Reaching out to influencers can be a challenging task. Many factors come into play, when analyzing your response rate, including your experience in the market, your brand’s awareness, general reputation and social media presence 📲.

Many brands struggle at the start of the outreach process, trying to find their target’s contact information, if not listed on their social media profile.

Once they find the proper point of contact, it’s challenging to get replies and/or people interested. This can be caused by many reasons, including:

1. Too broad/short of an outreach email
2. Sending an unclear outreach email
3. Using the wrong outreach channel
   1. Corporate email, agency email, google email

Selecting Outreach Channel

To select the outreach channel, you need to think about the message you want to resonate to the potential partner.

• Coming from an agency email seems more formal, can indicate it is a PR/seeding deal or a pricier partnership with more contractual obligations. 🗂

• Sending from your corporate email can be most effective and seem the most authentic, but if your brand is relatively unknown, you will not receive as many replies and/or be pushed into a spam/junk folder. 📌

• Finally, we would recommend never outreaching from a “gmail.com” account as partners will not believe your business is as legitimate, without a corporate webpage. ❌

Pro-tips: Outreach from your corporate email (not hello@brandX but more contactname@brandX)  

 

Gaining Influencer’s Attention 

Overall, there are four primary ways to gain an influencer’s attention, and they can all be combined together, if needed…

1. Send an email 📩
   1. Use the templates provided, to follow
2. Follow their accounts from your brand account and engage (like/comment) with their recent content. 👍
3. DM them 💬
   1. Keep it very short and positive, asking them to check inbox or for contact info
4. Always, ALWAYS follow up! At least twice within a week to generate more answers from creators

Types of Approaches

 Now, looking at the email template. There are two things to consider here:

• Influencer receives a ton of emails from other brands, including from your competitors. 
• They might be busy on other projects

So, 

1. Keep it simple
2. Go straight to the point 

Don’t start attaching a document, or writing an essay on your brand and how your products are different. They won’t take the time to read it. 

Focus on what’s important. 

Another important point, if you are looking for free promotion, you should send a DM first asking the influencer if he would be interested in that type of promotion.

-> Usually target micro-influencers for those partnerships. 

To start the outreach process, you should have a clear understanding of :

Firstly, the collab goals (sales, awareness, growth, leads)

Secondly, the content types (video, image),

But also, the budget, number of partners, and your target audience. 🚀

Next, there are three main types of email approached, to spark influencer interest and responses:

Short Outreach

🟢 Effective Uses:

• If you want to simply gage their interest level and reception to your brand

• If your brand has strong name recognition, you will not need to sell the collab and opportunity as much.

• If you don’t have a budget, you will know by their response, right away, if they are a free collab fit or not

🔴 Cons:

• Response rates could go down if influencers think it is not a paid deal
• Makes the outreach and negotiation process longer, which could lead to dropouts

 Detailed Outreach

⚠️ Make sure the information is shared clearly and in an easily digested format (bullet points, bold, italics). Outline your collab goal, content needs, timeline, brand mission.

🟢  Effective Uses:

This will let the influencer know right away the exact details and can avoid multiple email exchanges with more information questions

Pro-Tips: Write in the subject line – “Paid opportunity” to increase the open and reply rate

🔴 Cons:

• If too much information, influencers will not spend the time reading it and lose interest

 

 Seeding/PR Outreach

This is a somewhat different type of design, with the goal of adding an influencer to your mailing list for product seeding. You will likely also hope this influencer uses your products in content (story frames, post tag, etc.) without paying them.

Here’s our key tips ✨:

1. Depending on your software tools and capabilities, you can include a form in the email to autofill their replies and shipping information.
   1. This is what more prestigious and larger brands tend to do
   2. Smaller brands should send a more personalized message
2. You want to praise the influencer and be very upbeat, to increase the chances of them promoting your products for free

Pro-tips: Typeform.com is the best software to design free surveys / google surveys is also a great way to generate contact details automatically. 

 

Templates 📩