Don't Forget THIS Cardinal Rule of Sending a Press Mailer!

Plus: There's still time to sign up for our June Top Tier Talk (free to paid subscribers) and July Affiliate Marketing "Christmas in July" Workshop

Happy Thursday, TTC subscribers!

By now, we hope you’ve all had a chance to sign up for our 2 upcoming events:

1. June Top Tier Talk: Our monthly, open-forum Q&A session where we dive into any media topic you’d like insights on

2. July Affiliate Marketing Workshop — “Aka “Christmas in July:” Get a jump start on your 2023 Holiday Gift Guide season with our affiliate Marketing workshop featuring publicist and affiliate marketing guru Sarah Karger. We’ll talk everything you need to be gift guide ready this holiday season, with a heavy emphasis on getting your clients dialed in with affiliates, properly communicating affiliate-ready clients to editors and writers, and best practices in pitching them. This is a group session priced at a more accessible rate for participants: $99 for TTC paid Substack subscribers and $49 for free subscribers. We hope to see you there!

And don’t forget we’re still available for a couple July 1:1 consulting sessions, too. Here are a few of the topics we offer:

• Want to workshop a few pitches with two top-tier writers to help improve your success rate? Try our Pitch Perfecting session.

• Looking to build deeper relationships with journalists that will pay off for years to come? You’ll love our Become a Journalist’s BFF session.

• Have a slew of specific questions you want answers to? Book an Ask Us Anything session … the sky’s the limit.

• Need fresh ideas for sending mailers to writers? Book our Press Package session.

Have other ideas you need help brainstorming or creating an action plan for? We offer Custom sessions, too! Email us at info@toptierconsulting.net.

---

This week’s topic:
Avoiding a Major Press Mailer Faux Pas

As we start thinking about the upcoming holiday gift guide season, we wanted to touch on a topic near and dear to every e-commerce writer’s and product publicist’s hearts: media samples (aka press mailers). But actually, this topic is important all year long … both of us write product odes and roundups 12 months of the year, which means we’re always receiving samples.

As you know, press samples are the absolute BEST way to familiarize a writer with a product. It’s how we hold/smell/taste/touch/experience a produce for ourselves … and we like to do this because our reputations as journalists and the gigs with our outlets are dependent upon our ability to recommend great products to their readers! If we don’t have a first-hand experience, we aren’t as credible and may end up recommending something a reader could have a bad experience with.

Plus, we write a lot of “I Tried It” style pieces and those absolutely require getting our hands on the product in question.

As such, the UPS guy and FEDEX guy literally visit our homes on a daily basis (sometimes multiple times a day!) with various press samples vying for our attention. It’s a lot to manage (both in terms of storage, and also product testing can be quite tedious if you do it right!), but it’s also one of the coolest parts of our jobs.

There are a lot of things to keep in mind when putting together a press package (and we can get into those other things in future newsletters if you want — let us know in the comments!), but today we want to talk about what we consider THE cardinal rule of press mailers.

And this topic stems from a real-life situation Jill encountered earlier this week. Here’s her story:

I’d first like to reiterate that this example stems from a publicist I’ve worked with many times before and she’s truly lovely and excellent at her job. This is by no means a dig at her, nor will I identify her here in this Substack to keep things anonymous. But this general example is an important teachable moment that I want to share for the greater good.

This publicist was very excited about her client, and thought it would be a good fit for an assignment I’m working on. So she sent a pitch about the product and asked if I’d like a sample. Here’s where it all went wrong …