When reaching out to YouTubers for collaborations, most businesses don’t receive a response. In fact, not getting a reply is more frequent than receiving either negative or positive replies. According to a recent study, the average cold email response rate is only 7%.
But, we’ve found what sparks conversation with YouTubers and we’ll teach you how to do it too.
To ask a YouTuber to promote your products, write an email that includes:
- Personalization
- Short and simple pitch
- Fair offer with clear collaboration instructions
In this article, we’re focusing on how to ask a YouTuber to promote your product and get a positive reply. You will learn more about the elements of the pitch, and how to make the YouTuber excited to collaborate with you effortlessly. Therefore, stay tuned!
7 Steps to Ask YouTubers to Promote Your Products
The first step to getting a positive reply is to address the right profile for your business. Micro and macro YouTubers are the most common options for brand collaborations.
So, let’s go through all the steps of asking a YouTuber to promote your product. The first step is to find YouTubers that are suitable for your brand.
1. Identify the Right YouTubers for Your Business
The perfect YouTuber is not always the one with the most subscribers. In fact, influencer marketing experts think that micro-influencers are an underused tool to separate brands from their competitors.
Instead of putting all your efforts into reaching out to one macro influencer, you can reach out to hundreds or thousands of YouTubers with smaller audiences and partner with diverse YouTube influencers, hence, reaching a wider audience.
Plus, they have a loyal audience that easily relates to the influencer.
The identify which YouTubers are suitable to promote your products, keep these things in mind:
- Credibility – You need a trustworthy YouTuber whose word calls people to action. That doesn’t always mean to get them to buy your product, but to get them to check out the product or brand, or establish any other type of engagement with the audience.
- Shares the same values as you – They have a loyal audience that follows them along the way. Their audience is your target as the YouTuber has a great influence on them.
- Audience demographic – The YouTube influencer you partner with should have influence over your target audience.
Establishing these points allows you to pin down the starting point of your search. Then, you can start looking for your potential YouTuber. You can do it for free or with a tool. Both come with their benefits. Check them out below:
Free ways to find YouTubers
If you are a small business looking for free ways to find YouTubers for collaborations you can do it through Google search or by using keywords on YouTube for example.
Search by keywords on YouTube
Search for potential YouTubers using keywords as in the example above. You will find YouTubers with different subscriber sizes, views, and other metrics for free. However, note that if you need YouTubers from a less popular niche, filtering YouTubers manually is difficult.
Run a Google search
When searching on Google, type the industry or niche you wish the YouTube influencer then add “YouTubers” as done in the picture above. You will find pages with the most relevant results, so skim the results to see the recommendations.
2. Use creator discovery tools to find super-targeted YouTubers
If you want to dive deeper into analyzing YouTubers and find thousands of YouTubers from a specific niche or location, use creator discovery tools. Besides the number of subscribers, and engagement rate, you will get valid email addresses, info about past collaboration, monetization, etc.
Influencers.Club
You can use our free search tool and find various YouTube creators promoting products for free.
At Influencers.Club, we have 110M+ YouTube creators, searchable by 50 filters. Use our creator discovery dashboard to narrow down your search in a few minutes and get a list of YouTubers that are most suitable to promote your products.
Our dashboard simplifies your search for potential YouTubers for collaboration by providing:
- Custom list of YouTube creators – Set your criteria and then use our creator discovery dashboard to narrow down your search in a few minutes. You can search by location, topics keywords in bio, hashtags used, etc.
Using advanced metrics – We offer in-depth YouTuber analysis, so, you can use our creator deep dive feature to filter YouTubers by those who promote affiliate links, are selling merch, are present on other platforms, etc.
Want to Find YouTubers to Promote Your Products?
3. Build a relationship with creators
Once you get a list of potential YouTubers you want to collaborate with, explore their content in detail. Watch several videos until you understand their tone, ideas, and interests.
Comment on their post by pointing out what you liked about it. You may even briefly introduce yourself in a comment. For example, mention a common thing. It may catch their attention.
4. Craft your proposal
When writing your email, keep it straightforward, convincing, and interesting to read. To do so, you need to pay attention to:
Subject Line
The subject line must be catchy or presentable enough to hint at the purpose of the email. You can do it by:
- Point out the benefits of the collaboration. You can say, Paid Collaboration offer for *insert their user name*.
- Make them feel special: Trigger their excitement with compliments. Mention they are the top match for the *type of promotion*.
- Use emojis: Over 58% of people are likely to open an email if it includes an emoji in the subject line.
Keep it short and clear: The length of your subject line should not exceed 41 characters.
Email Copy
The complete email contains all elements of the pitch. There are 7 elements as explained below
Personalize the email: Mention the post you liked about the YouTuber and explain how it resonates with your brand. Feel free to go into details because it allows you to establish a friendly tone that instantly evokes positive emotions (thus, increasing the likelihood of reading through the email). Check out our example:
- Focus on value proposition: Include information about your brand and product. Highlight the main benefits of the product, and how it stands out from the competition.
- Mention the benefits of the collab: After introducing your brand, make sure to mention the benefits of that collaboration. Keep it professional. You don’t need adjectives to gain their attraction. Instead, show your realistic views on the collaboration.
- Timing is crucial: Nikola Sokolov, CEO of Influencers.Club, known for his effective influencer outreach strategies says that timing is one of the 3 crucial segments of asking YouTubers to promote your products (along with finding the right YouTubers and writing personalized copy).
After analyzing data from more than 10M sent emails, he concluded that Tuesdays and Thursdays (basically, mid-week days) had the best open and reply rates. Moreover, sending emails during mid-morning and early afternoon turned out to be the most productive.
- Use Skimable Structure: Make sure that your email is indented, and well-structured. Block-style emails make the reader lose interest in the email.
- Support your statements: The final element in the pitch is to use supporting statements or arguments that add credibility.
- Add a CTA: A call to action is a must in any email. It is usually the last sentence that entails the following steps. Therefore, it is usually to book a meeting or to reach out to you so you can arrange the collaboration.
If you don’t feel confident writing the pitch yourself, you can use our free email outreach templates. All you have to do is fill in the gaps, and you’re good to go.
Or, you can let us reach out to YouTubers on your behalf. We have a team of experts who handle email deliverability. Monthly, we send 800K+ emails, with a 36% positive reply rate.
Let us contact YouTubers to partner with your brand
Multi-channel Approach for Collaboration
Apart from emails, you can use the multi-channel approach to spark a collaboration with the YouTuber. That includes reaching out to YouTubers via direct messages on Instagram or other social platforms.
Typically, DMs are an unconventional approach for reaching out to YouTUbers, but that doesn’t make it ineffective. But, while YouTubers with a smaller number of subscribers may see the DM and respond to it quickly, macro influencers may never even see the message.
However, keep in mind that usually, the influencer leaves their preferred method for collaboration in YouTube description. Check it out and start crafting the message.
Craft Your DM Professionally
If you want to DM a YouTuber on Instagram, you need to be aware of the character limit. Currently, Instagram caps the DM length to 1,000 characters. Therefore, your message needs to be on point. Content-wise, your DM needs to include the following:
- Emojis: Visuals help in getting YouTuber’s attention. Choose the most suitable ones and send them.
- Acknowledge their work: Mention that you find their work inspiring, and insert a specific post that caught your attention.
- Mention how they align with your brand.
- Mention you are willing to send a few products to test: If the limit allows you, mention a mini product review. If not, just express you are willing to send a few products/items for testing.
Here’s an example:
Hey Marie,
I admire your passion for ethical rights in the fashion industry, especially the vlog where you interview the workers yourself. Similarly, I was driven by the same idea and I run a vintage store with fine and handpicked clothes and accessories.
I would love to send some of our items to you to try them and share your opinion about them with your audience.
Let me know if you’re interested.
Regards,
Anna from Vintage District
Bonus Tips
- Stay away from too many emojis: Google identifies such messages as spam
- Overpromising words or phrase.
- Unrelated context: Make sure you personalize the message always
5. Send samples of your products to the YouTuber
There is one thing you can do to increase your chances of getting a positive response from YouTubers. The strategy is called influencer seeding and means sending them samples of your products as a gift.
Influencer seeding is not a paid collaboration, and it doesn’t require the YouTuber to post or promote your products. Read it as a gift to a person of interest. However, what makes influencer seeding an effective strategy is that you get to introduce your brand through the selection of products. Plus, if they like your products there’s a high chance to get that collaboration.
If they like the products and they plan on sharing them, ask them to use your hashtag. On the other hand, if you have a flowy conversation, you may propose a collaboration.
6. Negotiate your campaign
Negotiation is crucial and in most cases the determining factor of the collaboration. Therefore, knowing all payment methods is imperative. Check the list below for more details.
- Pay-per-click (PPC): This payment method is most popular among YouTubers. It operates by putting the affiliate links that YouTubers add in their description. The total salary is the total number of clicks.
- Cost per engagement (CPE): This means that you pay a set rate per engagement on the post.
- Pay per conversion: For each conversion referred by the influencer, you pay a percentage.
- Flat rates: The flat rate is a flat payment. You arrange a sum, and if the YouTuber agrees, you will pay that sum, regardless if the engagement rate turns out to be higher.
- Fixed-rate and performance-based pay: This type of payment includes a fixed fee for the campaign plus an extra percent from sales.
- Hybrid or individual model: This method is flexible and open for adjustments on both parties.
- Brand ambassador program: This payment method is for a long-term agreement. The payment is hour or commission-based, but also you can do it with free products.
Review all these methods. Pick one. Negotiate.
How to negotiate an offer with a YouTuber in 6 Steps
With your clear campaign goals and objectives and budget range during the negotiation with the YouTuber, you will have to:
- Be transparent: Kiril Dameski, Head of Marketing at Influencers.Club shares that to do influencer outreach successfully, you need to be upfront about campaign rules, details, and budget. Influencers receive hundreds of collaboration emails per month and they value businesses that offer transparency.
- Consider repurposed content: Keep in mind to repurpose the promotion to other social platforms, and mention it during negotiation.
- Discuss brand exclusivity: There is no point if the YouTuber promotes your competitors. Therefore, you need to be open about brand exclusivity and mention some benefits of the collaboration.
- Include an NDA: A professional collaboration must be legally covered to ensure both parties stick to the deal.
- Arrange a short-term or long-term collaboration: Discuss what works best for you.
- Discuss incentives: Suggest a preferred payment method. If they suggest a price outside of your budget, negotiate compensation with free products.
7. Send Follow-up Emails
Follow-up emails are often game-changers. About 21% of the first follow-up emails ended with a positive reply and about 26% of the second follow-up emails ended with a response.
So, if the influencer doesn’t respond to you. Don’t shy away from follow-up emails. Here’s our example of how follow-up emails should look without being pushy or corny.
Hey {first_name} –
It’s {rep_name} at {brand_name}
{{personalization based on content}}
We sent over some products for our upcoming collab and I’m just checking in to see if you got them. Give me a shout when you can, just to make sure we’re all set.
Can I send you some more info?
{rep_name}
We have more follow-up email examples here.
Content Types for YouTube Collaboration
Ultimately, every YouTube collaboration is of different content. There are 4 content types you need to know to choose and suit your campaign. Therefore, you have:
Unboxing
Unboxing is one of the most popular types of content among YouTubers. Views get to experience the product and delve into the features of the product from the start.
This type of content is best if you want to raise sales of the product because the viewer audience of this video probably plans on buying the product. In fact, according to Google data, about 62% of the audience on unboxing videos plans on buying the product.
Reviews
Reviews are new word-of-mouth. Typically for this review content, the YouTuber would try on and test the brand’s products and share their opinion. What’s best in the reviews is that the YouTuber shares their honest opinion with the audience in a relatable manner.
According to Science Direct, nearly 90% of the customers said that reviews help them in purchasing decisions.
This type of content is beneficial for all businesses, regardless of the size. YouTubers can help you spread the word about your product or services and help you meet your goals.
Tutorials
Tutorials or explainers are a promising marketing tool. Statistics say that 85% of people are inclined to buy the product after watching a tutorial on using the platform.
Otherwise, these videos explain how to use a given product, service, tool, or software in detail. YouTubers may cover various topics, from how to use the product to how to fix it. Usually, the focus of this content is to provide answers to frequently asked questions by existing or potential customers. They feel comfortable and secure that in case of trouble, they will easily fix the issue because about 68% of users said they would rather watch a tutorial than explain an issue to customer support.
That being said, all businesses selling services, programs, or software need to provide tutorial videos.
Day-in-the life
The day-in-the-life vlogs focus mostly on YouTuber’s lifestyle and their typical workday. Usually, the YouTubers who make these types of videos (also called YouTube vloggers) have a loyal and highly engaged audience that encourages them to keep creating their day in life.
Moreover, they trust their YouTubers in their suggestions and recommendations. And, that’s what interests you.
YouTubers creating day-in-the-life vlogs usually leave the affiliate link in the description. This way, you expose your brand in front of hundreds, thousands, and millions, depending if you have reached to micro or macro influencer.
These videos are recommended for all businesses regardless of their size.
Conclusion
Statistics say that YouTube ads have 84% more effect on viewers than traditional TV ads. It’s safe to say that reaching out to YouTubers is highly competitive as they receive tons of collab proposals from businesses like yours. But, this should not discourage you from reaching out.
Instead, focus on the email composition elements. Use the tips we mentioned above, and stay away from potential spammy words or phrases.
Also, review your goals. Think who is a better YouTuber for your product promotion, micro or macro? Use free tools, or invest in an advanced search. In the end, it will surely pay off.
FAQs
It depends on the type of YouTuber. But, for reference, a YouTuber with a 10,000 audience may charge about $200 per video.
Yes. Both parties, YouTubers and brands, have to sign an agreement for collaboration.
Yes. You can edit and crop the video from the influencer and post the promotional insert on social media platforms.
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