How to Contact a Brand for a Collaboration
One perk of being an influencer is getting to work with your favorite brands on your social media. For example, I never imagined Sephora would sign me on a 1-year influencer contract but hey, here we are! And I never would have gotten there if I didn’t take the initiative to make myself known.
If you take the initiative to reach out to a brand, you will have a higher chance of collaborating with them. Trust me when I say you will never get what you want if you expect a brand to magically discover you. You have to go after what you want. The most straight forward way to do this is to contact brands directly.
In this blog post, I am going to teach you two effective ways to get in touch with brands, methods of how to find the correct email address, and how to properly prepare yourself for when you finally reach out
Email Brands Directly
Emailing brands is the most direct way to get in touch with them (and it’s the method I use 99% of the time when I’m reaching out to collaborate.) But, something you might run into is not being able to find the right email easily. Let me break down four methods you can try to hunt down the correct email address for a brand collaboration.
Contact Us Page
Visit the brand’s website and find their Contact Us page. Here, you will most likely find their Customer Service email and it might look something like “hello@___.com” or “info@____.com”. Before you send an email to their customer service email, try looking for their PR (Public Relations) email address first.
Because the influencer industry has really established itself in the past years, some brands make it really easy for you to find their PR email. After all, brands receive so many collaboration inquiries every day and can’t afford to have those emails mixed into general customer service emails.
Look for keywords such as pr, public relations, collaborations, or partnerships on their contact page.
Email Button on Instagram
If you’re already on Instagram and there’s a brand you want to reach out to, click the Email button on their Instagram profile to get quick access to an email. This can potentially help you get that much closer to getting in contact with the right person at the brand.
LinkedIn is another great place to locate a specific email address. My process is typing in the brand name + keywords such as: pr, public relations, collaborations, influencer, influencer manager, and influencer partnerships.
Say you don’t pay for all of LinkedIn’s features and the emails are blocked out. Try the following workaround.
If you can find the first and last name of the brands’ PR contact, try getting creative and send emails in the format of:
firstname@brand.com, firstnamelastname@brand.com, firstinitiallastname@brand.com, and so on. ;) I gotchu, boo.
Ask a Fellow Creator
If you have built strong online and offline relationships with creators in your industry, do not underestimate the power of that and people’s willingness to help you. Ask a fellow influencer for an email. My tip? Offer something in return to show that you’re willing and able to support them back.
That being said, fair warning: many influencers do not like to share contacts, especially if you haven’t established a connection or friendship with them beforehand.
One reason might be because they worked extremely hard to get that email or connection in the first place. Another is that some influencers don’t feel comfortable sharing their contact or say they need permission to share first out of respect for the PR rep. Others find that it’s not fair to have someone ask for that information especially if previously, there was no connection established. Lastly, you might be in direct competition with the influencer you’re asking the email from.
After all, this is business baby.
What it all comes down to is understanding the benefits of nurturing and building strong relationships if this is the method you choose to try.
DM Brands on Instagram
Emailing brands directly on Instagram can also pave the way for getting in contact with brands.
However, there are some thing you need to keep in mind first.
The people who run brand accounts aren’t always responsible for influencer partnerships. Your message might not be seen, read, or responded to because you aren’t reaching out to the right contact for the right thing. If you experience this issue, try another method or follow up and try asking for the right contact for your inquiry.
Another thing to note is that when you reach out via DM, the brand’s first impression of you is your message and how your Instagram looks. Consider whether DM or email might be more in your favor in terms of how you pitch yourself, especially if you want to send a media kit along with your pitch.
Also, if you want to reach out via DM, you will have a higher success rate if you reach out to smaller brands. Smaller brands tend to have a faster response time, are able to read more messages, and overall have a smaller team so that means less people you have to work through to get to the right contact.
What’s Next?
Now that you know a variety of ways to reach out to brands and how to find the correct email address, there’s three steps you need to take next.
Set up a custom email signature (and use my free email signature templates to get started asap.)
Make sure you have your media kit handy if you are reaching out via email (and peep my influencer media kit templates to get your customizable template set up immediately.) You got this!