've already started to blur where PR people are doing marketing stuff and marketing stuff or sometimes doing PR people.

Is it just going to be good for pros just to understand both, at least from the basic principles or the old school principles of things?

Like word of mouth is king and it always will be king.

No matter how often we say how great like social media is, word of mouth is always king.

So is that, are we going to see too much of a blurred line now where PR and marketing are just going to have to know each other's different types of principles?

I think it kind of depends.

At the end of the day, we work with some massive companies, enterprise level companies, we really don't do anything on the marketing side for them.

The only thing they actually need from us is to get featured.

And because they have those systems in place, they're doing the marketing themselves.

Like, I'm not the one doing it, that's for sure.

I'm not that good.

But for most people, most businesses, it is the mixture.

You are going to have to realize how you can boost your perception, boost your credibility, get in front of the right people, which is all pr, and integrate that in front of your marketing strategy and PR professionals.

Like if you cannot equate your services into dollars, people won't buy from you.

Like it's as simple as that.

Like hell.

If you get featured on publication and you run an email list blast 90% of the clients we work with, they make the money back.

The upfront investment they may pay for us from month one, right then and there, and then they'll re up after that.

That super simple gotcha and then where do, where do you think the future of this integration is going to be going?

Because, like, like we've talked before, I mean, there's the outreach of it and either email newsletter signups, cold emails to get businesses free trials, and then eventually the sales part.

So where's this future?

Like, is it going for this?

I think the future is wherever the consumer wants it to go.

Like it was, I would say, 2020.

Late 2020 is when I started.

If I was to do the exact same thing I did 2020 as it did 2023.

I've tested this.

It's about 15% of the cash collected from new clients and maybe about 30% of the results on the backend for fulfillments.

Obviously, times change.

What consumers, what reporters, what journalists, what businesses look for and what they actually respond to is kind of dependent on what they're not being hit with and what they actually want to be hit with.

Gotcha.

And then where can people find you online?

Yeah, LinkedIn and Twitter are the main ones at the Carson02 for Twitter and LinkedIn, my name, Carson Spitsky website, company website, spitsolutions.com that's really where we do everything from perception, credibility, getting features in publications and TV as well.

And that's about it.

All right, any final thoughts for listeners?

I think the only thing is really just take a look at what your audience cares about, what actually resonates with them.

At the end of the day, it's basic copywriting principles, but applying them through public relations to boost people's perception on you and what you're offering.

All right, thank you, Carson, for joining Digital Coffee Marketing Brew and sharing your knowledge on PR and integration with marketing and cold emails.

And thank you for listening to Digital Coffee Marketing Brew.

As always, please subscribe to all your favorite p.

Actually podcasting apps in PR for me as well.

And join me next month and talk to another great seller in the PR industry.

All right, guys, stay safe, understand your integration between both of these sectors, and see you next month later.