One of the major challenges of influencer marketing is getting in touch with influencers. Quite often, influencers don’t respond to some brands’ inquiries. Other times, the response comes late. If you are experiencing this, you don’t need to worry as this is a common occurrence in influencer marketing and every brand out there has experienced it at one time or another. However, there are ways you can go about increasing your response rate and getting influencers to respond to your inquiry. Before we proceed, let us take a look at some reasons why influencers don’t respond to brand messages.
1. The influencer is not interested in working with your brand: These days, most influencers prefer to work with brands that they are interested in or businesses they are familiar with rather than working with a random business that they don’t know anything about. The reason for this is that influencers want to prevent their followers from being scammed. To overcome this, you need to first build a relationship with the influencers by engaging with their content before finally reaching out to them.
2. Your email entered the spam folder: Most people don’t know of this. But, it does happen quite often. Especially if you are using other unverified email providers to send messages to Gmail or vice versa.
3. Your mail got mixed up or lost: Popular influencers especially the ones who are not under agency tend to receive a lot of collaboration emails and because of this majority of brands’ emails are left unopened due to the large volume of mail. However, you can always overcome this by working with micro-influencers that don’t receive a lot of collaboration emails.
4. You are using the wrong pitching template: Using the wrong pitching template is another reason why most influencers don’t respond to collaboration inquiries. Your pitching message has to be professional, personalized, and friendly. Remember, Influencers are human, you are friendly to them, and they will also return it in kind. However, if you are finding it difficult to draft out a personalized, professional and friendly messaging template you can get ours for free. Our proven messaging template can be used for different scenarios. Click Here to get it.
5. Not using brand email address: These days, some influencers prefer to be contacted through a brand official email rather than a normal Gmail or Outlook email. Although, some influencers don’t care what email address you used to contact them. But, most influencers do. Below is a screenshot of a post on Facebook where an influencer is asking if she should respond to a brand collaboration request or not, on the bases that the brand sends a mail to her using Gmail.
Now that we have known some reasons why influencers don’t respond to some collaboration inquiries. It is time to look at 5 ways you can contact Influencers for promotion.
#1. Through DM.
Social media platforms like Instagram and Twitter allow you to send DMs to influencers. As long as the influencer DM is open, there is a high chance you will get a response. TikTok also allows brands to send DM to influencers, although it is only possible when the influencer is already following the brand. When sending a DM to influencers, there are certain things you need to know:
The influencer might not read your message if their DM is close on Instagram, while on Twitter you won’t be able to send a DM, because the message icon won’t be seen on their bio. So make sure the influencer DM is open before you contact them. How do you know if their DM is open or not? It is simple, most influencers usually put this in their bio “dm for promotion”. If you see this on an influencer bio, it shows that the influencer bio is open.
Another thing you need to know is that some influencers receive a lot of DMs, and there is a high chance that your DM will get lost. So you have to go the extra mile to make your DM stand out. One way of doing this is by using catchy emoji on your message and leaving a comment saying “Business-related pls check your DM”. This trick has helped me get responses in minutes.
#2. Through Email.
Reaching out to influencers through email is the professional way you can go about reaching out to influencers for collaboration. So, how do we go about getting the influencers’ email addresses? Most influencers usually include their email in their bio or bio link, this is especially common on platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok. While in platforms like YouTube, the influencer email can be found in the “About” section of the YouTube channel when you click on “view email address” as shown below.
When reaching out to influencers through email, always make sure you include a subject heading that shows your intention, such as “Collaboration Inquiry”, “Business-related” etc. Also, make sure you are sending the email through your brand email address instead of using Gmail or Hotmail. Most influencers prefer to be contacted through brand email addresses. You should also consider attaching a campaign brief to the pitching email. This will save you a lot of time.
#3. Contact Influencers Through LinkedIn.
LinkedIn is the world’s largest online professional network. It can be used to connect and deepen professional relationships. This means LinkedIn can also be used to connect with influencers in your niche. However, this is only effective for reaching out to prominent influencers and influencers in the entrepreneur, finance and business niche.
To find these influencers on LinkedIn, simple Google search their name along with the word “LinkedIn” at the end or just conduct a name search on LinkedIn along with their niche. You can then proceed to send them an invitation to connect with them. After the influencer, accept your connection. You can then proceed to message them about your intention.
#4. Contact Influencers Through Their Websites.
Another effective way of reaching out to influencers is through their website. Most influencers, especially those that have a website, can be reached through their website using the “contact me form” which is usually found in the contact us or about us section of the website. Also, in the “Contact us” section you will find influencers’ other contact details such as email addresses, and phone numbers (not recommended except if the influencer stated so) that you can use to reach out to them.
Contact Us Form
#5. By engaging with the influencer content.
While this is not a way of reaching out to the influencer, it can get you noticed by the influencer and whenever you send the influencer DM the influencer will sure notice your message and respond immediately.
Mind you, this doesn’t mean you should over saturate their post with multiple comments which might look spammy, rather leave reasonable comments that are relevant to the post.
Take away
Always remember that influencers are human and not bots, so be friendly and professional as much as possible when reaching out to them for promotion. And even if at the end of the day you don’t end up working with them, always thank them for sparing their time to chat with you.
If you need help with getting the right influencers for your product. Don’t hesitate to message us. Thanks for reading our blog post. If you find this post helpful, don’t forget to share it with your friends and colleagues.
