For example Prowly offers monthly and annual plans starting at $115, Prezly starts at $270, and the costs of Cision can go up to thousands of dollars.

Free trial

One of the most important things is to be able to try out the service by yourself before you have to take out your wallet. 

Look for services that let you explore the interface and see if everything you need is there and it’s easy to use. 

Take this time to chat with customer support. Are they responsive and helpful? 

And finally—if possible—give the platform an actual test drive. Import or create a media list and reach out to journalists (or your co-workers) with your story. 

Prowly offers a free 7-day trial^[20] with media database search access, no CC required.

Contact management (exclusions)

Look for a service that lets you easily manage your media contacts. It’s basically an upgraded version of Excel that you would use to store your contacts. They include tags, filters and other features to keep you organized and let you collaborate with your team.

Take note if there are flexible and easy-to-use targeting options for selecting people for your distribution. With PR outreach, it’s important to get your message to the right journalists, editors and bloggers so you need something that’ll let you stay in control of the whole process.

Personalization

PR outreach works partially because it’s personalized and you’re reaching out to relevant media contacts. You could send each person on your list a custom email, but that would take ages. 

Personalization options let you keep your messages targeted while saving a lot of time. These can include the basic personalization tokens like {first name} or it can involve being able to easily segment your media lists into smaller groups and send each targeted message.

Email creator (visual editor)

With all the emails and press releases journalists receive, it’s not easy to get their attention. It can help if you spruce up your emails (without overdoing it) by adding visuals and other multimedia. This can be done with Outlook, but having a dedicated email creator for PR outreach can make things easier.