Journalists don't ignore your pitch because they hate it. They ignore it because it arrived four minutes before a deadline, or during a news day, or under forty other emails. A well-timed follow-up isn't nagging — it's a second chance at a bad moment. The whole craft is making sure the second chance never feels like pressure.
The cadence that works: 0, 3, 7 — then silence
Three touches across one working week is the practical ceiling. Day 0: the pitch. Day 2–3: one gentle nudge. Day 6–7: a final note that closes the loop politely. After that, stop — not because a fourth email is rude exactly, but because the data is in: if three well-made touches got nothing, the story doesn't fit, and email four only spends relationship capital you'll want later.
Every follow-up must add something
"Just bumping this to the top of your inbox" is the most-deleted sentence in PR. A follow-up earns its place by carrying something new: a fresh stat from the dataset, a new image, an exclusivity window ("holding this for you until Thursday"), or a sharper angle for their specific audience. If you have nothing to add, you haven't earned the send yet — wait until you do or let it go.
Time of day matters more than people admit
Morning sends, 08:30–10:00 local, land while the journalist is planning the day and commissioning is still open. Late-afternoon sends get buried overnight and judged in the morning cull. Fridays after lunch are where pitches go to die; weekend sends signal automation. None of these are iron laws — reactive comment on a breaking story goes now, whatever the clock says — but for planned campaigns, the morning slot is free performance.
The reply rule is absolute
Any reply stops everything — instantly, automatically, whatever it says. A "no thanks" followed two days later by your scheduled "just checking you saw this!" is how agencies get marked as spam by name. This is precisely where manual sequence management fails: the person who got the reply isn't the person running the sequence tool. The fix is a system that watches the actual mailbox and halts the sequence the moment a reply or bounce arrives — no human relay required.
"Pitch me again in autumn" is a task, not a compliment
The most valuable replies are deferrals: wrong story, right relationship. These die in normal workflows because nothing owns the future. Log the deferral against the journalist with a dated reminder, and in September you're the one agency that actually came back — with the story they asked for. That single habit converts more over a year than any subject-line trick.
Persistence wins placements; restraint keeps relationships. The cadence above holds both — two follow-ups that each add value, a polite close, an absolute stop on reply, and a memory for the "later" that most teams forget.