How To Approach Influencers To Promote Your Ecommerce Products
The perfect influencer has been found to promote your eCommerce products. They are the ideal influencer for your eCommerce products. They have the right audience and great engagement. It would help if you now found a way to approach this influencer that will yield actual results.
It can be labor-intensive to approach influencers. It takes effort and time. Establishing a genuine relationship with influencers takes time and effort before you can ask them to collaborate with you. Even then, there will be silence and rejections. If you are focused on influencers that match your brand and follow these steps, you will develop positive relationships with influencers that drive traffic to your store and, ultimately, sales.
Step 1 - Plant some relationship seeds
Before you pitch for work, engaging with the influencer is essential.
Influencers will notice you through soft engagements. These engagements help influencers recognize your presence so they can identify you as someone attentive to their brand when they see your pitch. You might even let them visit your store to get a feel of your products before they approach you.
Engaging softly is essential so that influencers feel like they have added value. It is not a good idea to ask for favors right away. You need to be able to distinguish yourself from the thousands of pitches that influencers get every day.
What is a weak interaction? Any natural touchpoints you can make with influencers outside your request are considered soft engagements. Softly engaging with influencers is done by connecting via their preferred channels.
Follow the Instagram influencer if they are popular. You should also like their posts and comment regularly.
Subscribe to their email newsletter and send them a message with something you learned from an email.
Comment on videos or blog posts they have published with thoughtful, genuine comments that demonstrate your interest in their content.
Join their LinkedIn or Facebook groups and take part in the discussions. Engage with them and offer some non-promotional value.
Your pitch should be received in the inbox of an influencer. You want them to think, “Oh, they know me.” They have been engaged with me for some time.”
Step 2 - Create and send your pitch.
A pitch is an email that suggests a mutually beneficial arrangement between you and the influencer. A rise should be able to:
- Get in touch with influencers
- Highlight the advantages of working together
- Set up a partnership and propose it.
- Let them understand what they should do next to move forward.
Unless they indicate an alternate channel, it is best to reach potential influencers via the platform where you want them to promote products. For example, an influencer may prefer you email them to leave direct messages on their social media channels for their followers. Other influencers might work with agencies and like to be contacted through their representatives.
Your pitch should inspire the influencer to act. This is usually the next step, like an email response or a call to discuss specifics.
Personalize your pitch
It can be tempting to send the same pitch to 100 influencers. Although it is easy, it can also be ineffective. Insta-delete stock pitches are commonly used by influencers, mainly if they are in high demand.
Insta-delete stock pitches are a common practice by influencers, so make yours unique and personal.
Influencers are looking for brands that understand them and their audience. Not just any store that has their email address. You must reveal to your partner that you care about them if you want them to be interested in your partnership. Personalization will increase your chances of receiving a response.
How can you personalize your pitch? Before pitching, learn as much about the influencer as possible. Learn about what they value and enjoy, then incorporate those insights into your email.
The cold email open rate is low in every industry. So spend some time writing your subject line (just as you would for an email campaign) to get the most out of your cold-email.
The benefits of the arrangement
Unless you ask the influencer to endorse you as a favor (which, we caution you, is scarce), you are offering them some advantages in the deal. It would help if you highlighted these benefits in your pitch to make the influencer feel like they have something to offer.
Sometimes, the benefits can be as simple as a free product or compensation. These benefits can be motivating for influencers. You may have to highlight more abstract benefits in some cases.
You could, for example, explain how your store uses cause marketing to help a charity or promote a social cause. If you have a unique product to share, tell them why it would be a great way to make their profile or page stand out.
Your audience can also benefit from your services, which is an added value. Offer to send your fans a coupon code or discount.
A coupon code that the influencer can share with their followers is one way to add value to the relationship.
Offer to expand their reach.
To sweeten the deal with influencers, you can offer to share their promotion or review on your pages to grow their audience. This could appeal to influencers if your audiences overlap. Offer to
- You can share their posts/review on your blog or social media profiles
- Your website should include their testimonial and a link to it
- Send an email to your list regarding your review/approach
- You can promote them in every other way possible
Get right to the point.
Many influencers are busy and don’t want to spend the time to read an 800-word essay about why they should work together. Popular influencers tend to be sensitive to long messages ( like your customers). They receive dozens of pitches each day. You must quickly get to the point.
According to data from Prospect.io, the ideal cold pitch is between 900 and 1,000 characters. These are characters and not words. The 175-250 word limit should be your pitch.
Use as few words and as specific as you can. Describe how you want your relationship to develop in concrete terms.
You might say, for example, this:
“Here’s my proposal: You’ll receive a product for free, and then you’ll post a picture of yourself using the product on Instagram along with an honest review. Your post will be shared along all of our channels.
Get a counter-offer
While there is always the possibility that the influencer won’t accept your pitch, they might have an idea of how you could work together. Your pitch should include language that indicates you are open to collaboration in other ways. Perhaps you could say, “PS – I’m completely open to other ideas.”
Go beyond the promotion of today.
Don’t ask too many questions if you are approaching an influencer for the first time. The “transaction” should be simple, manageable, and fast.
If the promotion goes well, you should mention that you are open to a long-term partnership. It could be something like, “If this goes as well as I expect it to, we’d love to continue the partnership in the future.”
Give a deadline and mean it.
Although it may seem unprofessional, a deadline is essential. It would help if you give your influencers a deadline. They may need to wait weeks/months before they decide whether to work together.
You don’t want your business to be slow, so you shouldn’t be their eCommerce store. It is essential to only work with people who are open to working with you. Influencers are able to determine if they will work with a brand quickly.
Don’t be rude. You can say, “Let me have your feedback by the end of the week. Otherwise, we’ll look for other opportunities.”
Step 3 - Follow up (just one time)
It is essential to follow up with people you work with. Many people don’t do this, especially when they first reach out to an influencer. People assume that the influencer is “busy” or doesn’t like their brand. If they do not greet within a few days, you should send them a quick email to follow up.
However, they may have chosen to ignore your message. If they don’t reply to your follow up, this is likely. Keep an eye on their online-activity and engage with them, but stop sending them follow-ups.
Do not be pushy. You won’t be able to convince them to contact you six times, or pester them on the internet. If your circumstances change and time has passed, you can try to re-engage with the influencer in the future. You might double your audience to make you more appealing to the influencer or launch a product that aligns with their fan base.
Don't get discouraged if you don't see immediate results
Influencer marketing can be difficult. It’s hard to get noticed if you don’t have a well-known brand. Even if your eCommerce store is a major one, most influencers will not respond to you unless they are happy with the terms of the partnership.
Keep sending out your pitches. You’ll eventually build a network that you can count upon to promote your brand.