Leveling Up Your Influencer Outreach Strategy: Automation, Scaling, and Beyond
In this article, we explore strategies for optimizing influencer outreach using automation tools like Google Sheets and CRM platforms. We discuss tracking influencer performance and streamlining profitable results.
Now that we've laid out the fundamentals of reaching out to influencers in part one, it's time to dive into the world of automation and scaling. These processes can become a time sink as your brand grows and your need for influencer partnerships increases. Fortunately, there are many tools that can help streamline these processes. Let's also explore how Dreamwell AI, our new product, can play a significant role in simplifying your influencer outreach efforts.
Check out part one if you haven't yet.
Dreamwell
Streamlining Processes with Google Sheets and Other Tools
Google Sheets
Another great use case for Google Sheets is organizing and managing your influencer outreach process. Here's how to leverage it:
- Create a Master List: In your sheet, compile a list of influencers you're interested in, including details like their contact information, social media handles, and any specific notes about them. This becomes your single point of truth for your outreach strategy.
- Track Progress: Update the sheet as you progress through your outreach. Keep track of when you sent the first email, their responses, and any follow-ups.
- Plan Follow-ups: Use conditional formatting to highlight influencers who haven't responded in a week. This will help you remember to send follow-up emails.
Automate Email Sending: Use a Mail Merge Tool
Manually sending emails can be a chore, especially when you're reaching out to a large number of influencers. Tools like Mail Merge for Google Workspace can automate this process. With Mail Merge, you can:
Personalize emails: Despite being automated, your emails can still be personalized. Mail Merge can pull details from your Google Sheets to customize each email.
Send at scale: Most tools provide an email limit of least 500 emails per day. Start small and slowly scale to the volume you need, especially on a cold email domain. You can use a warm up tool and even a secondary domain to keep your main domain safe and out of spam filters.
Schedule emails: Avoid sending emails at inopportune times by scheduling them. Mail Merge tools typically let you choose when each email goes out.
I’ve heard from many that Gmail can be finicky and not show the Mail Merge button. In this case, I’ve also had success creating my own Mail Merge extension by following this guide from Google.
Scaling Your Outreach Efforts with CRM Tools
As your brand grows, so will your need for a more robust system to manage your influencer relationships. This is where CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tools come in. A platform like HubSpot is excellent for scaling your efforts.
These tools offer features such as contact management, email tracking, and project management. They provide an organized system for tracking your interactions with each influencer, allowing you to easily manage multiple relationships at once.
Measuring and Optimizing Influencer Performance
Once you've sent out your outreach emails and established partnerships with influencers, the next step is to ensure that you can measure and optimize their performance. This is where UTM tracking links, URL link shorteners, discount codes, and website analytics tools come into play.
UTM Tracking Links and URL Link Shorteners
In the digital marketing world, UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) parameters are the gold standard for tracking the effectiveness of online marketing campaigns across traffic sources and publishing media. They use simple code added to the end of a URL to track data about website visitors and where they come from.
When you provide a unique UTM link to each influencer, you can track how much traffic they're driving to your site, what those visitors do once they're on your site, and how many of them end up converting into customers.
To keep things neat and tidy (and more attractive to potential clickers), you can use URL link shorteners like Bitly or TinyURL. They make your links more shareable and keep your UTM parameters hidden.
Here's an example of how to create a UTM link:
- Start with your website URL:
https://www.yourwebsite.com - Add the UTM medium (the influencer's name or handle):
?utm_medium=influencer_handle - Add the UTM source (the platform, such as Instagram or YouTube):
&utm_source=instagram - Add the UTM campaign (the specific campaign you're running):
&utm_campaign=spring_sale
The final URL will look something like this: https://www.yourwebsite.com?utm_source=influencer_handle&utm_medium=instagram&utm_campaign=spring_sale
Discount Codes
Another great way to track the effectiveness of an influencer is by giving them a unique discount code to share with their followers. This not only encourages their followers to make a purchase, but it also allows you to easily track how many sales each influencer is driving. Plus, who doesn't love a good discount?
Website Analytics Tools
Website analytics tools like Google Analytics, Plausible, or Dreamwell can give you in-depth information about how visitors from each influencer's unique UTM link or discount code are behaving on your site. You should aim to track metrics like conversion rate, pages per session, session duration, and bounce rate.
These insights can help you understand which influencers are sending high-quality traffic to your site — visitors who are engaged, interested in your product, and more likely to convert into customers.
Optimizing Influencer Partnerships
Armed with this performance data, you can make informed decisions about which influencer partnerships to scale up and which to scale down.
For instance, if an influencer is driving a lot of traffic to your site but those visitors have a high bounce rate, it could be a sign that the influencer's audience isn't quite right for your product. Conversely, if an influencer's traffic results in a high conversion rate, it's a good sign that their audience aligns well with your brand, and it could be worth investing more in that partnership.
By continually measuring and optimizing, you'll ensure that your influencer marketing strategy is as effective as possible, helping you to maximize ROI and build strong, productive relationships with influencers.
Leveraging Dreamwell AI
Despite all these tools, managing influencer outreach can still be time-consuming. That's where Dreamwell comes in.
Dreamwell is an AI-powered tool designed specifically to save you time and money on influencer marketing. Here's how it can help you prospect, outreach, and negotiate.
Influencer Discovery: Dreamwell automatically sources influencers for you that align with your brand's values and target audience.
Automated Outreach: Use our tools to generate personalized outreach emails, making the process much less tedious.
Insightful Analytics: Using our pixel, get detailed analytics on your influencers’ engagement and performance, helping you make data-driven decisions on which influencers to partner with and how much to pay them.
Brand Deal Pipeline: Our deal pipeline gives you an overview of all influencer deals from prospect to deal expansion. We'll provide insights and shortcuts along the way to progress the deals to success.
Embracing automation and AI in your influencer outreach process can lead to significant savings in both time and resources. Remember, it's not just about reaching out to influencers. It's about building lasting relationships that help scale your brand, and Dreamwell helps you achieve this with minimal effort.
Dreamwell is more than just an outreach and prospecting tool. It is a comprehensive platform that:
Maximizes Your Ad Revenue: Dreamwell's platform helps launch profitable campaigns, ensuring you invest in influencers who generate revenue.
Offers Smart Influencer Pricing: Using the power of AI and predictive analytics, Dreamwell suggests the best influencer matches for your brand, optimizing for ROI.
Provides Sales Attribution: With the Dreamwell Pixel and Shopify orders integration, you can measure success across all channels and calculate an accurate return on investment for all ad spends, improving efficiency.
Employs Generative AI Tools: With Dreamwell, you can generate targeted ad copy, influencer outreach messages, and landing page content using AI. Creating entire influencer campaigns can be as simple as a click of a button.
Creates Dynamic Landing Pages: Dreamwell uses AI to swap landing page content with better-targeted messaging for specific audiences based on visitor behavior, interests, and traffic source, thereby increasing conversion rates.
Closing Thoughts
Free tools like Google Sheets and Mail Merge are great in launching your influencer outreach. As you scale and find influencer management taking up too much time or find it hard to stay organized, adopt something to manage brand deals like HubSpot. With campaigns launched, performance tracking is vital in deciding where to spend budget next, so make sure you use a tracking solution like Google Analytics, Plausible, or Triple Whale.