What To Include in Your Brand Pitch Email
Brand collaborations are a huge part of being an influencer. For full-time bloggers, brand partnerships can make up a significant chunk of their income. If you’re not yet at a point where you have brands reaching out to you, you should definitely get familiar with reaching out to them. Yup, we’re talking about pitching again!
If you want to work with a brand, sending them a well-crafted pitch email could be your ticket to getting free product or ideally working with them on a paid basis to create content. If you want all of my pitching secrets including how to negotiate higher rates and easy ways to make a pitch stand out, check out my e-book Right on Pitch. In this post, we’ll go over what to do before you pitch, a basic outline for a brand pitch email template, and what you shouldn’t include in a pitch.
before you pitch a brand
Now before you even sit down to write an email to a brand you should ask yourself if you’re in a good place to send a pitch email and get a yes from them. As I think most of my blog readers know, I’m a big believer that you do not need thousands of followers to work with brands. It is absolutely possible to have successful brand partnerships as a micro-influencer.
But follower count aside, do you have a clear objective as a creator? Are there one or two topics that you post about that your audience considers you an expert in? Do your social media profiles have a cohesive look to them and are you consistently posting great organic content? Checking in with yourself and seeing if you’re covered in these areas will help put you in a good position to pitch.
Next, you’ll need to locate the right contact for a brand. Finding brand contacts isn’t always easy and sometimes you may just find a generic marketing email. Ideally you’ll want to find the email of a real person working for the brand. Some ways to find brand email contacts include:
Look on the brand website for a PR, marketing or influencer relations email
Go on LinkedIn by and search the brand name and either PR, marketing, or influencer relations
Check on the brand’s Instagram page to see if there is a general email there
Search in influencer Facebook groups or ask if anyone has that contact and if they’d be willing to trade for one of your contacts
Last resort: DM the brand on IG and ask for a contact in marketing
A word about pitch templates
While I think a brand pitch email template can be super helpful if you’ve never written a pitch email before, I often find that influencers take them so literally that they will only ever swap out words designated in [brackets] and leave everything else the same word for word. Brand reps will catch onto this and I’ve heard marketers and influencer managers at brands complain about receiving the same copy and paste email from different influencers.
So while I’m going to provide you with a very thorough outline of what you should include in your brand pitch email it is really up to you to write the meat of it and sell the brand yourself. I promise it won't take too long and that I’ll help guide you in the right direction, but templates can sound robotic and inauthentic and as an influencer the last thing you want is a brand thinking that that’s how you talk to your audience and that’s how you would promote their products.
What to include in your pitch:
Catchy subject line - include the name of the brand in the email and entice the person on the other end to click through
Quick background on you - I typically say “I’m a former magazine editor turned fashion and beauty blogger living in NYC.”
Get to the point - let them know you want to work together
Be specific about your idea - What products will this campaign feature? Would it go live during the holidays? Where will you shoot it?
Why should they choose you? - Do your audiences have the same demographics? Are you the brand’s number 1 fan? Do you have a unique photography style that would appeal to the brand’s audience? Use a sentence or two here to make your case
Show them what it will look like - provide a recent example of organic content you’ve created featuring the brand OR similar content you could create for them if you haven’t created yet
Social proof - share any DM’s from your followers about the brand, numbers of swipe ups on your Instagram stories to their website, views on a YouTube video about the brand or anything else to prove to them your audience cares about the brand
Link to your partnerships page - to avoid going too long with previous examples you can create a partnerships page on your website (here’s mine for reference) and link to it so brands can see more examples of your work
Call to action/next steps - use a line to get them to respond like you’d love to hop on a 15 minute call to discuss if they’re interested or that you can provide a media kit with more details about your audience
While this sounds like a lot, try to keep it as short and to the point as possible with each of these points as one sentence, maybe two. They will likely skim your pitch and if you plant one or two interesting nuggets in a short email they’ll catch on and either give it a more thorough read or reply to you right then and there.
what not to include in your initial pitch
I have two things that I would personally not send in your initial pitch email that I wanted to call out.
The first is your rates. When you send a brand rates you are closing yourself off to potential money that they may have to offer you. I always try to get a brand to give me their budget first (doesn’t always go this way but I can try) and then figure out what I can do from there. If you tell a brand that it costs $100 for an Instagram post and they would have given you $700, you just missed out on some money.
The second is your media kit and while you should eventually share this with a brand, sending an attachment in your initial email may cause it to get blocked by a spam filter so it’s better to wait to send it and even use it as a call to action like I mentioned above to get the brand to ask for more info.
final thoughts
When it comes to pitching:
Keep it short and sweet
Make it about why this is interesting/helpful for the brand and NOT what is in it for you (the creator)
Set a reminder on your phone to follow up a week after you send the email to show you’re proactive
yours,
Austen