Almost 85% of companies are committing to collaborate with social media influencers in 2020, and it’s not too late for you to do the same! It’s one of the most effective ways for brands to reach consumers who would be interested in their product or even for other influencers to reach an audience that might like the same content. If you want to get started on influencer marketing today, the first thing you may want to learn about is how to request for a collaboration through Email.
In this article
For this first tutorial, we’re going to be teaching you how to request for a collaboration in an email with an online search engine called InflueNex. It’s a tool meant primarily for searching for influencers, but it offers a great feature that will allow you to contact a YouTube directly through the email that is available on their account (which you would have had to locate manually if you were doing it without InflueNex.)
Key Features of InflueNex
- YouTuber search engine (search through search bar or with filters.)
- ‘Send Invite’ button that will allow you to communicate to an influencer directly.
- Email composer that is very easy-to-use and will allow you to create templates so that you can save time for mass-invites.
How to Request for Collaboration in Email
Step 1. Search for Influencer
As an influencer search engine, you can use InflueNex in order to find an influencer that you want to work with — just use the search bar or use the advanced filters to locate an influencer or influencers to collaborate with.
Step 2. Send an Invite
Once you’ve found an influencer that you want to collaborate with, you can click the Send Invite button on their YouTuber Stats & Analytics button to begin drafting your request.
Step 3. Introduce Yourself
Start the request for collaboration by introducing yourself, your business, and some links or information on the product/project that you want to collaborate on.
Step 4. Make Your Request
Next is the request portion. This is when you state what you want to collaborate on and how they will benefit from it (be it an ongoing relation, monetary compensation, etc.)
Contact Multiple Influencers in Batch
After searching for the influencers with InflueNex, you're allowed to add these influencers into a group, and then send email to all the influencers in this group at one time. You'll only need to click the Email icon at the bottom of the group icon, and then you can send collaboration email like the steps above.
Part 2. How to Request for Collaboration in Email with Traditional Way
If you don’t have access to a tool like InflueNex, you can always manually locate and manage your requests for collaboration. It’s easier to do this when you already have an influencer in mind when it comes to collaborations.
How to Request for Collaboration in Email
Step 1. Locate an Influencer
As mentioned, it starts by finding an influencer to collaborate with. The best place to find people on social media platforms like YouTube is the Trending page (where the most popular influencers can be found.)
Step 2. Enter the About Page
When you finally find an influencer that you want to collaborate with, you’ll have to go to their YouTube profile — specifically, their ABOUT page. Most influencers have a business email address available that you can use to send them collaboration enquiries.
Step 3. Compose Your Collaboration Request
Now, all that’s left is that you use their business email to compose your request for a collaboration!
Part 3. Tips & Tricks about Requesting for Collaboration in Email
For this last portion, we’re going to summarize all that we’ve learned so far and introduce you to a couple of other “tips & tricks.” These tips will simplify the entire email composing process and remind you of all the important things that you will want to keep track of to make the process of requesting a collaboration through email go so much smoother!
1. Provide All Necessary Information
In order to make the process go as smoothly as possible, you always have to start with the introduction. We already mentioned this previously, but this is where you tell the influencer all that they have to know for the collaboration. Starting with your name, your brand, your product, etc. and any other introductory information you deem necessary.
2. Highlight the Benefits
When it comes to the rest of the email, you have to make sure that you highlight how the influencer will benefit from the collaboration. Is it mutually beneficial? Are you going to provide monetary compensation? Are you going to give them free samples? This is really the only other thing the influencer needs to know before you have to discuss the full details of the collaboration.
3. Save as Template
If you’re planning to request for other collaborations through email, then make sure to save the email you write as a template. That way, you can use it in the future — which will save you time when it comes to composing and sending future business collaborations. Online tools like InflueNex offers a “Save as Template” option to make this process go a lot easier.
4. Manage Your Sent Collaboration Emails
Find a way to make sure that you can keep track of all the requests that you send. Influencers received dozens of requests every week, and it’s completely plausible for yours to be ignored. That is why it is important to make sure that you can monitor activity on all your email threads so that you know when to reply or send a follow-up email.
5. Keep Track of Growth Tendency
This is actually something more for the pre-request stage, but even after you’ve sent the request, you should keep track on how the influencer is growing and what their statistics look like. There are a variety of tools that you can use to do this, one of which is InflueNex — which provides YouTube views tendency, subscribers tendency, and so much more.
