Five Influencer Outreach Message Templates For Your Brand To Use

What’s more, in a world where companies are fighting against a weakening economy, influencers provide incredible value for money in terms of ROI. Research conducted by TapInfluence and Nielsen Catalina Solutions discovered that influencer marketing earns 11x bigger ROI than traditional approaches.

In 2023, influencers will be more popular and more valuable to marketers than ever, which means working with them as a marketer can be genuinely transformative. However, to unlock the benefits of influencer marketing, companies must first secure the influencer’s service—which can be a challenge.

Finding the right influencer

The first step in working with influencers is finding the right influencer to work with. As with any marketing or advertising campaign, the method—in this case, the type of influencer—has to match the brand and the campaign’s goals.

Failure to match the influencer with these two things creates a risk of underperformance or, worse, damage to brand value. Instead, companies should treat influencers like business partners whose values align with their own and who are willing to work hard to ensure the relationship is mutually beneficial.

Each influencer is different, as is each campaign they could work on. However, there are some key things companies should consider when selecting an influencer:

Relevance

Ensuring the influencers they work with are relevant in their industry is crucial for companies. A synergy between the influencer and the company is the only way to guarantee the campaign’s credibility and increase its chance of success.

The influencer’s audience must also be relevant to the company’s targets. Communicating with an irrelevant audience through the wrong influencer wastes time and effort.

Reach

A well-devised campaign needs a target in terms of the number of people it needs to reach, and this number should be used to help select an influencer. In simple terms, there’s no point in choosing an influencer with a follower count of one million if the aim of the campaign is to reach five million. So companies should consider each influencer’s sphere of influence—their follower count across different platforms—before deciding which influencer to work with.

Engagement

Reaching a relevant audience of a large enough side is important. But influencer marketing can only be successful if it connects with that audience and moves them to act in the way the campaign sets out to. Therefore, an influencer with a good engagement rate is crucial. This is made more complex by the fact that, according to research by Markerly, as an influencer’s follower count rises, the amount of likes and comments they receive per follower actually decreases. Companies, therefore, need to analyse the percentage of followers who regularly like, comment and share an influencer’s content.

If this sounds complex, don’t worry—there are tools to help. At Kolsquare, we’ve built a solution that allows users to understand the many challenges of Influencer Marketing. From the selection of influencers to the search for the target audience, it provides everything needed for finding influencers and running a successful campaign. You can find out more here.

Contacting Influencers

Finding influencers is just part of the challenge that marketers face. Connecting with them and setting up a relationship is time-consuming and is not always a successful venture for marketers.

Why? Influencers are busy people, often balancing several jobs at once and are unable to reply to every request. Contacting them is also rarely straightforward, with brands forced to ‘slide into their DMs’ to begin contact. It’s also an intimidating process for any marketer challenged with securing influencers’ services. Reaching out to someone new can be intimidating, and finding the right words to convince them to join in with a campaign doesn’t come easily to everyone. This is where templated influencer outreach comes in.

Influencer Outreach Message

An influencer outreach message is the first piece of communication a brand has with an influencer. It comes in the form of an email or social media direct message designed to get the attention of the influencer and briefly explain how the brand would like to collaborate with them.

They’re often a brand’s only opportunity to connect with an influencer, so they need to be well-crafted, hit the right messaging and clearly lay out the opportunity. This takes time. So having a template that can be tweaked for personalisation but sent to many influencers at once is a valuable tool.

How To Write Influencer Outreach Messages

There are well-known templates that brands can use as the basis for their outreach emails, which feature at the bottom of this piece. But before then, marketers need to understand the key information that must be included with them.

Define Your Goals

For a start, messages need to clearly state the campaign’s goals, so influencers are aware of what will be required of them. Knowing this makes it easier for them to buy into the campaign or opportunity. These are busy people, so leaving out information that means they have to ask questions is not going to go down well.

To be able to include a campaign’s goals, marketers need to understand what they are themselves. Marketers should ask themselves: What do you want to achieve with these influencers? How does it benefit the brand, and how does it benefit them? What compensation are you offering them?  

Coming up with answers to these questions will develop a clear idea of what needs to be included in that outreach email.

Personalisation and pre-outreach

Popular influencers receive a large number of outreach emails, meaning the ones that stand out have the best chance of success. Sending a cookie-cutter email that the influencer is likely to have seen before is unlikely to succeed. Follow this guide on how to personalise your approach:

• Establish a pre-connection. From the brand account, follow the influencer on all platforms they’re active on and, when relevant, comment on their posts to increase visibility. By engaging with them beforehand, they are more likely to recognise the brand and be open to responding positively.  
• When drafting the outreach message, tailor the subject line and content to each recipient. This means including their name and making reference to recent work they might have done.
• Write in an appropriately conversational tone so that the influencer feels comfortable that they’re talking to a ‘real’ person.
• Identify yourself and your organisation in the first line of the email. This helps the influencer remember who you are after reading and helps them get to the point quicker.
• Likewise, quickly and clearly explain why you’re messaging and what the campaign brief is. This saves the influencer time and will be easier for them to remember.
• Bullet points or lists can make it easier for recipients to scan and digest information quickly.
• If you represent a small or niche business, an additional explanation of who you are or what you do can be added to your outreach email.

Message Templates

That’s how to make an outreach email stand out. Often these tips are used in conjunction with a pre-written message template that can be selected based on the campaign and the type of work the influencer will be required to do. Here are five of the most common templates that can be copied and personalised.