How to optimize your recipient list

Before writing your media pitch, you should first find relevant contacts and prepare a list of journalists who could be interested in covering your story. Once you have your contact list ready and organized, start by choosing New Email and move to the first step, Recipients:

 

email select recipients

In the Select Recipients tab, click on Add recipientsYou can then choose any ContactsListsMy filters, or Filters in the respective tabs. This essentially means that you can distribute your pitch to predefined groups and segments that you’ve created earlier in the CRM. 

And the best part? Prowly enables very flexible recipient selection. With the same personalized email, you can easily target different lists and filters. Not to mention that Prowly’s smart suggestions will help you optimize your recipient list before launching an email distribution in order to protect the sender’s reputation and increase delivery rates. 

Here’s what smart suggestions look like: 

  • Exclude GDPR- protected contacts
    Contacts that aren’t GDPR-compliant should not receive this email.
  • Exclude unsubscribed contacts
    Contacts that unsubscribed from receiving your emails should not receive this email. We exclude them by default.
  • Exclude blacklisted contacts
    Blacklisted contacts won’t receive this email. 
  • Exclude contacts that hard bounce often
    Contacts that have hard bounced are potentially invalid or outdated.
  • Exclude contacts that soft bounced recently
    Exclude recipients that have encountered difficulties in recent delivery attempts.
  • Exclude contacts with low open rates
    For contacts that haven't opened 10 recent emails from you.
  • Exclude contacts with low click rates
    For contacts that haven't clicked any links in 10 recent emails from you.
  • Exclude contacts with low-quality scoring
    Low deliverability to these contacts is predicted by an in-depth analysis of email addresses. Prowly has detected issues with certain email addresses, which decreased your deliverability rates in the past. Excluding them should have a positive influence on your overall email performance.

In the optimization section, you can also find a warning about risky contacts: 

Risky contacts detected

Spam traps, invalid or disabled email addresses detected through comprehensive AI analysis of your contacts. Emails won't be sent to them.


Such recipients are automatically excluded, as your message is likely not to get delivered to them. This, in turn, can decrease your sender reputation, negatively impact delivery rates of all your emails in the future, or even result in your email address being blacklisted.

If you want to see which contacts have been deemed as risky or low quality, click on the underlined "Show X contacts in total" copy next to the message. 

To double-check what the final recipient list looks like in detail, you just need to move from Select Recipients to the Verify Recipients tab. Here’s also where you can exclude particular contacts from receiving your message.

 

emails verify recipients exclude contacts

Avoid mass pitching. Keep in mind that effective PR revolves around relationships, and these require a personalized approach. Launching mass email campaigns can also affect email deliverability and your reputation as a sender.