Brand Pitch Email Template – Everything You Need to Know About Reaching Out to Influencers

Oliver Bridge

We live in an era where a strong personal brand can become a business almost overnight.

Influencers can put your product in front of your target audience in a matter of minutes and achieve better exposure than you ever could on your own.

Researching influencers and reaching out to them should be treated with as much importance as lead-hunting. Before writing the actual email, you have to do research and approach the whole process strategically.

In this article, we will cover all the steps you need to take to create a good email pitch campaign: from setting up your email to finding influencers and writing the email.

Why should you reach out to influencers?

Influencer marketing has one significant advantage over media buying: authenticity. An influencer can honestly and directly promote your product on their page, unlike when you buy a banner on a website and promote the product on your own. It’s a more soft-sell approach that doesn’t look as spammy.

Stats show us that this is a smart investment as well. Every dollar spent on an influencer marketing campaign can make up to $5.20 back.

Another way to make sure you’re not wasting resources is to create an affiliate agreement, where an influencer gets paid only for the sales made through their blog/profile.

However, you decide to approach it, keep in mind that, while it may look like a significant investment at the start, influencer collaboration usually returns dividends.

Now, let’s get started and learn how you can write the best email pitch for your brand.

1. Make sure your email doesn’t end up in Spam

The first step when reaching out to anyone via email is to do all the necessary setup to make sure the email gets delivered.

It doesn’t matter how smart or well-written your email is – all your effort will be in vain if the message ends up in the Spam folder.

But, why does an email end up in Spam in the first place?

There are several reasons for this. Having low engagement rates is often mentioned by webmail providers as one of the key indicators of whether or not an email sender is a “spammer”. So, if your newsletters and other promotional emails get low open rates, your emails have a higher chance of being marked as spam.

If your IP address has been used to send spam emails in the past, that could also flag your email as spam. Especially if you’re using an email marketing service: some of these use their servers to deliver emails, so even if you didn’t send spam, maybe some of their other customers did.

Here are some things you can do to avoid your email ending up in the Spam folder. 

Set up your email

And we don’t mean just create a Gmail account with your name, photo, and “@gmail.com” at the end. Your business will seem more legitimate and credible if you have your domain name at the end, like this:

Take care of your DKIM and SPF

Many people aren’t familiar with these two abbreviations but they can be a big reason why your emails keep getting flagged as spam. Both DKIM and SPF are used by Google to prevent spammers from forging your email, so make sure you set them up properly so Google can ID you. Here are simple guides on how to do that: DKIM, SPF.

Avoid trigger words

Spam filters can be triggered by certain words that are deemed too sales-y and misleading. This includes words like, “congratulations”, “promise you”, “dear friend”, and “this is not spam”. All of these words and phrases scream “fraud”, so steer clear of those.

2. Choose your influencer carefully

The first choice you need to make is whether to go for reach or niche influencers. While reach influencers can seem appealing because of their huge audiences, it’s debatable whether they’re the smarter choice.

Think of it this way. Tom Hardy has over 6.7 million followers on Instagram. It may seem to get him to promote your travel agency because of his large reach and potential exposure for your brand. However, people don’t follow Tom Hardy for his travel tips or experiences – they follow him to get an insight into his career, to find out about his next movie, or just learn more about him as a person.

Now, say you partner up with a travel blogger that has 9.000 followers. Their followership isn’t nearly as impressive as Tom Hardy’s but their relevance is much higher. The small audience this influencer gathered follows them exclusively to learn about new places and fantasize about travel. This partnership could get you much better results at a lower cost.

The choice is ultimately down to you but let’s say that reach and niche influencers both have a role to play in your marketing process. The former is good to increase brand awareness and cast a wide net, while the latter is better for generating high-quality leads.

3. Start getting contacts

Just like when you’re looking for potential new customers, you should start by generating leads or, in this case, collecting contacts.

Fortunately, it’s not too hard to find contacts online, as most people who work in digital marketing have their email prominently displayed on their social networks. Depending on the channel, you’ll find that email in different places.

For example, YouTube influencers have their email addresses in the “about” section. Simply click on their profile, choose the “About” tab, and you’ll see the address for business inquiries listed below. You’ll likely have to click the “View email address” button for it to show up.

Here’s how it looks on a famous YouTube channel:

Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram are pretty standard, as contact information is placed in the Bio or About sections.

If a specific influencer you’re targeting doesn’t have their email address highlighted, you can still get it in more inventive ways. For example, you can use a tool called Email permutator, where you can enter someone’s name, last name, and domain name to get all possible permutations of their business email address.

Source: metricsparrow

You can then start writing a new email, paste all these emails as recipients, and Google will recognize which one of them is right. The right one will usually have an image and possibly some other contact information.

4. Personalize your emails

Once you start writing the emails, it’s important to take the time to personalize each one and reach out to every contact with a tailored message. The last thing you want is to spend all this time researching and collecting contacts, only to waste everything on a generic message.

A good way to start with personalization is to take a good look at your contact’s profile and make a comment directly related to their social media presence. Maybe there’s a post you like, maybe they often post about a certain topic you find interesting – anything that allows you to make a natural connection between their posts and your brand.

If you want to impress them, you might want to include a personalized video in your email. This is a great way to put a personal touch on your message and connect with your contacts on a deeper level. A personalized video can also improve your open rates to as much as 85 percent!

You can easily make and send these videos with Bonjoro: it only takes a few minutes to create a video right from your desktop or smartphone. You can create several templates for influencers from different industries and use them when you want.

Check out how you can create a funnel and engage your prospects with video content!

Writing tips

To wrap things up, here are a few writing tips that we consider to be good practice when reaching out to prospects. It doesn’t matter if your recipient is a hot lead or a potential business partner, emails should always follow these rules to leave a better impression and achieve better results.

Have a good subject line

There are many tips and studies that cover subject lines but we want to focus on two key tips here: make it short and personal.

Brevity is important to get instant attention and get your point across as directly as possible, but also because many people access their emails from their smartphones. Keep your subject lines at up to 24 characters to make sure they are readable on devices with smaller screens.

While analyzing emails sent through their service, Mailchimp also found that personalized subject lines tend to get better results than generic ones.

On a side note, make sure you avoid the spam triggers we mentioned at the top of the article. Including them in your subject line can greatly increase the chances of your email not getting opened at all.

It’s not about you, it’s about them

When reaching out to people, you can easily fall into the trap of explaining what they can do for you.

Instead, try to focus on how you can help them. Why should they even consider promoting your brand? Taking a strong position and sticking up for a brand can be compromising if the brand isn’t well-known. So, make sure the influencers you reach out to have no doubts about your integrity and experience.

Feel free to explain the mechanism of your cooperation and ask them for their price – most of them have media packs and pricing plans for different types of promotion.

Use their language

This is a simple tip but it’s worth mentioning because too many people make this mistake.

A middle-aged businessman you found on LinkedIn requires a different message than a young adult travel blogger you found on Instagram. Don’t be too professional and always adapt your communication to the person you’re reaching out to.

They’ll have a better response to the message and they’ll instantly feel more connected to your brand.

How to write a pitch email: template

If you’ve been researching email pitch examples online, you probably noticed that they apply most of these rules to their messaging.

So, now that we know what we’re striving for, let’s get to an actual example. Here is what your email could look like if you were a travel agency reaching out to a travel blogger.

Subject: Help us spread the joy of travel!

Hi Mark,

We LOVE your IG profile! We’re very impressed with your Bali journey and your blog series about the whole experience. It inspired us so much that half of our staff is looking up Bali arrangements online!

All of this got us to thinking that you can be the perfect partner for our latest campaign. Your funny writing style and breathtaking photos will go perfectly with our Exotic Destinations package that’s going live in early January.

We would love for you to write about our key destinations, share those posts on your social media, and spread the word to people who love to travel as much as you do.

You can check out the link to our offer here: LINK. Please, let us know if this looks like something you can get behind and feel free to send us your prices!

Regards from sunny Miami,

Travel Agency

As you can see, this is a highly personalized message that is bound to get a response from our fictional character Mark. You can apply this to any niche and any brand – simply make a connection with the person and show them that your business and their brand are a perfect match.

Be as transparent as possible by sending the link to your website and social media profiles to inspire trust.

Final word

Reaching out to people and approaching them to promote your brand is not an easy task. Although it may seem like all you need to do is write a smart email, your planning needs to go much further.

You need to research, find the right people, and make sure your email account is ready to go.

And, if you want to create highly personalized messages, check out Bonjoro, because nothing promotes transparency and trust as a cool video!

Category
Growth tips
About the author
Oliver Bridge
Growth Grizzly
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