Personalizing Your Influencer Marketing Outreach on a Budget

Whether you’re conducting outreach for streamers to play indie games or reaching out to beauty influencers for a collaboration opportunity or have a User Generated Content opportunity for a nano influencer, here’s a guide to help maximize your influencer marketing outreach strategy on a budget so your cold outreach helps produce results for your influencer marketing campaign & helps build positive relationships with influencers.

Keep Your Elevator Pitch - Short & Sweet

As part of a broader influencer marketing outreach strategy, you'll likely be asked to conduct outreach to multiple different influencers, so strong outreach methods start with clarity on your campaign goals before you contact influencers. These influencers and their managers are also evaluating several other brand e-mails. A well-written outreach emails with a clear subject line can improve response rates, so respect their time by keeping it short & concise.

Create an e-mail template that's brief, and details the essential information of your influencer campaign such as: deliverables, campaign theming, deadlines, compensations, and whether the influencer has any creative freedom.

Additionally, create a template to be used for direct messaging as nano-influencers are less likely to check their e-mails. Be careful when using AI to write your outreach template because that may cause you to be mistake for spam or feel too robotic.

Identifying Influencers - Reach out to Target Audience

Strive to reach out to influencers who already part of your demographic, community, or match your ideal customer profile to ensure content authenticity. These influencers also much more likely to be interested in your outreach e-mail and will see the opportunity as mutually beneficial. Some influencers may reject opportunities, if they feel it won't be a brand fit for them or their community.

For example, an influencer who primarily produces gaming content catering to Gen Z may reject an opportunity in collaborating with a beauty brand who produces skincare products catering to Millennials.

Creator discovery tools such as Modash, CreatorIQ, and Trudy help provide deeper insights if the influencer is a part of your audience demographics or help recommend similar creators. If you don't have access to any creator discovery tools look at relevant hashtags, tagged posts, or check recent comments on posts to find influencers who are already actively part of your community. Smaller creators with highly relevant audience niches can outperform bigger but less aligned accounts.

Personalize Your Opening Statement

As part of an effective influencer outreach strategy, take a quick look at a few videos and recent posts before initial outreach so you can personalize each outreach message for potential influencers—around 5-10 minutes spent on an influencer's page is enough to gain an understanding of their personality, perspective, and content. If any of the influencer's content is relevant to the brand, you're familiar with them, you share a commonality with them, or you can mention the influencer's recent work or how you discovered their content, use that specific reference as the opener for your influencer outreach e-mail or DM.

Personalized messaging helps separate you from mass spam, and personalized outreach can double response rates. Personalized influencer marketing outreach especially helps you stand out in an AI-driven world and helps build positive relationships with influencers. Professional influencers are also more likely to respond when your opener shows real familiarity with their work.

Have A Professional E-Mail Signature

Before, you click send to your outreach e-mail make sure you add a professional e-mail signature to your message so your message feels credible. Ensure your e-mail signature includes the following: company's logo, company's website, your job title, and your name. Outlook and Gmail have innate tools in their platform to add e-mail signatures.

A professional e-mail signature helps maintain professional consistency across your communications with the influencer and helps boost the veracity of your influencer marketing outreach. This will help boost your engagement rate as that will help make you stand out from other non-business e-mails an influencer may receive.

Check the Name, Before Hitting Sent

You also want to make sure you're sending the right e-mail to the right person. For example, you don't want to send an e-mail addressed for Jessica that was actually for Priyanka. This will cause the influencer to mistake your message as spam or feel that your message is too robotic or uncaring. They will be less likely to respond to your initial influencer marketing outreach.

Double-check the recipient's name and contact information before sending each email. Taking a moment to personalize the message correctly shows attention to detail and helps build trust with the influencer from the first interaction.

Stay Professional for Successful Influencer Outreach

You may also need to send multiple different follow-up e-mails as part of your influencer outreach strategy. Keep your follow-up messages brief and polite, as part of structured outreach campaigns rather than repeated pestering. Never let your verbiage in your creator outreach skew aggressive. Remember, creators often talk to each other and their audience; rude behavior may lead to negative attention for you or the brand you're working for.

Treat all influencers regardless of audience size equally and politely. Follow up politely after 3 to 5 days if there is no response from the influencer. Stick to a rule of three; if they don't respond after 3 attempts, decide whether to manage conversations across email and social channels by trying DM if you haven't, or move on to a different influencer.

Be Mindful of Time Zones

Additionally, it's important to be mindful of time zones when conducting your influencer outreach. For example, an Influencer from the United Kingdom is more likely to respond to your cold outreach if you e-mail them during their business hours, use time zone convertors to help you schedule your message at the right time.

Take advantage of scheduling tools that Gmail and Outlook of their platform so you can send your cold outreach at the most opportune time.

Managing Your Responses

As you conduct your cold outreach, it's important to keep track of your outreach metrics. Especially if you work with a team so no one is messaging the same influencer twice. CRM tools such as Grin, CreatorIQ, and Aspire are great for tracking your influencer outreach. However, spreadsheets are a good replacement if you don't have access to CRM tools.

Bonus - Your LinkedIn and Social Media Presence

Due to their online visibility, an influencers' inbox may be filled with malicious e-mails or DMs from scammers who may want to take advantage of them. Usually, an influencer may Google you to ensure the veracity & brand reputation of your e-mail. Ensure your LinkedIn mentions the company you're conducting influencer marketing outreach for or mention you're looking for influencers on a LinkedIn post.

If you mentioned in your outreach e-mail or DM that you are a fan of their content, boost the veracity of that claim by liking their content, reposting their content, or following their social media platforms; this also helps build positive & authentic relationships with your influencers.

You're Ready To Click Sent

Now that you know how to maximize your influencer outreach strategy with intuitive and attentive outreach, you're ready to click send on that e-mail. A personalized touch helps build positive influencer relationships which helps build successful campaigns that AI can't replace.

🪽 Written By SJ Singh