Let’s talk about influencer outreach. Whether you are just getting your feet wet in influencer marketing or are a seasoned pro, outreach will always remain a fundamental part of the process. Once you get in the groove, naturally, you’ll want to increase your goals and start to scale. At this point, brands are often left wondering how to manage communications without spending all day drowning in email or sacrificing a personalized approach.
Unfortunately, there is no magic step-by-step guide for success. Instead, you’ll need to spend time planning, testing, and evaluating your email outreach strategy to find what works for you. But, there are some best practices and resources available to set you up for success.
Table of Contents
Let’s Start With The Basics of Influencer Outreach
Be Intentional In Your Influencer Pitch
Ready to Hit Send
Test, Optimize, Test Some More
The Simple Art of The Follow-up
Ready To Scale Your Influencer Outreach?
Reading Tip: How to Approach Influencers Through Emails
Let’s Start With The Basics of Influencer Outreach
Successful influencer marketing is rooted in human connection, engagement, and authenticity. So, having the right influencers on board can make or break your campaign. But outreach is a two-way street. You can spend all the time in the world compiling your perfect influencer list, but if you don't get a response, your goals will be at risk.
The Human Element:
Always remember there's a person on the other side of your email. Humans are complex, and our attention spans are fleeting. Influencers, much like everyone else, lead lives filled with responsibilities—jobs, family, and friends all vying for their attention. Before sending that email, pause and reflect on your own experiences. Consider what motivated you to engage, respond, and follow through when getting email outreach. Or, think about the instances that made you cringe, shake your head, or promptly hit delete. Invest the time to carefully craft your pitch.
Be Intentional In Your Influencer Pitch
First impressions matter. In email outreach, it’s important to be intentional in your first touchpoint. The urge to include every detail and brand message will creep up, but it’s important to take a step back and focus on the essentials.
As you draft your influencer outreach pitch, consider these tips:
- Be concise and clear: A two-page email with intricate details and one-sided branded messaging can turn off an influencer. Make sure your email clearly states its purpose—whether it's a collaboration proposal, product review, or event invitation. Make the purpose evident from the very beginning.
- Keep It Personal: It's a no-brainer, but addressing the influencer by name and showing you’ve done some research is important. While you don't need to go overboard, let them know why you think a collaboration is a good fit. Acknowledging the type of content they specialize in and how that aligns with your brand can make a significant impact.
- Make it Engaging: Reflecting your brand voice in the email is an engaging and strategic way to kick your relationships off on the right foot. Aligning your communication with your voice fosters a sense of authenticity from the get-go that can pave the way for a positive relationship.
- Include Next Steps: Provide clarity on the next steps. Whether you're looking for a response within a specific timeframe, or are looking for influencers to apply through a separate link, make sure the influencer knows what’s next.
Ready to Hit Send
Once you’ve compiled your list of targeted influencers and have your pitch, it’s time to hit send! Luckily, there are tools available to make the process run process smoothly.
Through Meltwater Influencer Marketing's email integration, you can connect your email account to seamlessly send emails directly from the platform. So you don’t have to toggle back and forth between screens and get lost in spreadsheets. Meltwater's email functionality caters to both individualized outreach and large-scale campaigns.
The email functionality works for both one-off emails or mass outreach.
- Individual emails: For personalized nuanced campaigns tailored to each influencer, you’ll likely want to stick to one-off emails. Within Meltwater Influencer Marketing, you can send emails directly from search results or an from influencer’s profile. So once you’ve found a great fit, you can get your outreach out the door immediately.
- Mass outreach: For larger-scale campaigns, you can send in bulk to streamline the process, without sacrificing personalization. We know mass outreach can get a bad reputation, but there are good and bad ways to go about it. With Meltwater Influencer Marketing, you don’t have to sacrifice personalization with this approach. With customizable email templates and custom fields, you can inject personalized touchpoints into each message. To add another layer of personalization and to improve your influencer strategy, you can set up multiple outreach campaigns and adjust your message to different groups to improve response and engagement (more details on that in the next section!)
Test, Optimize, Test Some More
Once you’ve started to send your first batch of emails, the job doesn’t end there. To get the best results, there will be an ongoing cycle of review and optimization as you go. Paying close attention to responses (or lack thereof) is key to uncovering the secret sauce that works for you and getting the best response possible.
Nothing hurts more than pitching all your options at once and hearing crickets, leaving so many missed opportunities on the table. To avoid that, consider these tips:
- Use Variation: Create a few versions of your pitch and diversify your outreach to see which has a better response rate. Experiment with a shorter vs. longer approach and test different subject lines to see which gets more engagement.
- Segment your audience: Leverage the power of tags within Meltwater Influencer Marketing to create different segments, allowing you to tailor emails based on specific criteria (e.g., interests, location, engagement level).
- Track key metrics: Meltwater's solution provides all the tools you need to set yourself up for success and optimize your efforts. You can track open and conversion rates for each outreach campaign to gain insights into what’s truly resonating and having the most impact.
The Simple Art of The Follow-up
It might seem like a simple concept, but the art of following up is often forgotten. Remember – influencers lead busy lives. A well-timed nudge to bring your message back to the top of their inbox is sometimes all it takes to get a response. Of course, give influencers some breathing room before immediately following up.
Typically waiting at least 2-3 days before following up ensures you don’t come off as too pushy and overbearing with your first impression.
The golden rule for how many follow-ups you should send is typically capped at two. Trust that if there is genuine interest, they will reply once their schedule allows. And if the interest is only one-sided, keep it at two to save yourself the heartache of being ghosted.
Ready To Scale Your Influencer Outreach?
Once you’ve tested and optimized your outreach, take a moment to applaud yourself for a job well done. With your outreach strategy in place, carry on full steam ahead to maximize the impact for your brand. And don’t be afraid to get some help and use tools like Meltwater Influencer Marketing, especially as your outreach continues to expand.
When it comes to growth, if you are looking for ways to build up your pipeline and find even more authentic and enthusiastic influencers, explore our recruitment strategy tips.
Building meaningful connections and expanding your influence network is an ongoing adventure, and with the right influencer marketing tools and strategies, the possibilities are endless!
- Don’t be intimated by your influencer outreach, but do be intentional.
- Remember there’s a human on the other side of your emails, so make sure your pitch stands out, is engaging, and is clear.
- Test, optimize, and test.
- if you haven’t heard back, there’s no harm in a little nudge to show you are serious about a collaboration.
- And last but not least, don’t be afraid to use influencer management tools to help.
Request a demo today to see how Meltwater Influencer Marketing can help amplify your influencer email outreach:
