Test Your Campaign Pre-Launch
Now that you have your list of potential influencers, your campaign brief ready to post, and you have a good sense of what you might need to pay influencers, you are almost ready to build a campaign on your Business Page and encourage people to apply. Just one more step!
We highly recommend you test your campaign messaging with a few influencers directly first. While you can mass email influencers on a list with one click, we recommend that you start with a few personalized messages to the first 4-6 influencers on your campaign. At the outset, just like with any marketing campaign, you should experiment with what you communicate and focus on learning as much as possible about how your message is received.
As you interact with more influencers you will start to see patterns in what they ask, what confuses them, and what expectations they have (even if they are unreasonable ones!). You’ll be able to adjust your outreach message over time to answer the most common questions upfront and save yourself (and the influencers) a lot of time.
There are various theories on how much information to put in your first outreach message. Our data shows that more comprehensive outreach emails are more effective in getting a response.
Great outreach emails include the following information (which will also be present in your campaign information):
- Your company name
- Your name (influencers respond to people vastly more than generic company emails)
- A few sentences about your products
- A few sentences about your campaign
- Any notable ways you’ve interacted with influencers before
Here is a simple example of an effective influencer outreach email:
“Hi Sally,
My name is Heather and I work with BondEye Swim (@bondeyeswim). We are the leading Australian boutique swimwear company and have worked with notable influencers like Natalie Roser and Steph Smith. We’re planning the launch of our summer collection and looking for new faces to work with. I saw your profile and thought I would reach out. I’d love to have you review our product line. Let me know if you are interested in potentially working with us. You can also shoot me any questions you have by replying to this email.
Looking forward to talking with you.
Heather”
Keep in mind that not all influencers will respond. We see between 30% and 80% response rate depending on how well a Business Page is built, how well their website and Instagram channels are designed, how well the outreach email is written, and a brand’s general recognition. If you don’t get a response to your first couple of influencers we recommend trying a few more.
One note of caution - don’t shoot off emails to influencers with 500K+ followers at the start, unless your brand is clearly very established and that level of influencer would definitely take your outreach seriously. Start with smaller influencers and have a few conversations with them. See what questions they ask (maybe they all want to know what your budget is or if they get to keep your product after the campaign) and work that back into your outreach emails. All of this will help you build a campaign on your Business Page that attracts amazing applications.