How an A-Player Platform Got 140K+ Influencer Signups with 0 Manual Work

Influencer marketing platforms are built to provide a quick, easy, and reliable way for brands to find and connect with creators.

Brands need a huge and diverse pool of choices, so they usually choose platforms with the biggest and most active influencer database over all other choices. 

That’s why most platforms focus on scale – collecting public data from social media platforms and building massive influencer lists. 

But the real challenge begins when it’s time to activate those profiles to become platform users ready to be discovered and hired by brands. 

In this case study, we’ll go through how one of the biggest influencer platforms secured emails for influencers in their database and got 140K+ new signups in just 3 months.

The Problem

Influencer marketing platforms source publicly available influencer data from platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. 

Once they have the data, the key thing for them is to find emails for those influencers. 

With emails, platforms invite influencers to sign up and become active users, making it easier for brands to hire them directly through the platform.

But finding influencer emails is difficult because of privacy regulations and the fact that most emails aren’t publicly available. 

This makes it both a technical and legal challenge that limits platforms from growing their user base and delivering more value to brands.

The Solution

Enrich the existing creator database with verified emails through a creator API.

You can run a one-time enrichment to upgrade your entire database or integrate the API to keep profiles updated continuously. 

The influencer platform discussed in this use case started with bulk pull and then set up scheduled syncs to refresh emails, metrics, and platform links every 2 weeks.

See our creator API in action

A famous influencer marketing platform had a database of 110M influencers. They’ve sourced the data from Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok and they had an email for only 37% of those profiles.

Because of this, the only way brands could reach out to influencers they found on the platform was via social media DMs.

But relying only on DMs resulted in lower response rates and less effective communication, making it harder for brands to engage and collaborate with influencers.

And that’s where our creator API came through.

The integration

Since the client already had a solid database of 110M influencers, we’ve set up a direct API integration. 

We’ve run their username database through the API, and we enriched 48.4M matched profiles with a verified email.

Once they had an email for 81% of the influencers on their platform, they had two approaches to reach out to those influencers:

• Automated invites triggered by brand interest – When a brand selected an influencer that wasn’t yet signed up, the platform automatically sent an email to them saying: “{Brand name} wants to collaborate with you. Join the platform for free to learn more.” 

The conversion rates for influencer signups were between 17% and 31%, depending on the platform and whether it was a micro or macro influencer.

• Targeted cold outreach to high-potential creators – With this strategy, they’ve targeted two groups:

1. 1. Influencers who are successful at paid partnerships and affiliate marketing
   2. Rising stars who don’t have many brand collaborations but have over 10K followers, plus at least 10% monthly follower growth and eng. rate higher than 3.5%.

The results 

• Got 41K+ new influencer signups in 3 months from automated invites (with zero effort) – This was directly influenced by the number of brands actively using the platform. As the demand from brands increased, so did the number of influencers who were accepting the invitation to sign up. 
• Over 100K+ new influencer signups from scaled cold influencer outreach – The outreach was fully managed by our creator outreach team. We’ve sent 10M emails in 3 months, and we managed to get over 100K influencers signups (targeting just influencers that match the above-mentioned criteria).

How it works

If your team isn’t familiar with API integrations, we’ll help you with setting up everything until there’s no manual work. 

For platforms with an existing influencer database, the API connects directly to your backend. Once integrated, it automatically enriches every profile by username or profile URL.

More info for technical teams:

• The enrichment is triggered using existing identifiers (usernames, profile URLs, or emails)
• You choose which data fields you want returned (emails, number of followers, locations, platform links, keywords, etc)
• Enrich a large batch of usernames at once or set it to update profiles automatically over time

For more details, view the API documentation or get in touch with us.