How to Help Your Clients Rock Email Interviews
Wondering why some email submissions don't get used? Learn how to give writers the most usable responses (which will help your client become a writer's go-to source!)
Hi Top Tier Consulting Substack subscribers. Happy Thursday! We hope you enjoyed our first 2 newsletters. If you didn’t read them yet, definitely make sure you check them out. We’ve been receiving many reviews about how they’ve been helping people to truly make a difference when pitching their clients for gift guides. Here they are:
Our first newsletter talked about how to pitch your sources around the holidays when it seems like people only care about gift guides. Thankfully, outlets care about a lot more than just gift guides during the Oct-January timeframe. So we’re helping you learn how to make all of your sources appealing right now. We’re talking how to get your therapists, dog trainers, authors, hairdressers, stylists, real estate experts, finance experts, CEOs and beyond into stories when it seems like people only care about gift guides. You can check that out here:
Our second newsletter was all about the gift guides because yes, those are a very big part of holiday coverage and practically every writer we know (including us) is working on them right now. We discussed how to make your gift guide submission stand out from all the other ones, how to properly position your client to land in a gift guide, how to handle affiliate links, the angles to go with, what to tell writers about your product, things that will make your gift guide submission get instantly deleted and more. You can read that here:
This week, let’s talk email interviews!
If you’re noticing more and more requests for them lately, and a preference for writers to get quotes from your sources this way versus phoners, you’re not alone. Email interviews are becoming increasingly popular. There are many reasons why writers are requesting these and no, it’s not because they are lazy.
We realize it is incredibly frustrating on a publicist's end if you have your client answer email questions and then they don’t end up getting used in a story. There are reasons why this happens. The good news? There are definitely ways to avoid this from happening and to better a client’s chances of getting used.
When it comes to answering email interview questions, there are some tricks to know that would help out a writer tremendously, and even help make your source a go-to for that writer, and the other many publications that they write for, in the future.
There are also some mistakes we see people making with email questions time and time again (some of which could get you blacklisted from working with a writer ever again, eek!). Your clients may be doing some of the things unknowingly and some of these things may be happening that you, as the publicist, are also unaware of.
Here is everything you need to know about helping your sources navigate the world of email interviews: Why writers request them, when and how to push back, tips for answering to ensure that your client’s quotes make it into the story and things to avoid that could get your client left out of a story they submitted answers for.
Here we go!
P.S. Yes, there is a paywall here. If you’re a free subscriber make sure to upgrade to paid so that you can take advantage of reading our current and past newsletters. We are charging a small fee to receive our weekly email newsletters but as two professional writers, we’re treating these like we would any article we’d being commissioned to write. We’ll be putting our two heads together to pack these full of our best tips of information, past experiences, personal examples and more. A lot of effort goes into these. And they are well thought out in advance. As a reminder, these newsletters will go out WEEKLY so you’ll be getting four articles from us a month. Keep in mind that’s more than many paid substacks are offering. And if you sign up/ upgrade your subscription to a Founders Membership, you’ll get monthly access to us where you can ask us questions that came up during the month in our virtual Ask us Anything sessions. So there is extra value in that too! We have our first AMA coming up and will send details out to founders soon.
Also, we want to make sure we’re constantly providing content that matches what you looking for as well so if there are topics that you’d like us to tackle in upcoming newletters, definitely let us know! We’ll make sure to do some posts about it.
Now, onto the good stuff! EVERYTHING to Know About Navigating the World of Email Interviews: