Are you struggling to make an impact with your influencer outreach efforts? You’re not alone.
93% of marketers have used influencer marketing in their campaigns and for most of them reaching out to influencers was the biggest challenge.
There are 3 steps to effective influencer outreach that must be done correctly:
- Find the right influencers for your brand
- Craft persuasive copy that clearly communicates your value proposition and also resonates with the influencer
- Time your outreach effectively for maximum impact
At Influencers Club, we’ve helped 1000+ companies find and reach out to influencers. We’ve refined our methods to achieve a 36% positive reply rate from outreach to over 800k creators per month.
And let me tell you the secret! The success lies in:
- Finding the perfect fit influencers
- Showing your deep understanding and appreciation of the influencer’s work
So, if you want to grow your business by leveraging influencer marketing, keep reading to:
- Find the most effective influencer outreach strategies and tactics
- Learn how to find the right influencers for your brand
- Learn how to find influencer contact info
- Find influencer outreach templates that are proven to work
- The best influencer outreach tools you can leverage this year
- Bonus tip for getting replies from influencers
The 3 R's of Influencer Marketing
Before you do influencer outreach, you must be aware of the three key factors that determine the success of a collaboration. These are known as the 3 R’s of influencer marketing:
- Reach: How many people can the influencer reach with their content?
- Resonance: How well does the influencer’s content resonate with their audience?
- Relevance: How well does the influencer’s niche or topic align with your brand’s goals and values?
To ensure successful collaboration, it is essential to evaluate potential influencers based on these three R’s.
We help companies find influencers that meet the 3 R’s criteria by providing an influencer database from diverse niches, engagement rates, and follower demographics.
We have a database of 70M social media influencers, and with 40+ unique filters, we can help you narrow down your search based on your specific needs.
Types of Influencer Collaborations
Before you learn how to do influencer outreach, it’s important to understand the different types of influencer marketing campaigns as it directly affects the outreach process.
- Sponsored content: influencer creates content promoting your brand or product
- Brand ambassadorship: ongoing partnership to promote your brand
- Product Reviews: influencer reviews your product and shares their thoughts
- Guest blog posts: influencer creates content for your blog or website
Effective Influencer Outreach: A Strategy for Maximum Positive Replies
After 5 years and millions of cold emails sent successfully, we found out what influencer outreach strategy works best:
- Identifying the right influencers
- Reaching out to the influencers the right way
Identifying the right audience
Your influencer outreach will only be successful if you reach the right influencers that will help you achieve your marketing goals.
To identify the right influencers for your brand, these are the first three metrics to consider:
- Audience size
This metric shows the number of followers/subscribers a certain influencer has. If the goal of your influencer marketing campaigns is to increase brand awareness, you need to prioritize macro influencers. - Engagement rate
The average engagement rate of macro influencers is 2.72% while the avg. engagement rate of nano influencers is 4.32%. So, if your goal is conversions, engagement rate is the metric you should consider when you are searching for influencers to partner with. - Location
This is the key metric if you have a local business. Still, besides the location of influencers, keep in mind the location of their followers as well.
Intent data: The best way to identify and reach out to influencers
Apart from the basic engagement metrics and location, to get a positive reply from influencers you need intent data.
Intent data: The best way to identify and reach out to influencers
Apart from the basic engagement metrics and location, to get a positive reply from influencers you need intent data.
Intent data can show whether an influencer is likely to want to collaborate with you or not because it can:
- Tap into influencers’ interactions with brands like yours
- Analyze their content and engagement
- Uncover influencers who are not only interested in your brand but have also become your customers
If you need intent data, you just need to share your campaign goals with us. Our influencer outreach experts will identify your ideal target audience and deliver your intent data within 5 working days.
Some of the intent data points are:
- Hashtags and keywords used in the influencer’s posts
- Accounts and hashtags the influencer follows and interacts with
- The influencer’s content themes and topics
- The influencer’s brand collaborations and sponsored content
By using a combination of engagement metrics and intent data, you can identify which influencers are a good fit for your influencer marketing campaigns and create a more successful influencer outreach strategy.
Get intent data for influencers from any niche, platform, country, and more
We tested this with over 100 brands, and the influencers we’ve found are:
- 50% less expensive
- 350% more likely to accept a free product east of actual cash for the collaboration
- way better at representing your brand, which results in around 27% lower CPA
Reaching out to the audience the right way
Reaching out to your identified audience is equally important as identifying them. The way you approach them can determine whether they respond positively or not.
Remember– there has to be something in it for them. You should make them feel unique and let them know you chose them for a reason. Here are some tips to do so:
1. 1-on-1 personalization
Personalize your message to each influencer you reach out to. Start with addressing them by their name and mention a recent post or project of theirs that you found interesting.
2. Keep it brief
Keep your outreach message short and to the point. Influencers receive countless outreach emails every day, so it’s important to make sure your message is clear and concise. Get straight to the point as soon as possible if you want your chances of getting a response to increase.
3. Value proposition
When pitching to influencers, highlight what value your brand can offer. Whether it’s providing them with exclusive content or an opportunity to collaborate with a reputable brand, make sure they understand what they stand to gain from working with you.
4. Clear Call to Action
Be clear about what you are asking for and what you hope to achieve with the collaboration. Whether it’s a sponsored post, a product review, or a brand partnership, make sure your request is clear and easy to understand.
By following these tips, you can ensure that your outreach message is received positively by your identified audience. However, it’s important to note that not all influencers will respond positively to your outreach, and that’s okay. Keep trying and adjusting your approach until you find the right fit for your brand.
Bonus tip: Multi-Channel Approach for a Successful Outreach Strategy
Taking a multi-channel approach with your influencer outreach is the ultimate ticket to success. This approach has been implemented in the B2B world and marketers have seen great results.
The main reason for this is:
- You have more flexibility and don’t depend on one channel
- While you’re doing the work, you’re testing which channel brings the most ROI
- You don’t over-invest in one single channel
- You stand out in the eyes of the prospects
So, when it comes to influencer outreach, you have to look at creators as businesses. Moreover, you have to implement the multichannel approach accordingly.
Let’s get an overview of the image below:
If we take a look at the B2B outreach sequence, the multichannel approach usually covers a few social media platforms (depending on your niche), phone calls, and mail.
We can take this same approach for influencer outreach; however, the best practice here is to add multiple social media platforms into the game.
From our experience, the effectiveness of the outreach campaign is x3 when using this multichannel approach.
The most important thing you need to remember during multi-channel influencer outreach is that email is your main point of communication. Everything you do should result in the person opening your mail.
So, make sure that while you’re reaching them out on Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, or any other outlet, you’re redirecting them to the main point- the email.
Our best-performing influencer outreach templates
In the past years, we’ve had the opportunity to work with a diverse range of brands that had varying influencer marketing goals.
From doing influencer outreach on behalf of brands that wanted influencers to accept a gift from them to those that offered paid collaborations and even brands that needed influencers to sign up on their platform. We’ve found their target audience and reached out to them on behalf of our clients.
Take a look at our top-performing influencer outreach templates and:
- Get ideas on how to personalize your outreach emails
- Use the parts that fit your case
- Use our structure as a starting point to create your own successful influencer outreach email strategy.
Through personalization like this, you show the influencer that you are familiar with their content, and how it resonates with you. So before doing influencer outreach check their profile and see if you can find some shared interest, challenge, passion, or else that will help you connect.
Influencer Outreach Tools
There are plenty of tools for influencer outreach that can simplify, improve, or streamline your influencer outreach campaign.
To find influencers’ contact information:
- Manually extract it from their profile by looking for an email in their biography or an email button on their profile (from mobile)
- Use an influencer marketing service like Influencers Club to find hundreds of highly relevant influencers + their emails, along with 30 other data points.
To contact influencers:
- Use Sidekick to track email engagement (clicks and opens)
- Use Canned Responses to build outreach templates
- Google Drive or Dropbox to share large files
- FollowUpThen to send follow-ups
- OutreachPlus to save time and better organize your large-scale influencer outreach campaigns
To manage and organize your influencer outreach:
- Google Sheets to plan your influencer outreach campaigns
- BuzzStream to keep track of your influencer outreach campaigns, emails sent, received, and follow-ups
- Pitchbox to keep track of your influencer campaigns from start to finish. This tool is great for keeping track of individual influencer performance
Influencer Outreach Metrics: How to Measure the Success of Your Campaigns
As with any other marketing strategy, you need to measure and analyze the results of your campaign to see what’s working and what’s not and make data-driven improvements.
You can keep track weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly, depending on the size of your outreach campaign. If you are doing outreach on a scale then without a doubt you need to keep track every week.
But, to get the most insights about how your influence outreach campaign is performing you need to keep track of the right metrics. Here’s what we know for sure works best:
1. Emails sent
This is the total number of influencer outreach emails sent. This stat shows the size of your outreach effort.
2. Emails Open
The total number of emails open shows whether your emails ended up in the spam folder or were actually received and opened by influencers.
3. Average Open Rate
This is the percentage of your outreach emails that were opened by influencers. According to industry benchmarks, the average open rate for influencer outreach emails is around 20-30%.
If you have a low open rate analyze and improve your subject line as that is your chance to entice influencers to open and read your email.
4. Average Reply Rate
The avg. reply rate shows a percentage of influencers who opened your email actually replied to it. If you have a high reply rate it means you are doing a good job and your message resonated with the influencer and they want to learn more about your offer.
5. Number of replies
This is the total number of replies and it can help you measure the overall success of your outreach campaigns.
6. Percentage of Positive Replies
This is the metric you hope to be as higher as possible! It’s a summary of influencer replies that were positive. For example, influencers replied that they are interested in collaborating with your brand or learning more about the offer and your products.
If you have a low percentage of positive replies you might doing a couple of mistakes when approaching influencers:
- You are reaching out to influencers that are not a good fit for your brand
- You need to improve your 1-on-1 personalization.
- You don’t offer value for the influencer.
- Change your call. Maybe you have a strong CTA like “book a call” instead of something easier like “reply to this email”. If you can get what you need without being pushy, always go with that first.
Sure, there can be other challenges for example if you are a new brand and you are just starting to build a reputation, or your website doesn’t look professional. But the factors mentioned above are likely the primary reasons why you are not receiving positive replies, and it is essential to address them first.
7. Conversions
This metric shows the number of influencers that took the desired action as a result of your outreach campaign. Depending on your goals this includes:
- influencers who signed up for your platform
- influencers who downloaded your tool
- influencers who partnered and will promote your brand
- influencers that your agency signed and will manage in the future
- any other objectives you set for your campaign
In conclusion
Influencer marketing will definitely bring results over the top when you do influencer outreach correctly. When doing influencer outreach campaigns you have to focus on finding the right influencers, writing good email copy, and timing your outreach effectively.
So, now you know the most effective influencer outreach strategy, you have our best-performing influencer outreach emails and some currently most used influencer outreach tools to simplify and streamline your process.
Also, keep in mind that we offer influencer outreach services that can save you time and improve the effectiveness of your influencer marketing campaigns. Just get in touch with us and our team of 40 creator sales experts will do the job for you.
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