Developing Outreach Strategies for Influencers

Finding the right influencer fit may be one of the biggest challenges in influencer marketing. But even after this hard part is over, there are still a few more obstacles along the way. Take, for instance, influencer outreach. From crafting subject lines that catch the eye to making them an offer they can’t refuse, the outreach process involves a lot of moving parts.

As a contributing writer to many leading publications, I get dozens of emails soliciting a content partnership from different organizations. Between marketing emails and other work-related communications, it’s easy to miss these emails, especially if the subject line isn’t compelling enough. And I’m just a regular person, not an influencer. So you can imagine how easy it is for your outreach emails to get lost in an influencer’s inbox.

That’s why creating impactful outreach strategies for influencers is essential for establishing a successful partnership. In this post, I guide you through the steps and best practices to develop these strategies.

5 Steps to Creating Outreach Strategies for Influencers

Before we discuss anything else, let’s get straight to the practical aspects of influencer outreach. Here are the five steps to follow when creating outreach strategies for influencers.

Step 1: Understand Who Your Influencers Are

The first step to a successful influencer outreach is understanding who you’re reaching out to. Who are your influencers? What do they like or dislike? What are they interested in, and what motivates them?

Having a deeper understanding of your potential influencer partners will make it easier to personalize your outreach messages. This is essential to make a good first impression and build a strong connection with them. Your research will also help you understand what matters to your influencers, so you can develop an offer that’s relevant to them.

Without researching your influencers, you could miss an important update like this:

Thalia, who originally created content about maximalist fashion under the username @polychrom3, announced in an Instagram post that she’s retiring as a fashion creator. Without seeing this post and from simply glancing through her Feed, you might end up wasting time approaching the creator with a collaboration opportunity to promote your fashion brand.

Meanwhile, she regularly shares her concern for the environment. So she might still be interested in helping you promote an environmental cause.

Step 2: Have a Clear Idea of Deliverables and Expectations

What do you expect from your influencers? What kind of content do they need to create, and how many? Laying out these expectations early on in the campaign outreach process will save you time and filter out mismatched influencers. 

This will allow influencers to assess your needs and compare it against their current bandwidth. So they can decline or accept the opportunity accordingly. This will prevent you from signing influencers who end up failing to deliver. That way, you can avoid issues related to delays, missed deadlines, conflicts, and early withdrawals.

Additionally, it will also help you maintain clarity about your exact needs. So you can avoid piling on more work beyond the original scope of work in your influencer agreement. In other words, it will set you up for clearer contracts and prevent future conflicts.

Step 3: Lay Out Your Compensation Offer

Next, decide on how you intend to compensate your influencers. Will this be a paid opportunity? Or will you be compensating them in other ways? If you’re offering monetary compensation, how much are you willing to pay?

Laying out all these details during the outreach stage will help you form a partnership with influencers who match your budget. Even if you’re open to negotiating based on the influencer’s rate, you should still have a clear idea of how much you’re willing to spend. That way, you can filter out creators whose rates far exceed your anticipated spending.

Similarly, specifying your compensation offer at the outreach stage will make it easier for influencers to decide the value of your partnership. This will help them make an informed decision so you can reduce the back and forth needed for pricing negotiations, allowing both parties to save time. 

You can use Influencity’s IRM to save content-specific prices for each influencer. This will help you keep track of how much you’ve agreed to pay each creator, which is especially useful for multi-influencer campaigns where different creators have different rates.

Step 4: Craft Your Outreach Message

Now that you have all the details in place, it’s time to focus on your outreach message. This is where it gets complicated, as you need to make it compelling and enticing enough to draw in potential influencers. So something basic (or desperate) like, “Please work with us,” isn’t going to cut it. Check out some of our paid collaboration email templates for inspiration.

Let me share a few best practices on how to craft a strong outreach message that influencers will love:

Add a Personal Touch

I can’t remember how many times I’ve ignored an email or LinkedIn message that starts with something along the lines of: “Dear author…” Here’s an example:

It’s not hard to add a name to an outreach message. Yet some “outreach experts” can’t even be bothered to do that. So you can understand why influencers will ignore generic outreach emails…because why would they want to work with someone who won’t even do the bare minimum?

Personalizing your outreach messages with the influencer’s name is just a small but essential step. Consider adding more personal touches to make the message feel like it was crafted just for the influencer. This doesn’t necessarily have to be complicated. For instance, you could mention a recent collaboration or a Reel that you love.  

Say you want to reach out to Leonie Hanne, who recently went on a trip to Italy. Your outreach message could mention the trip for a little personal touch. For example:

“Loved all the looks you put together for your Italian summer getaway. My favorite was the pure linen look that screamed: boss lady, but make it chic. And I have a feeling you’ll love our latest collection of summer suits (hint: there’s lots and lots of linen).” 

Craft an Enticing Subject Line

Your subject line is one of the first things that an influencer will notice about your email. It’s also what will get them to open the email in the first place. So if you want to drive more opens for your influencer proposal emails, you need to write subject lines that are enticing enough to catch the eye without looking spammy or suspicious.

Consider personalizing this section of your email with the influencer’s name as well. If this isn’t viable, use the available space to specify the opportunity. Add details like your brand name and the campaign details so influencers have a fair idea of what the email is about, even before they open it. For example:

“Interested in a long-term brand ambassador opportunity for X Brand?”

Being too vague and “mysterious” could have an unintended effect and end up annoying influencers more than it intrigues them, especially if it’s your first time reaching out.

Include a Soft CTA

If you want more influencers to respond to your outreach emails, a soft CTA is the way to go. This involves ending your email with a question that needs a “yes or no” response. For instance, “Is this something you’d be interested in?” or “Are you open to this opportunity?”

This opens up an opportunity for further communications. Instead of expecting influencers to make an instant decision, you’re leaving some room to discuss and negotiate the opportunity. So it’s more likely to generate a response from influencers who are open to learning more about the campaign before they finalize their decision.

Keep in mind that this type of CTA won’t always be ideal depending on factors like your budget and deliverables. If there’s no room to negotiate, you may want to ask for their rates first or ask for a firm decision after specifying all the deliverables and compensation details.

Step 5: Have a Follow-Up Strategy in Place

Finally, you can’t bank on influencers responding to your outreach efforts in the first go. Even if some do, there’s always a chance that you’ll need to follow up with some of them. Between creating content and navigating existing brand partnerships, influencers may not always have the time to respond to new collaboration opportunities.

This is why it helps to have a strategy for following up with influencers. Set up a follow-up plan that lays out details like frequency and timing. For instance, you may decide to follow up when an influencer fails to respond after 1-2 weeks. This could then follow up with another reminder after a week of not receiving a response.

It’s important to time your follow-ups and space them out strategically so as not to come across as pushy. Remember that influencers are busy people. So they might need time to check their emails and send an appropriate response. Don’t make the mistake of following up after just a couple of days, or you could end up annoying them, which means they’re more likely to decline the offer. 

I recommend spacing out your follow-ups for at least 1-2 weeks, which gives them enough time to go through their emails without pushing back your campaign schedule too much. Consider using an email sequence software solution to automate the process and schedule your follow-up emails.

Additionally, frequency is another factor to consider in your influencer follow-ups. How many times will you follow up before giving up on an influencer? Too often, and you could end up looking desperate. No follow-ups, and you could lose the influencer.

I suggest keeping your follow-up frequency at around 1-2 times. You could do one more follow-up for influencers that you absolutely want to include in your campaign. Anything more than this could be annoying to an influencer who’s not interested. Not to mention the time and energy you waste in the process.

4 Best Practices for Effective Influencer Outreach

Successful influencer outreach goes beyond simply following the above essential steps. Let me share a few more tips and best practices for better outreach success.

1. Test Your Email Subject Lines

As I mentioned earlier, your email subject line makes all the difference in getting those opens. If you want influencers to accept your offer, you have to get them to open the email in the first place. And that’s where your subject lines come in.

I recommend testing your email subject lines to see what works. Omnisend offers a free email subject line tester that rates your subject line based on length, wording, and scannability. It then gives you suggestions on how to improve it for a bigger impact.

But don’t just rely on this alone. Run a live test by sending emails with subject line variations to a few sample influencers. Then track the open rates for different variations to see what works best.

2. Create Loose Templates to Save Time

Personalization is the key to creating impactful outreach strategies for influencers. So relying on generic templates may not yield the desired results. At the same time, crafting a personalized email from scratch for hundreds of influencers can be time-consuming and inefficient.

Strike the perfect balance between personalization and efficiency with loose email templates that you can easily personalize and reuse for your influencer outreach. Create a generic outline with essential info about your campaign, compensation offer, and deliverables. Then when you’re ready to send out the email, personalize it with influencer-specific details like their name, recent campaigns, etc.

Influencity’s built-in communication tool lets you build and save email templates for future use. You can easily customize these emails with personalization tokens containing influencer-specific information. This significantly streamlines the outreach process and helps you save time crafting your messages.

Take care to consider your industry when crafting your outreach templates. There are different best practices that will align with specific industries. So you need to keep these in mind when creating template variations. For example:

• Fashion: Keep it casual and conversational. Mention something unique about them, like their style identity, favorite clothing items, or styling principle. 
• Tech: Keep it conversational but more professional. Give a nod to their tech knowledge, mentioning their niche, favorite brands, or recent reviews.
• Food: Keep it conversational. Mention something unique about their content, such as their go-to ingredients, recent recipes, or cooking style.
• Beauty/Skincare: Keep it casual and conversational. Include personalized info related to their skin type, skin concern, go-to brands, etc.

3. Use the Right Tools to Track and Manage Communications

It’s easy to lose track of your communications when you’re reaching out to multiple influencers. Sure, you may have all the messages in your inbox and “Sent” folder. But you might have a hard time tracking down emails from specific influencers when it’s all mixed up with your other emails.

And when that happens, you might have to ask influencers to resend their info or even follow up when you don’t need to. This is why it helps to use a separate tool for managing and keeping track of your influencer communications.

An outreach software solution like Influencity lets you track all your communications between different influencers in one place. The platform maintains your conversation history with specific influencers, allowing you to easily check back on any important details without having to ask them repeatedly. Not only does this streamline your influencer communications, but it also saves time for both you and the influencers.

4. Monitor Your Email Performance

How do you know if your outreach efforts are paying off? Or whether your emails are landing in the spam folder? Monitoring the performance of your outreach emails is an essential step to inform and optimize your outreach strategies for influencers.

Keep track of your open rates, click rates, bounces, spam reports, and unsubscribe rate to see how specific outreach campaigns are paying off. Influencity offers all these outreach metrics to help you understand your performance. Use these insights to see which subject lines are driving higher open rates, which messages are resonating, and so on. Then optimize your outreach emails accordingly.

Build Influencer Outreach Strategies that Deliver

Your influencer outreach plays a key role in the success of your campaign. After all, what’s the point of finding the perfect influencer fit only to get no response or a declined offer? So make the most of the tips and best practices I shared above to create successful outreach strategies for influencers.