Communication plays a central role in influencer marketing. After all, you are trying to convince as many influencers as possible to work with your brand.
We recommend using email for outreach. With DM’s, the number of reach outs is limited. At the same time, the influencer’s DM inbox is often packed with messages from fans and businesses. Sending an email comes over as more professional, and the influencer takes you more seriously. The biggest advantage is that you can scale with email outreach!
The Influencer Hero platform enables you to easily set up outreach flows similar to Klaviyo or Mailchimp, but this time to reach out to influencers. You can reach out to hundreds of influencers with a click of a button. The Influencer Hero CRM platform allows you to streamline and automate most of your communication.
Communication for your influencer marketing program can be structured into the following segments:
1). Outreach: Set up a compelling outreach template. We offer A/B tested and reply rate-optimized templates, which you can access through the Influencer Hero platform. When setting up your outreach email, it is important to keep several things in mind.
Follow-ups: We recommend around 2-3 follow-ups to increase your reply rates. With 2-3 follow-ups, you can usually get your combined reply rates up to around 30 – 50%, depending on the attractiveness of your offer and brand/product.
2). Negotiation: The advantage of the Influencer Hero platform is that you can reach out to many influencers and pick the best deals. You will enter the negotiation stage if the influencer asks for more compensation. We recommend having 1 or 2 negotiation email templates which help to close deals on beneficial terms. You can offer a fixed fee, increase your product offering, or the affiliate commission at this stage. The advantage of product offering is that your cost as a brand is the COGS while the perceived value from the influencers perspective is the retail value. Use this to your advantage to increase your closing rate.
3). Awaiting post: Once you have sent out the product to the influencer, you will wait for the influencer to post—schedule follow-ups with reminders to post without coming over as pushy. We usually recommend waiting at least 1-2 weeks from when the product has been delivered when scheduling follow ups. If you are not offering a fixed fee, there can always be a small percentage of influencers which end up not posting. Try to reduce this number by using follow-ups. Personalizing the package ensuring that the influencer’s experience with your product is the best possible helps to reduce non-posting rates. Read more tips and tricks to maximize your influencer campaign performance here.
4). Post campaign: Once the influencers have posted, you analyze the results. More on measuring Influencer success and ROI here.
You can welcome the high performing influencers to your ambassador program as you want to work with these influencers long term. The Influencer Hero platform has a dashboard where you can effectively maintain and manage these relationships. Read more about managing influencer relationships and affiliate marketing here. Make sure to thank all influencers for the post. We recommend thanking all influencers despite their performance. Although an influencer didn’t perform well, you don’t want to leave a negative impression. Be polite and thank them for the collaboration. Despite their low performance, you could still invite these influencers during peak season campaigns. During Black Friday Cyber Monday for example, even lower-performing influencers can show a good ROI as a lot of people are looking for gifts and overall conversion rates go up. Read a step by step approach for creating a performance driven influencer marketing program in our Ultimate Influencer Marketing Guide here.
