After you have found the right influencers for your brands, the next step is to contact them. When you send out massive emails to influencers, these questions you must have asked yourself:

How to avoid ending in the spam folder?

How to increase the open and response rate?

How to convince more influencers to collaborate with you?

If you already have a list of influencers, no matter how many contacts it contains, be sure to apply the following tips when outreach.

1. Be Personal

If you want a successful email campaign, you must be personal. The fundamental trick is to add the recipient name in the subject line and email body, to imply the email message is exclusive for the influencer.

The ideal way is to check each influencer’s channel before contacting them and write a personalized email to each of them separately. For example, mention some content the influencer recently posted. The key is to make influencers feel they are valued and unique.

But if you got no time for doing that, the alternative way is to divide influencer contacts into small groups and write a customized email for each group.

2. Short and Sweet

Try to use fewer words in the email body, and make it clear why you are writing this email. Influencers will quickly lose attention if you write a long email without stressing the key points immediately.

Use short sentences that easy to understand. Avoid using complicated sentences which may confuse.

3. Clear Format

If you copy and paste sentences from somewhere else, be sure to clear all the formats. Then divide the body into small paragraphs, which has a different point to express. Only bold the keywords that matter. Too much bold text means none. Use bullets and numbered lists to organize if necessary.

4. Insert CTA

Add clear Call-to-action (CTA) at the end of your email body. For example, ask the influencers to reply to this email if they are interested in the collaboration, or pick up a time for a quick call. You can use some email extensions to insert time spots for influencers to choose for a quick call. Assistant.to is the one I want to recommend. You can connect it with your daily calendar, and the UI is pretty clear.

5. Create Credibility

Introduce your company and yourself in the beginning. If the influencer is familiar with your company, it would be much easier to start the conversation. If your company is new in the industry, telling influencers something that adds credits. For example, your company has just raised capital recently or has been reported by a well-known media. Insert the article link there so they can check. If some top influencers have created content for your product, share the post links in the email.

6. Mobile Friendly

Send yourself a test email before sending out mass emails to all your influencer contacts. Check the spells, grammars, and links. View the test email on your mobile device as well, since many influencers are checking emails on mobile. And this is one of the reasons why you have to keep your email subject and body short. The subject line and email body are very likely to be cut off due to the limited screen size of mobile devices.

7. AB Testing

If you have a long list of influencer contacts and have plenty of time before the marketing campaign deadline, try AB testing with your email outreach! It can help you to increase open and response rate dramatically sometimes. Only test one variable each time. For example, if you want to increase the open rate, use two different subject lines to see which one will attract more open.

8. Offer Benefits

It is a beneficial strategy to offer a giveaway to influencers in the email outreach, to build up the relationship first. If your product has good quality and is a match to influencer’s channel, the influencer would be very likely to create content about it for free.

9. Follow up

Follow-up with your influencers is essential. Top influencers’ inbox is always flooded with emails. If your first email is missed out, a series of follow-up emails will increase the possibility the influencers to respond. Apply all the tips above to your follow up emails: be personal, short and sweet, well-formatted, and add credibility. SocialBook’s new feature “Email Sequence” allows to set up a series of auto follow-up emails and track email status as well.

Click here: The How-to article about setting up email sequences when contact influencers.

10. Track Results and Improve

Keep tracking on the performance of our email campaign. Some basic metrics you should pay attention to:

  • Open rate: if it is low, try with other subject lines.
  • Reply rate: if it is below average, think about modifying your email content or reformatting the content.
  • Click rate: if no one clicks the links, try other call-to-actions.

SocialBook helps marketers to track and manage email campaigns all in one place and view all the email threads on the one dashboard. You can also directly reply to influencers on SocialBook dashboard. The emails sent out are all from the company email you connected with SocialBook, so the influencers know who you are, and it is the start point to build up your influencer relationship.

This article was originally posted on SocialBook Medium Publication: https://medium.com/socialbook/how-to-increase-your-response-rate-when-contact-influencers-886cb33484a8