Sending out emails to PR contacts about your news releases is beneficial in so many ways. Apart from allowing you to control your own narrative, it builds relationships with key media figures, enhances your credibility and increases your likelihood of earning media coverage. Practically speaking, you get to decide who receives what news, and when.

That's why our email tool is built to help you manage all the eventualities, and in style. You can read a more pragmatic guide on how to send an email, while this guide focuses on broader recommendations you might consider.

Verifying your domain is an important step to complete before you can begin sending emails from the platform. It allows the PR.co platform to send emails on your behalf so that to your email recipients, the email will be recognised as coming directly from you and your company, rather than via us. It also means that your emails will be much less likely to be marked as spam.

You can check in the dashboard whether your email domain has been verified already. Go to Account Settings > Email domain and you should see your domain with all green ticks.

For whatever reason, if the domain you want to use either isn’t there, or has a red cross, get in touch with us and we’ll help you get fully set up.

Next, you’ll need to organise your contacts in the CRM, which will make finding your contacts to mail much easier later on. Start by uploading your contacts, where they’ll be added to a master list. From the master list, you can separate out your contacts in several ways:

Use the contact lists to add smaller groups of similar contacts together. Depending on the size of your company, you may want to group contacts by language, geographical region or industry. Important to note, all the contacts for any one email must come from the same list, so avoid putting contacts you’ll likely email together into different lists.

You can create custom tags to label your contacts and group them ready for use in the filters. Multiple tags can be added to any one contact.

Within a contact list, you can create custom filter ‘views’ of a smaller group of contacts. Select how you’d like to filter the contacts (if you’ve added tags, we’d recommend using those) and save your filters. Later, when you send an email you’ll be able to select these filtered views for a quick and easy email send.

You should also include your own email somewhere in the CRM. Make a separate list, with your address, and perhaps you want to add colleagues. This will come in handy later so that you can see exactly when and how your emails will look to your recipients.

Finally, if you’re planning to send emails directed at individuals (eg. Hi Sarah) make sure you’ve added a first name to each of your contacts. Again, you can do that first in your spreadsheet before uploading. Later, when you use a variable to include their {{first_name}}, you’ll be able to send lots of emails at once, all personalised to each recipient.

There is already a simple default message added to your account, but we’d recommend you set up your own. You can do that in Newsroom settings > Email.

Even once your default message is in place, with each email you’ll be able to adapt the message accordingly, but it will save time and effort if you have a default that you can use as a base. You might consider the following:

Now you’re ready to send your first email. Emails need to be attached to a press release so edit your press release and click into the 'Timeline' stage. Here, click the button to create your first email.

Go through the steps to create an email until you get to the email writing stage. Your default template should already be in place.

Here, we'd recommend you check the following:

We recommend that you always send yourself a test email once you’re finished, in particular if you’re scheduling an email for a future time. It serves as a quick check to make sure that your email doesn’t have any issues and will be sent. For example, the most common reason an email will not send is because there is an error in the text, usually an incorrect variable that you might have missed. If you don’t receive your test email, you’ll know there’s a problem with the email and can correct it immediately.

In the same vein, you can also include yourself in one of your email sends by adding your own email to the CRM beforehand. This will mean you’ll see the email exactly as your recipients will, and at the same time. And of course, it means you can keep a copy for reference, if desired.

Need to send an email in a different time zone, or under embargo? Schedule your emails in advance and remove all the last minute stress of publishing and distributing your release.

You can even use the platform to schedule follow up messages once your main release has been sent out, which means you don't have to remember to do it manually.

Once you've written your email, you'll be asked to select a delivery date/time, which can be anytime in the future. Be sure to check that the delivery time is correct according to the newsroom timezone.

You might be sending multiple emails to different groups. To save time, use the duplicate function and then you only need change the sections that are different.

Questions? Send us an 📩 at hello@pr.co
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