- Startup Spells 🪄
- Posts
- 3 hacks for mastering PR email subject lines
3 hacks for mastering PR email subject lines
PLUS: Deep Tech Founders Guide to Twitter
Startup Spells 🪄
November 27, 2025
3 hacks for mastering PR email subject lines
In PR, email subject lines are the only thing standing between your pitch and the trash folder.
Carrie Rose, CEO of Rise at Seven, once asked a journalist at The Times for a screenshot of their inbox.
It was chaos. Journalists receive upwards of 200 pitches every single day. That is 200 people asking for a favor. 200 people claiming to have the next big story.
Most of them get ignored.
To survive the purge, you don't just need a good story. You need a subject line that physically disrupts the journalist's scanning pattern.
Here is Carrie's formula for cutting through the noise.
The visual trick that forces journalists to read your emails
The inbox of a top-tier journalist is a wall of grey text. To get clicked, you need to break that visual pattern using pattern interrupt.
Carrie recommends 2 specific tactics that feel "wrong" but work perfectly.
1. Emojis
It sounds unprofessional. It feels like something a teenager would do. But in a sea of plain text, a single emoji acts like a stop sign.
It draws the eye immediately.
2. Capitalization
You shouldn't write your whole email in caps. That’s shouting. But selective capitalization triggers a psychological response.
Carrie uses the word REVEALED in all caps at the start of subject lines.
It implies exclusivity. It implies gossip. It promises that clicking the email will give the journalist something they don't currently know.
But visual tricks are only the first step; you also need to borrow authority from somewhere else.
Nobody cares about your client's small brand.
That is a hard pill to swallow. But a journalist at The Guardian isn't waking up hoping to read a press release about a new startup in Sheffield.
They are waking up looking for stories about the brands everyone is already talking about.
If you are a small unknown brand, don't put your name in the subject line. Put a massive brand's name in there instead.
The Netflix Example
Carrie ran a campaign for a small client. They had zero brand recognition.
They conducted a study analyzing Netflix data.
The subject line didn't mention the client. It mentioned Netflix by saying "Netflix study REVEALED..." in it.
Journalists clicked because Netflix is a trending topic. They wanted the data. The fact that the data came from a smaller third party didn't matter. The hook was the big name.
Once you have their attention with a big name, you need to speak their specific language.
Write headlines exactly like the journalist does
This is the most sophisticated tactic in Carrie's playbook and what Chris Voss teaches in his best-selling book "Never Split the Difference". Chris calls it mirroring technique.
Most PR professionals blast the same subject line to 500 people. They treat The Times, The Sun, and Vogue like they are the same person.
They aren't.
Carrie studies the specific headline style of the publication she is pitching. Then, she writes her subject line to look exactly like one of their articles.
Pitching The Sun
The Sun uses punchy, 2-word headlines. They rely on shock and alliteration.
"Botched Boobs"
"Dirty Money"
When Carrie pitches The Sun, she doesn't write a polite, descriptive sentence.
She writes a 2-word (not real, made up) subject line: "Botched Boobs."
She makes up a heading like "Blackpool is the 'botched boob' capital" as an example and formats it to look native to their platform.
When the journalist sees it, they don't see a pitch. They see a headline they could have written themselves.
The genius lies in understanding that you are not writing for yourself or your boss. You are writing for a stressed human being who has 200 unread emails and a deadline in an hour.
Make their life easy by following these rules:
Disrupt the visual pattern (Emojis and Caps)
Piggyback on fame (Mention big brands, not yours)
Be a chameleon (Mimic their headline style)
If you can stop their thumb from scrolling for just one second, you have already won half the battle.
The key lies in studying how each publication writes headlines, then format your pitch to match their style.
Top Tweets of the day
1/
It's incredible, so many SaaS don't have this simple question.
Literally just copy the onboarding flow of the most popular SaaS in your niche. Or check out Canva's onboarding flow and then copy it 1:1. You don't need to be a genius to copy stuff from big companies. They do it because it works. And they have the best minds optimizing stuff like this.
2/
Momentum is everything. One of the best blogs I've read on this specific topic that explains this point deeply.
Once you learn this, you'll see the world differently. And the boring advice: be consistent daily would make sense finally.
3/
There are a lot of people who are buying 10+ accounts to use AI all the time. It's insane. These are the 10x engineers of the world. Or should I say 1000x now?
Those who can read/consume code are finally in a league bigger than any point in history because they just need to let AI do the work.
A difference as massive as Sun and Stephenson 2-18 which is 2,150 times that of our Sun.
Rabbit Holes
What’d ya think of today’s newsletter? Hit ‘reply’ and let me know.
Do me a favor and share it in your company's Slack #marketing channel.
First time? Subscribe.
Follow me on X.
More Startup Spells 🪄
Alex Hormozi’s $100M Offers Upsell Strategy (LINK)
Tweet for Discount (LINK)
How Tweetscrape Built a $5K MRR SaaS Business in 120 Days (LINK)
Kunal Shah's Delta-4 Framework with Real-Life Examples (Horses vs Cars vs Uber) (LINK)
How Buffer’s Open Salaries Became a Compounding Backlink Magnet: The $0 PR Hack (LINK)
Reply