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Give free products, get content in return. To the inexperienced, influencer gifting sounds easy. A smooth transaction. In reality, things aren’t as hunky-dory as they seem in theory:
With the help of some expert influencer marketers, I’ll help you alleviate six common challenges of running gifting campaigns.
Sometimes, the problem is that the influencers just aren’t responding to your initial message. How do you improve your influencer outreach? The solution lies in finding out why creators aren’t responding to you in the first place:
In influencer gifting, you’re asking a creator to create content for your brand for free or in exchange for a product. Revisit your offer and evaluate if it’s worth their while. Would you have replied to you?
One idea to make your offer more enticing: dangle the carrot of long-term partnerships. Use gifting as a testing environment to find creators who genuinely love your product and post A+ content. Influencer marketing expert Dmitri Cherner agrees:
Take a conscious approach to gifting, and use it as a first step in the (ideally) long-term relationship development of the creators you care more about and see the most potential in.
On the other spectrum, your offer might also be holding you back. Are you doing a barter deal asking creators to create a ton of content with strict guidelines? Mandatory requirements like that with no flat fees might turn off creators. Loosen the grips and maybe even experiment with mixing a no-strings-attached approach to increase your response rate.
If you’re wondering whether to do barter deals or take a no-strings-attached approach, this graph might help you understand the benefits of each:
Being clear, direct, and compelling in your subject line gets your emails opened. Test out different hooks that get a creator’s attention. But don’t be so focused on being clever that you aren’t clear.
Craft a subject line that gives a preview of your offer and grabs attention.
Find the creators who would actually want and use your products. Also think whether their audience will benefit from your merch. If you’ve pre-vetted creators, you’ll not only have a higher response rate but also need fewer follow-ups.
A great example: Cristina Surdu mentioned how collaborating with DeMellier has been her dream for a long time. Find creators like these who’d genuinely be enthused to receive your products.
Andreea Moise, founder at HypeMaven, says you want the influencer to think, “these people get me!” when you reach out to them:
Have a good understanding of what an influencer’s problem is, what they’ve tried before and didn’t work and most importantly how they talk about it in an emotional context.
You need to do your homework before you start your influencer outreach to increase your response rates.
But how do you find the right creators? If you’re just getting started, you can search for hashtags, ask for recommendations from your network, and scroll through your Reels/FYP to find the right creators. But if you want a faster solution, use an influencer discovery software. In Modash, you can find any creator across Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube with over 1k+ followers. In the screenshot, we’re finding influencers who:
Try Modash for $0. You don’t even need to take out your credit card.
I get it: mass outreach is scalable, costs less, and is easier to implement. You still shouldn’t be doing it. Why? The obvious reason is that out of a list of 1,000 ideal influencers, a personalized approach will get a higher response rate & live collaborations than a fully templated message.
The second reason is an influencer can see right through that automated message. Would you like to feel like ‘just another client’ to a creator partner? This not only hurts your response rates, but also starts off your creator relationships on the wrong foot. You need to convey to the influencer that they aren’t just another number to you. Cherner agrees:
The biggest way to stand out with gifting is to personalize your actual correspondence with the creator. It's less about the product/notes/custom boxes/etc., and far more important that you can convey that the creator is not just a number.
Nicole Ampo, Influencer Marketing Manager at American Hat Makers, also said scouting the right influencers and keeping the outreach message short, clear, and personalized helped improve her response rates:
Two things that improved our programme for gifted collaborations: 1. Scout specific influencers: Scouting influencers that create content that aligns with the brand really makes a difference. 2. Be very specific, direct, and open in your outreach message: this helps lessen confusion and the back-and-forth conversations between you and the influencer.
To speed things up, you can use a partially-templated email. Templatize the details about you: introduction, business info, gifting campaign details. Personalize the stuff about the creator: why you like them, why you think they’re a good fit for your brand, why you think they & their audience would love your product.
The image below is a good outreach example, but modify your CTA to ask, “We’d love to send you [your product name]. If you’re interested, can you share your email & address?” instead of the sponsored one.
Creators are busy people. It’s easy for emails and DMs to fall through the cracks. Three follow-up messages are a good place to start. Space them out for three, five, and seven days after your initial outreach message.
Luckily, you can automate most of the content of these follow-up messages if you’ve spent enough time and care personalizing the first message.
In conclusion:
1. Find the right influencers using an influencer search tool like Modash. Hunt for creators who’d actually find your product valuable and check whether or not they do gifted collabs.
2. Use a partially-templated outreach message to make the creator feel valued and start your relationship on the right foot. Write an enticing subject line and set up a system to follow-up regularly.
3. Make your offer more appealing – like promising long-term partnerships in the future if everything works out – if your response rate isn’t improving.
If you’re more of the visual kind, this graphic is a quick flowchart explaining the various ways to improve your response rates:
Getting ghosted is one of the most common challenges of running a gifting campaign. The influencer agrees to receive your product, maybe even agrees to post content, but once the product is at their doorstep…crickets.
There are four possible solutions to this challenge:
In a gifting campaign, if the deal value isn’t high and there are no unusual conditions, you don’t need to spend time creating a full-fledged contract. You can speed up the process by foregoing it and having a written agreement instead. This is especially relevant if you’re doing a barter deal. Via this agreement, you can enforce a timeline of when you can expect to receive some influencer content.
Don’t expect the influencer to reach out to you or post content after your product gets delivered. Take a more proactive approach: ask if the influencer received the product okay and ask for their honest opinion. Moise suggests asking the creators whether their problem has improved, product feedback, whether you can send more products for family & friends, etc. Put the spotlight on them instead of on your brand.
Don’t ask for content anywhere in this sequence, but rather inquire about their problems, life, expectations, etc. This is what it actually means to build trust and a relationship with an influencer – caring about them outside the context of your product and brand.
If you can, offer different variations (flavors, styles, colors, etc.) of your product, too. This might not eliminate ghosting, but following up can help nudge otherwise forgetful creators.
A creator gets tons of PR mail. Why should they prioritize yours? Especially if you’ve taken a no-strings-attached approach, you can’t rush people or ask for content. This is where the incentive of long-term partnerships comes in: if a creator knows they can partner with you in the future and make more money, they’ll prioritize testing your products first and posting about you.
Obviously, do this if the long-term partnership is really on the table. You risk damaging a relationship with a creator if you use this strategy without actually intending on a more in-depth partnership.
Offering product selection is a good lever to pull if you want to increase your posting rates. If an influencer’s genuinely excited to try your product, it’s more likely they will post about it. The only con is you can’t control what they select – they can choose something that isn’t popular and doesn’t sell as much. The solution to eradicate this con is to offer a limited number of products to choose from. And a cherry on top from influencer marketing consultant, Mark Dandy, is to put your top picks on the first page:
Create a closed category with collections you want to offer to influencers. Put your top choices first on page one. That way, you still provide choice, but increase the chance your preferred products will be picked.
The best part? By offering product choice to influencers, you not only reduce ghosting but also minimize wastefulness and ensure your product isn’t just sitting on a shelf collecting dust.
There's a simple solution for this problem: check whether an influencer has done gifted collaborations in the past. You can do this by vetting their profile. Browse through their posts and see whether they’ve recently posted content about any gifted product.
You can also do this by using the filters on various influencer search tools. For example, in Modash, there’s a hashtag filter. Since creators often use “#gifted” or “#pr” in their posts to display the gifted products, you can enter these hashtags on Modash to filter for creators who’ve participated in gifting campaigns in the past.
I’d also recommend searching for “not spon” or “not sponsored” in the keywords sometimes because not all influencers use the hashtags. For instance, Justine Doiron was gifted a large sweet potato by Farm To People. She didn’t use any hashtags in her post, but thanked them for the gift and mentioned it wasn’t sponsored.
Do a mix of:
a) testing different variations of “gifted” hashtags and keywords in an influencer’s profile on a creator discovery software like Modash
b) manually vetting a creator’s recent Stories, posts, etc., to check if they post content centering gifted products
Another way to solve this challenge is to find influencers who already love your brand. These creators will be much more eager to collaborate with you since they’ve already shown they like your products. Cheyanne Pettyjohn, Director of Influencer Marketing at Rookie Wellness, suggests some ways of spotting such influencers:
We’re gifting to influencers we have already had a touch point with – whether that be they follow our page, we have commented on their content before, or have seen them engage with content from an influencer promoting our products.
This flowchart quickly explains how you can ensure whether or not an influencer is open to gifted collabs:
This challenge comes back to right influencer selection. If an influencer isn’t excited to try your products, they’ll create dry, uninspiring content. Choose your influencers wisely and offer them product choices, if possible.
Case in point: I saw skincare creator, Aishwarya Kandpal, receiving multiple PR packages. But she gushed over the products Deconstruct sent her like no other – because the company sent her sunscreens she was truly excited to try. You can also see the excitement oozing out of her Story.
Another way to inspire creators is to surprise them. Lauren Roth, for example, worked with a candle brand. They'd ask for their preferred scent whenever they’d gift candles to influencers. But they’d also add a similar scent as a surprise. This thoughtfulness will create delight – which will also reflect in the influencer content.
Lastly, don’t hesitate to help creators brainstorm content ideas! If you’re doing a barter deal (where your creator has agreed to post in exchange for gifted products), you’ll have scope to give content suggestions.
You can suggest a few ideas in a doc or even get on a short call. Remember these are first-time creator partners. They don’t know about your brand as much as you do. Help them find the unique angle – this isn’t restricting their creative freedom. If you’re ever in a pickle about balancing brand input with creative freedom, this chart is helpful to navigate the territory:
Influencer gifting is a lot like juggling: you have to manage a ton of moving parts.
Doing all this manually can be exhausting. Enter technology in the mix to automate as much as possible – while keeping the personal touch where it matters most.
Lay out the whole gifting workflow from the first step to the last and think: what are some repeatable tasks in this system? Can you automate or templatize them?
But remember that you can only erase the manual stuff to a certain extent. Ultimately, things like personalized outreach messages & notes take time, effort, and resources – which is exactly what makes them special. Don’t automate the manual stuff that makes you human and helps you stand out from a sea of brands.
The last challenge is not knowing how to increase the ROI of influencer gifting campaigns. The easiest way to maximize the impact of influencer gifting is to make it the stepping stone for long-term partnerships. Gifting helps you vet for authenticity and find creator partners who truly love your product. Piper Philips, former Director of Marketing at Tru, always sent a free product to a potential creator before pitching for a paid partnership:
My first step in outreach is always offering a free product. To even consider a paid collab, we need the creator to actually enjoy our product. My go-to line is: ‘If you're interested, I would love to personally send you some Tru! (No strings attached of course)'.
Another way to improve the value of influencer gifting in your company is by providing influencer content for other purposes – like adding it to your video testimonials, webpages, and sales decks. Repurposing influencer content in this way helps you create cross-functional impact in your organization. Cherner agrees:
Develop a partnership roadmap where it's possible to bring value in multiple ways – like content generation, ambassador program growth, etc. This way, you can drive ROI using your seeding campaign for the marketing organization as a whole.
To do this, you must first obtain the creator's usage rights. How? Thank the influencer for posting and ask if you can repost their content. Some influencers might charge extra money for this, but it’s worth the cost if it provides value to your marketing department.
Influencer gifting is comparatively choosing the bitter pill. You can’t just do a direct cash payment, get a sponsored post, and call it a day. It’s a long-term play, but one that’s worth playing.
Gifting is one of the best ways to start influencer relationships and examine a creator-brand fit. If you have low cost of goods sold (COGS), you can do this at minimal cost.
Interested in learning more about acing gifting? Here are seven tips to master it.