Raf Weverbergh As you know, Mustr’s mission is to build a PR tool that allows PR professionals to get better results faster. A remark that we consistently get from PR professionals is that their team wastes a lot of time sending out press releases. Because PR pros routinely push their e-mail clients to the max of their functionality, there’s hassles with lay out, with pictures, with targeting and with attachments. All this is costing your team valuable (and often: non-billable) time.
We’ve listened to your feedback, and built a new, improved version of Mustr that will save your team hours every month.
Drag & drop press releases
Since a few weeks, our press release tool is “drag and drop”. You can now build a fully customised press release, with headers, footers, text and images configured exactly how you want it. It’s so easy, an intern can do it in 5 minutes (yes, we tested this at our own agency!). Any text field in Mustr is point, click, edit. Your text and lay out is autosaved every few seconds.
Insert images: choose from 5 different galleries
You can choose to insert pictures at full width, on the right, on the left, or a horizontal gallery of 2 or 3 pictures.
Of course, you can also combine them in any way you like: if you’re sending a press release about fashion week, you could create a gallery with literally dozens silhouettes. Simply add more galleries to your e-mail as needed.
Combined with our powerful targeting and tagging, this makes Mustr the fastest way to send gorgeous, photo rich press releases to highly targeted lists of influencers.
Use your own branding
Upon popular request, we also made it possible to insert your logo at the top of your press release:
As you can see in the picture above, we included a pretty huge picture in that press release. While journalists love pictures, e-mails with high res pictures quickly end up in the spam folder.
We know that some PR professionals use Dropbox links in their mails to prevent this. However, this forces journalists to click all your Dropbox links in order to check your pictures. Not ideal. How we solved this: previews & downloads
We solved by allowing you to upload your high resolution picture in the press release. You can upload pictures up to 25 MB (plenty even for the most demanding media outlets).
We don’t actually send the high res picture to the journalist, though. We send a small preview of the picture, with a clear button that says “DOWNLOAD”:
If your clients like to know when you sent a press release, or you want to include your team members, you can now add them in a “BCC” field. They will get your press release the moment it’s sent out.
Powerful analytics
Also, we released the press release analytics. From now on, for every e-mail you send in Mustr, you can see:
- who opened the e-mail (and how many times)
- who clicked on which URL (and when)
- who clicked on which photo to download it (very useful for your reporting)
- which e-mail addresses bounced (time to go to LinkedIn to check out where that contact now works)
Here’s some screenshots:
General view of opens, clicks, bounces:
Which photos were downloaded:
Engagement overview:
Twitter feed integration
From now on, when you pitch a journalist, you will see his or her Twitter feed displayed on their contact page. We also rearranged the contact pages to make them more logical – the activity feed (your interactions with a journalist) are now in the middle of the page. The Twitter feed (and soon, Instagram) is on the right. Here’s a screenshot (couldn’t resist but take a screenshot of Mike Butcher discussing the demise of press releases on his blog – sorry Mike!).
This will make pitching a journalist 100 % more effective: you can see what he or she is working on, what they are talking about with their network, who is in their network (which as you know is becoming more and more important to map), and whether he or she is on a holiday or at the office. From the application, you can also follow the journalist with one click.
(Note: for the feature to work, you need to input the Twitter URL or the @twitteralias in the correct field on the contact page).
Personalised e-mails (aka “mail merge”)
Another big demand from users was for e-mail personalisation. Some PR professionals really wanted to include a personal note to journalists by mentioning their first name. This is good practice, and increases the chances that your e-mail will be read, so we decided to fast track development of this features.
When you type [first_name] in the text somewhere, Mustr will automatically insert the first name of your contact in that place. If no first name can be found, then Mustr will just delete the entry so that it says “Hi”. (This can almost never happen, as the first name field is mandatory in Mustr).
Roadmap: let’s hear it from you!
We’re working on some pretty big changes that will fundamentally improve Mustr. However, don’t let that stop you from telling us exactly what you need from a PR tool that wants to be the backbone of your PR agency or communication department. We define customer success as follows: if PR and corporate communication people around the world use Mustr every single day, we will know for sure that we built something useful for you. That’s what drives us.
We’d love to hear your comments and feedback. Is there a PR tool that you’re looking for but haven’t found? Or is there a hiccup in your workflow that you would like someone to solve: let us know. Take it for a spin, or request a demo today! Of course, we’re always happy to demonstrate the power of Mustr. It’s improving every week, and we’d love to show you what’s been keeping us busy lately.
You can e-mail us support (at) getmustr (dot) com, or you can find us on Twitter (@getmustr, @rafweverbergh, @kris10vermoesen). We look forward to hearing from you!
