Intelligent Relations Preston AI Effectiveness and Response Rate Report 2024

By Intelligent Relations Team

December 3, 2024

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Preston is Intelligent Relations’ AI PR SaaS Platform. How does Preston work?

Users input brand and company data. Preston then uses that data to match users with the most relevant journalists, publications, and podcasts covering news and topics in their industry. Preston continues to learn with every new data point, be it a win or pitch idea, providing better results for users.

Other benefits for users are Preston’s AI workflows. They can use the platform to build media lists, create timely pitches, send pitches to journalists, and track progress.

Preston analytics includes data points such as email open rate, positive reply rate, and win rate. We created this effectiveness and response rate report to illustrate how these data points look for Preston users across various industries.

Methodology – Data Selection and Industry Vertical Classification

For our report, Intelligent Relations carried out an analysis of 38 manually selected client companies, representing our managed service clients on Preston.

The data covers the number of campaigns made, emails sent, emails opened (%), positive interactions, and responses (%) for the period covering January – September 2024.

We’ve grouped similar industries, calculated the necessary KPIs (Open Rate, Reply Rate, and
Coverage Rate), and presented the results in a heat map.

Open Rate

Quick Insights:

• Overall Open Rate: 44.81% across all industries.
• The Video Gaming and Financial industries had the highest open rates.
• The Fintech and IT industries had moderate open rates at less than 40%.
• Open rates vary significantly across industries, indicating potential differences in audience engagement.

Pro Tip: Other reports have found that the industry average for PR email open and response rates is higher than email marketing averages. Most journalists will open around half (46%) of the pitch emails they receive. The reply rate is around 3.43%. Intelligent Relations Effectiveness and Response Rate Report found that Preston’s open rates are above average for 11 industries.

Reply Rate

Quick insights:

• Total Positive Replies: 390 across all industries with an Overall Reply Rate of 0.54%.
• The Alternative Fuels industry led with a significantly higher Positive Reply Rate of nearly 4%.
• Both the Cybersecurity and AI, Machine Learning industries showed moderate Reply Rates
  around 1%.
• Despite high open rates, both the CRM and Consumer Electronic Product industries had
  relatively low Reply Rates.

Pro Tip: While reporter response rates are higher than email marketing rates (3.43% compared to 2-3%), a response rate of 1-2% is still moderate for most industries. Response rates often depend on the relevancy of the pitches. MuckRack reports that 49% of journalists say they seldom or never respond to pitch emails, while 73% say they reject irrelevant pitches.

Coverage by Industry

Quick Insights:

• Total Wins: 503 across all industries.
• Overall Win Rate: 0.69%, meaning 0.69% of all emails sent resulted in a win.
• Win Rate Over Positive Replies: 125% (Over 100% thanks to positive replies resulting in multiple pieces of coverage or syndication.)
• The Video Games industry also leads in coverage rate, reflecting higher engagement at different levels.
• The Cybersecurity and CRM industries saw moderate coverage rates, suggesting stronger follow-up processes.
• Low coverage rates for Consumer Electronic Products clients may indicate a need for improved outreach strategies.

If you’d like to learn more about Preston, feel free to book a demo call so we can give you a tour. We’ve found that our blend of AI and human PR expertise helps most users earn better media coverage.