21 Mar How to Write a Personalized Email to an Influencer
Influencer marketing has become a key part of brands’ overall marketing mix in recent years and is only continuing to grow. 89% of marketers say they’ll maintain or even increase their influencer investment throughout 2023.
But how do you get an influencer to work with you? From casually sliding into their DMS to the more professional approach of contacting them via online proposal software, there are multiple options.
The most common is usually email. A well-crafted email is a powerful tool for initiating contact and effectively presenting your business proposal. Staying up to date with email marketing trends can help you craft a personalized outreach email that aligns with current best practices and stands out in the influencer’s crowded inbox.
If you’ve never written an influencer outreach email before, here’s a complete guide to writing the perfect email for influencers guaranteed to help you break through the noise of every other brand clamoring for their attention!
Why You Should Collaborate With Influencers
The bottom line is influencer marketing builds credibility and maximizes exposure for your brand or product, and does so efficiently and cost-effectively. Influencer marketing is a powerful tool for boosting brand awareness, and working with successful influencers can quickly establish your brand’s credibility and trustworthiness.
Think of the time, effort, and budget you’d need to put in to build the level of trust and following for your brand that just one successful influencer can wield!
Influencers can also create content you mightn’t have the resources or know-how to produce in-house and help reach new audiences and markets. And that’s all before you factor in that businesses see an average of five times their ROI for every dollar spent on influencer marketing!
Image sourced from HubSpot
Tips for a Solid Relationship with Influencers
1. Identify your collaboration goals
Before you begin the outreach process or even choose which influencers you’d like to work with, think about what you’d like to achieve.
Do you want to increase your brand’s exposure, raise awareness of a particular product or service, or simply boost sales or leads in the immediate term? Each requires a slightly different approach and will influence the creators you choose to work with.
You’ll also want to consider exactly what type of content and collaboration you’re looking for. Do you simply want the influencer to post a photo of your product, provide a detailed review, host a giveaway with their followers or create a bespoke video?
2. Find the right influencers that align with your goals and your brand
Finding the right creator to represent you is crucial. The right person can really bring a campaign to life and provide massive benefits for your business, while others can have the complete opposite effect.
Think of your target audience when researching: what demographics are they in, which social media platforms are they on, and what type of content do they consume?
Follower count isn’t everything. Instagram and TikTok are two of the most popular influencer platforms, with creators that boast millions of followers, but are they right for your brand or product?
For some, going niche can yield greater results than prioritizing reach. A software business that offers a free online signature service may have more success with a specialist LinkedIn blogger than an ultra-high profile Instagrammer.
Free to use image sourced from Pexels
3. Engage with their content before outreach
Numbers alone rarely paint a full picture. An influencer might have the right audience and great engagement figures to back that up, but is their content or style appropriate for your brand?
It can also be useful to do your own research on your chosen influencers’ channel to verify that their engagement and following is legitimate (it wouldn’t be the first time fake followers have been used to boost stats!).
There are several ways to do this, for example, using a web app like SocialBlade to track their engagement and followers over time. You can use the likes of Make integration with Sendgrid or another email client that will automatically return user insights to your email or even trigger an alert when the influencer uploads a new post.
4. Give them real creative freedom
As a marketer, you’ll know your brand inside out, but influencers and creators know how to influence and create.
Overly prescriptive briefs or micro-managing marketers can be a major turnoff to influencers and cripple an otherwise great partnership. Understandably, you’ll want to protect your brand, but trust is a two-way street.
Any doubts or ambiguity over what you’d like said or not said should be figured out well in advance as part of the initial scoping process. Once the brief is with your influencer, trust them to do the job you’re hiring them for.
Free to use image sourced from Pexels
How to Craft a Personalized Email to Influencers
There’s nothing quite as nerve-wracking as a blank page. Your plan can be totally watertight, but it’s time to make first contact, all sorts of anxieties can bubble up: What do I say to them? What if they hate the idea? What if they never reply at all?
When crafting your email, don’t forget to include a professional email signature at the end. This can help you make a positive and professional impression on the influencer and can also provide all the relevant contact information about you and your brand in one place.
Don’t fret! Below are tried-and-trusted methods and techniques to make the process smooth and easy and help you structure your influencer outreach strategy more effectively.
1. Personalize the subject line
It’s a well-known psychological phenomenon that people respond more positively to you when you use their name, and that even extends to email. Did you know that just by using a person’s first name as part of your subject line, you can increase your open rate by up to 32%?
That’s a great tip for all your email communications but particularly useful for influencer outreach. Creators can have dozens of proposals land in their inboxes every single day, and you want yours to stand out.
2. Include their personal achievements
Flattery will get you everywhere. Dropping in a few of their personal achievements or big wins shows that you’ve done your research and know who they are and what they’re about.
Influencer marketing is ultimately a business partnership, but influencers are people too. Nobody wants to feel like they’re being used as a tool to generate reach and clout.
There’s also nothing worse to read than an obviously generic email. If you don’t make an effort, from an influencer’s perspective, it can feel like you’re just playing the numbers game—even if they’re the only person on your outreach list.
Free to use image sourced from Pixabay
3. Tell them what caught your interest
Similarly, if you’ve chosen an influencer solely for their massive following, you’re probably doing influencer marketing wrong (see the above Tips for a Solid Relationship!).
There should be something about this person, their style, their content, or their community that really resonated with you and that you know will resonate with your customer base as well.
Tell them why! This will help show that you’re actually engaged with them and will also make it clearer what your audiences have in common to ensure an effective collaboration.
4. Keep your message short and to the point
Don’t get bogged down in details: your first email should be the hook that gets them to bite. There’s plenty of time to get down to brass tacks once you already have their attention.
Your initial outreach email should be punchy and concise. Outline briefly who you are, why you’re contacting them, and provide a quick overview of your plan and what you’d like to achieve.
Provide enough context to get them interested and allow a decision to be made on whether they’d like to know more or not. A 3,000-word essay on your brand will be overwhelming, and detailed specifics like influencer contracts can follow once they’ve signaled that they’re interested in working with you.
Free to use image sourced from Pexels
5. Articulate your campaign goals and value proposition
Ultimately, an influencer will want to know what they can do for your brand and how they fit into the overall picture of your campaign or promotion.
Be clear on your goals and the value that your collaboration can bring to both parties, so they know exactly what’s expected of them and how best they can make that happen.
Influencers are also a business-savvy bunch, so don’t shy away from talking shop when it comes to metrics, KPIs, and engagement stats. The clearer your expectations, the easier it is for them to create.
6. Speak their language and tone
Influencers and creators generally want something of value for their followers: they know their audience will quickly sour if they appear to be simply shilling a product or service.
It’s helpful to point out where your audiences and customer bases cross over and that you think your collab will really drive engagement with their followers.
This can also work to your benefit: many people think influencers with large followings charge big money, but you’d be surprised how much flexibility there can be when they’re genuinely interested!
Also, be mindful of who they are and how they communicate: a Gen Z streamer will likely have a very different communication style than a personal finance blogger, so tailor your message, language, and tone accordingly.
Free to use image sourced from Pexels
7. Format your email professionally
Regardless of how you position your message, good spelling, punctuation, and grammar are essential if you want to be taken seriously as a potential partner. Remember that you’re representing your brand: an outreach email full of errors or inaccuracies won’t do much to reinforce your trustworthiness or competence.
That’s not to say that your email should be overly formal, as stuffy messaging can have an equally detrimental effect. Feel free to inject your brand’s unique TOV and personality into your message; just make sure to keep it professional.
8. Use a template that works for you
Still struggling? You can find free templates on the web for everything from a simple influencer email template to an event sponsorship proposal template.
Use these to steer your structure. Once you’ve crafted your email and personalized it appropriately, save that as a template. Now you have a brand-specific email ready to go out to any influencer in your marketing contacts database.
Note: always, always double-check that the details are correct before sending, particularly when contacting multiple influencers. Nobody wants to receive an email that you clearly meant for someone else!
Free to use image sourced from Pexels
Wrapping up
Influencer marketing is fast becoming prominent aspect of many brands’ strategies, and it’s easy to see why: the right influencer can deliver amazing results for you and your business.
If you’re unsure about how to approach influencers, the good news is that they’re generally all business-savvy and looking for the right opportunity. It’s all about having the right plan, positioning yourself correctly—and a killer outreach email, naturally.
If you’re delving into influencer marketing for the first time or want to know how to improve your outreach success rate, give these tips a try and see how well they can work for you!