4 Ways to Increase Creator Response Rates with Your Brand Pitch
Have you ever been ghosted by an influencer after the first brand pitch? It can be discouraging when you’ve poured in a lot of time and energy into your outreach. But the good news is that there’s room to improve. Pitching to influencers doesn’t have to be a daunting task.
Today, we’re breaking down 4 tried-and-true ways to impress creators in your brand pitch so that you increase response rates.
1. Personalize your outreach.
Nobody wants to feel like they’re just a random number in a brand’s CRM. Show influencers that you’ve done your research. When crafting your next influencer pitch, ensure that you’re personalizing each outreach message.
The easiest way to do so is by addressing each influencer by their first name. And if you’re planning to use an automation tool to send out mass invites, make sure that all of your email tokens work properly and that your content looks polished. It wouldn’t be very professional to accidentally address a potential brand partner as “{{First Name}}” or their Instagram handle.
To add extra flare to your pitch, include a sentence or two about why you think they’d be a good match for your company. You can talk about how a message from their recent post aligns with your brand’s values, or how their vibrant content could be a fun addition to your next campaign idea.
2. Offer incentives prior to making the deal.
The best incentives are interactive ones. Even before engaging in a paid collaboration, offer to send them your products or invite them to a local event so that they can try out your products and form genuine opinions prior to signing a contract.
This is a smart move for several reasons:
- Being able to try out the products will likely get more influencers to actually become brand fans. And once they do engage in a paid partnership, this will translate and show through in their content.
- Sending free products to influencers — also known as product seeding — opens up opportunities for influencers to potentially feature your products in a casual Instagram Story or a PR unboxing video. This type of organic content can do wonders for brand awareness and even sales.
- If you do invite influencers to a local event, they’ll have the chance to meet the faces behind your brand — making it easier to build more meaningful relationships and authentic partnerships.
3. Briefly include collaboration details in your pitch.
Most creators don’t enjoy reading long, extensive emails, especially when it’s the first touchpoint with a brand — but it’s still important to provide some basic campaign details so they know what to expect.
In addition to the incentives you’re offering, include a few short bullet points at the end of your email with more details about your campaign, such as a campaign timeline and specific deliverables you’re looking for. The less back-and-forth there is, the better.
If you don’t know where to start, you can download our free influencer outreach email templates and customize them to your liking.
4. Meet your creators where they are — Instagram.
While email is still a great way to reach creators, the truth is that creators spend a lot more time on Instagram than in their email inbox. Creators are typically much more receptive to you if you reach out to them on a platform they’re familiar with. So, meet them where they are by sliding into their Instagram DMs with your campaign pitch.
Manually DMing influencers one-by-one on Instagram isn’t scalable. The good news is that Aspire has a new Instagram Direct Messaging integration that allows you to send campaign invitations to creators via Instagram DMs — without ever leaving the Aspire platform.
With a tool like Aspire, brands have access to every email and DM conversation all in one place. Plus, you’ll have transparency and centralized communications across all of your team members as well.
Learn more about how to increase response rates and build more meaningful relationships in our partner webinar, Meta + Aspire Present: The Power Of Personalization. Watch it on demand now.
