Did you know that YouTube is the #1 social network for product discovery and research in the US?

That’s right – over half of Americans use the video platform to find their next purchase. So if you want to promote your product, YouTube influencer marketing is an obvious fit in most cases.

Read on for everything you need to know about asking YouTubers to promote your product, from finding relevant influencers to crafting impactful outreach messages.

(And if you’re looking for general, cross-channel guidance, also check out How To Ask An Influencer To Promote Your Product.)

Is YouTube the best channel to promote your product?

Before we discuss how to reach out to YouTube influencers, it’s worth considering whether YouTube is the right platform for your brand, product, and audience.

To find out, let’s start by looking at the top-level benefits of YouTube influencer marketing:

• Longevity: Content on YouTube (except Shorts) has a much longer shelf-life than other platforms. Customers could discover – and buy – your product through a YouTube video weeks or months after the collaboration took place. 

• Buying intent: Dedicated YouTube videos about your product may not have mass appeal – but people who watch them are actively looking for solutions to their problems, and are therefore more likely to buy from you.

• Discoverability: Because YouTube doubles as a search engine, you’re not totally reliant on the “for you” algorithm to reach your target audience.

• Product linking: Unlike Instagram and TikTok, YouTube allows you to add clickable product links to your captions, helping you drive more traffic to your website.

• Audience loyalty: When someone subscribes to a YouTube channel, they’ll receive a notification every time that channel publishes a new video, helping influencers build more loyal and engaged audiences.

It’s also worth noting that YouTube videos are generally longer than those on other platforms. According to our own research, over two-thirds of influencer marketers believe long-form content will compete on performance with short-form in 2025, while the average influencer marketer expects long-form pieces to make up 40% of their total content this year.

If you have a more complex product or a longer consideration period, long-form video should play a key role in your content strategy – in which case, YouTube is the perfect platform.

👉Get more content insights in Influencer Trends: Top-Performing Content for Conversions.

Find relevant YouTube influencers

If you’ve decided that YouTube is the right fit for your product’s promo campaign, then your first step is to find relevant YouTube influencers. Broadly speaking, you’ve got three options:

• Use a search engine
• Search by hashtag
• Use an influencer discovery platform

Let’s take a look at each…

Search on Google

The simplest way to find YouTube influencers is to head to Google and search for youtube influencer [your industry].

This method is free and quick, but you’ll have to sift through the results, manually check every influencer, and determine whether they’re a good fit for your campaign. It’s viable if you’re only planning to recruit a handful of influencers – but if you’re marketing at scale, searching for influencers this way will be a major bottleneck.

Search by hashtags 

YouTube creators add hashtags to their video titles and descriptions to make their content more easily discoverable. That’s good news for you because searching for hashtags related to your product niche will give you a list of potential influencer partners.

🤓Pro tip: Search for ad disclosure hashtags like #ad, #sponsored, and #paidpromotion to identify YouTube influencers already posting sponsored content.

Just like using Google, searching for influencers by hashtag is free, easy, and convenient for brands who are just getting started with influencer marketing. But manually vetting all those influencer profiles becomes a real headache when you’re trying to scale.

That’s why there’s a third option…

Use an influencer discovery tool

Outgrown manual influencer searching and vetting? It’s time to update to a dedicated influencer discovery tool like Modash.

The Modash database is home to every single YouTube profile with 1,000+ followers. Track down exactly the right influencer to promote your product using search filters like:

• Demographics: Age, gender, location, and language.
• Performance metrics: Engagement rate, subscriber count/growth, and view count/growth.
• Content: Which topics they post about.
• Account details: Words in descriptions, other social platforms they use, and when they last posted.

You can even search by audience demographics to ensure your campaign reaches your ICP.

🤓Pro tip: Even if you haven’t signed up for Modash yet, you can still use our free YouTube engagement rate calculator to quickly vet prospective partners.

Get influencers’ contact details from YouTube

Before you can reach out to your would-be YouTube influencer partners, you need to find their contact details. You’ve got two options here:

• Find YouTube email addresses manually: Free, but unscalable.
• Use an influencer search tool: Quick and scalable, but requires a subscription.

First, let’s look at the manual route. Just go to the influencer’s YouTube channel and click …more in their bio:

Then hit the button marked View email address:

Once you’ve completed the Captcha to prove you’re not a bot, you’ll see their email address.

Or, if you don’t want to do it all manually, use Modash to find the YouTube influencer's email address. 

When searching for YouTube influencers in Modash, you can filter the results to only return profiles with available email addresses:

Open each influencer profile and scroll down to the Emails section to view (or unlock) their email address:

Alternatively, add all your chosen influencers to a list – then open the list to view all their email addresses in a single column…

… or export their profiles (including contact details) to a CSV or Excel spreadsheet.

👉Try all of Modash’s influencer search, vetting, and email-finding tools by signing up for your free 14-day trial.

Reach out to YouTube influencers

Now that you’ve got contact details, it’s influencer outreach time. To make sure you’re using best practices, let’s go over three critical factors – the subject line, email content, and follow-up message(s).

Subject line

• Show the value up front: Explain what the YouTuber would get from collaborating with you. Are you gifting them a product? Inviting them to your ambassador program? Proposing a paid collab?

• Make it personal: Consider mentioning the YouTuber by name. Or you could go beyond basic personalization by adding what you love about the influencer, like a specific video or recurring feature.

• Get straight to the point: Try to keep your subject line under 50 characters so it will be visible in full across a wide range of devices and email clients. 

Email content

• Open with personalization: Make it clear why you’re reaching out to each individual influencer, and try to be as specific as possible. Sure, it takes time, but high-quality personalization can massively increase your reply rate.

• Use templates for scalability: Outside of the opener, it’s fine to rely on templated text. That way, you can personalize what you need and create messages at scale.

• Close with a clear CTA: Don’t beat around the bush; ask if they’re open to collaborating with your brand.

👉Swipe our email templates in 14 Influencer Outreach Examples From Real Brands.

Following up

• Don’t forget to follow up: That’s right – the most important thing about follow-ups is to send them. Sending just a single follow-up email can make a big difference to your response rate, although you shouldn’t stop there…

• Get the volume right: You should definitely be sending at least one follow-up message, but the more, the better. Modash’s influencer outreach survey revealed that 93% of influencer marketers send 1–5 follow-up emails.

• Nail your follow-up timing: Send your first follow-up 5–7 days after your initial email. We recommend that you follow up once via email, and if that doesn’t work, a week later, send a DM on social media and see what happens. If there’s no response after that, move on to other influencers. 

🤓Pro tip: When you’re reaching out to dozens of YouTubers, it’s easy to forget about following up. Set yourself reminders in your Google or Outlook calendar 🗓️

Once you’ve gotten a response from a YouTube influencer who wants to work with your brand, it’s time to talk deliverables.

Choose your collaboration type

Think YouTube influencer marketing is all about commissioning hour-long videos about your product? Think again! 

In reality, YouTube supports multiple types of influencer deliverables, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. You’ll need to choose the most appropriate format for promoting your product.

Let’s take a closer look at the main options:

Dedicated videos

As the name suggests, dedicated videos are like an infomercial for your product. They generally  work best for…

• Sharing detailed reviews or comparisons
• Promoting complex products
• Sharing experiences such as a brand trip or influencer event

As Suhit Amin explains, dedicated videos are also great at driving website traffic and sales.

Dedicated videos create a much deeper connection with the product. Whilst viewership may be lower, often the click-through rate is higher on dedicated videos. The views also tend to come from quality, high-intent buyers.

Suhit Amin Founder, Saulderson Media

On the downside, dedicated videos are typically the most expensive of all influencer deliverables. Plus, they feel like overkill for some products – if you’re selling socks, for example, you don’t need an influencer to do a deep-dive on them.

Integrations (aka non-dedicated videos)

In contrast to standalone promotions for your product, integrations are built into videos. They typically last for 30–90 seconds and fall into one of two categories:

• Seamless integrations are naturally woven into the “storyline” of the video as a whole.

• Spot-based integrations are standalone segments within a video. Ever seen a YouTuber pause their narrative for “a word from our sponsor”? That’s a spot-based integration.

Integrations are generally much cheaper than dedicated videos, but they also give you less control over the look and feel of the creative.

YouTube Shorts

AsYouTube’s answer to Reels and TikToks, Shorts can run up to three minutes long but are usually much shorter.

While you can purchase Shorts as a standalone influencer product, Julianne Kiider says they’re more useful as add-ons to an existing campaign.

Shorts are a good addition to a contract with other short-form content (e.g., a TikTok video) as you can repurpose it on Shorts. You can also add them to a long-form integration because the influencer can use the same footage from the longer video, and just edit/cut it for Shorts.

Julianne Kiider Influencer, Affiliate & Partnerships Consultant

👉Learn more in Influencer Briefing For YouTube: Dedicated Vids, Integrations & Shorts. 

Understand YouTube influencer pricing

Like with any channel, YouTube influencer pricing is affected by a wide range of factors, from the niche you’re targeting to the influencer’s location and subscriber count. 

And, as I’ve already noted, there are lots of YouTube deliverables to choose from, each with its own pricing. You can even negotiate a better deal with influencers if you bundle multiple deliverables into a single package rather than paying for a standalone video.

Given all these variables, sharing concrete figures on YouTube pricing is tricky to say the least. However, based on trends we’re seeing at Modash, here are some ballpark figures.

⚠️Disclaimer: Bear in mind these rates are largely informed by the US market – so if you’re working with influencers in different locations, your figures might look totally different.

Get more YouTubers to promote your product with Modash

If you’re serious about landing more YouTube collabs for your promo campaigns, focus on higher-quality, lower-volume outreach. You’ll generate way more replies if you find relevant influencers and send them personalized intro emails.

Sure, personalization takes time – but Modash makes the whole process easier. Use our dedicated influencer marketing inbox to find valuable context about potential influencer partners, such as:

• Links to their social profiles
• Past conversations
• Previous brand collaborations
• Their latest social posts

All of which helps you write laser-targeted outreach emails to boost your response rate 📈 

👉See for yourself with a free 14-day trial of Modash!