Why Sending an Email Attachment May Harm Your Coverage Chances & What to Do Instead

Plus: The video recording is now available for our press samplers workshop

Hello, subscribers.

Jill and Nicole recently hopped into a debate circling Twitter on press releases vs. word attachments in an email pitch to a writer. Our official answer? No attachments. And we’re not alone. Tons of other writers jumped into this conversation.

While you may have something great that you want to send a writer as an attachment, we’d still strongly advise not to. This includes everything from press releases and photos to media kits and beyond. We’re going to do a deep dive into that this week + talk about how to send these instead of in attachment format.

But first…

Did you miss our press mailer workshop? No worries. The recording is now available

This is one we’ve been wanting to do for a while and were so happy it finally came together. We took the best advice from our fellow colleagues and covered all things press samplers, touching on:

• What to include in a press mailer

• What writers often receive in press mailers that will end up donated or in the trash (translation: likely not providing much ROI for your client)

• A checklist to run through before sending out a press sample

• How to find the right writers to send press samplers to and which writers to avoid

• How to handle following up once you send a press sample — and why it’s a huge missed opportunity if you don’t

• When to follow up after sending a press sample

• How to handle press samples for limited batch/pricey items

• Why you should never send surprise packages to writers

• Questions you should ask a writer before sending out a product sample

• The one thing to always include in addition to the product that people surprisingly often leave out

• Is it better for a product sample to come directly from a warehouse or from the publicist?

• Does the packaging need to be fancy for a cool unboxing experience?

• Ideas for accessories/additional brands to include alongside your client’s product

• Press sampler bloopers writers often see

• Some ideas for ways to coordinate press boxes for maximum ROI

• Best practices for restaurant deliveries

• What makes a writer want to post a product they received on social media

• Timing of sending press samplers

• And more

If you missed it, you can still catch the recording, which we can email out to you to watch on your own time.

Rate: $39 Paid TTC Substack Subscribers; $99 Free TTC Subscribers
(you can always upgrade for the discount AND it’ll give you access to our weekly paid posts and monthly Top Tier Talks, too).

Interested? Email info@toptierconsulting.net

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Alright, diving right here. Reasons why writers don’t like email attachments. 1, 2, 3, go.

Attachments don’t always download

Sometimes attachments don’t download when we need them to and this can be a big issue when it counts. If a writers is doing a gift guide or wants to include your product in a round up, they will need a photo. If they are jamming away burning the midnight oil under the gun to get this article in (which, let’s be honest, is quite often how this whole thing works) and you’ve sent a photo as an attachment and it doesn’t download, then they don’t have a photo and will have to move onto another product instead of featuring yours.

They can cause your email to get stuck in our spam folders

Attachments can be flags for emails (this especially can be an issue if you are pitching a staff writer at a publication or an editor as they have anti-virus software and firewalls that can sometimes send these emails right to spam) and can end up in a spam folder. In theory, writers are occasionally combing through their spam folder…in reality, they are never looking in their spam folder.

Writers don’t know what you are sending them and don’t want a weird virus

Sometimes we get weird emails. Readers send us emails, publicists who we’ve never heard from send us stuff. Downloading something comes with risk and the last thing a writer needs is their computer being taken out. Oh the work that would pile up in that case (gives us chills just thinking about that!)!

Attachments take up space on our computers, which are already jam-packed with stuff

Up until quite recently, Nicole was working on a 2013 laptop that was basically threatening to blow up if she downloaded anything else onto it (happy to report she’s now on a brand new 2023 mac air). Needless to say, downloading your press release or photo would have taken up way too much room on her computer. While we’d like to think of ourselves as super organized people, writers don’t always have it together. And our computers are often very full with too many tabs open and desktops that are hot messes. Sometimes photos and media kits can be soooooooo big and take up so much room. And we’ll inevitably forget to delete them until our computers are on the verge of crashing.

We don’t have time to download things

This sounds crazy but we honestly don’t. Every day we are busy going through emails, pitching, sourcing, sending invoices, tracking down outstanding payments, networking, parenting, cooking, cleaning (always on the backburner), pet wrangling, attempting to exercise, snacking, eating and beyond. That extra step to have to download something may just be the thing that pushes us over the edge. :-p

If you don’t catch our attention in the email pitch and what’s posted in the body of the email, we’re not going to further interact with a pitch

If we’re sourcing for something, we’re getting a lot of email submissions. The ones that are easy to navigate — read: contain all the info we need in the pitch — are the ones that help us make easy decisions. The body of the email is where you have to convince a writer that your client should be featured. If we have to download a press release or media kit or click something in order to get to more info, we’re probably going to move onto another pitch. So make sure everything we need is in the body of the email.

If you don’t do attachments, then what do you do?

• Include links to photos (Dropbox, Google Drive, etc.)

• If you want to send a press release, paste it at the bottom of the email, below your actual pitch (or send a link)

• Send a link to a press kit if you want to include it

• Include a link to a website for further information

But again, keep in mind that what you paste into the body of the email is what is going to win a writer over. They aren’t going to interact with anything that’s an extra step unless they are first swayed by your initial pitch.

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Did you learn anything new today? Any questions on this topic? Our comment section is open and we ALWAYS reply!

Thanks again for being a part of this wonderful community we’re building. If you know a colleague who could benefit from this, please share this newsletter with them. We’re putting so much time and effort into these weekly articles and are thrilled to be able to get them in front of people who are benefiting from them. 

Jill & Nicole

PS: You can always email us with any questions: info@toptierconsulting.NET

Holiday Gift Guide Pitching Resource Center

Pitching products for gift guides this year? Pitching sources for stories around the holidays? Here are some tools we highly recommend:

• The ULTIMATE INSIDER’S GUIDE to Holiday Gift Guide Pitching Workshop (one full hour of best practices, sample subject lines, a checklist of what to include in your pitch, advice for how to stand out from the crowd, tips for getting your sources included, examples of real HGG pitches that worked and answers to your most pressing questions)

• Christmas in July Zoom Q&A with Affiliate Marketing Expert Sarah Karger (this will answer ALL your affiliate-related HGG questions!)

• A Real-Life Example of an HGG Product Pitch Format that Most Writers Will Delete (hint: Don’t do this!)

• What NOT to Pitch in a Holiday Gift Guide (seriously, save these pitches for another time)

• A Handy-Dandy Checklist of 10 Things to Double-Check Before Sending Your Pitch (don’t send another pitch before making sure you’ve included everything a journalist needs!)

• 5 Golden Rules of Sending Press Packages

• 6 MORE Golden Rules of Sending Press Packages

*Note: Our consulting sessions, workshops, Zooms and Substack newsletters are strictly educational. Signing up for anything has no bearing on landing coverage in any of our outlets. Our role is to finetune your approach and tactics so that you can apply these learnings when pitching other journalists.