Gifting 101: How to send products to influencers
In the first two parts of our Gifting 101 series, we showed you how to find the right influencers for your influencer marketing campaign and how to reach out to those influencers to begin your collaboration. Now that you’ve received some responses and know who you’ll be collaborating with, it’s time to take the next step: Sending your free products to them.
By gifting products to influencers instead of paying them to create branded posts, you can reach more influencers at scale, work with micro-influencers who engage niche communities, and allow these influencers the freedom to be authentic in their product reviews. Basically, it’s a win-win-win situation.
So get ready to ship those products out and start watching the sales come in.
Here’s how:
Send products to each influencer individually
We’ll start with the manual option: Simply asking influencers for their addresses and sending each product individually. If you already have an email thread going with your influencers (as we showed you how to do in Part 2), you can easily get this information and add it to your spreadsheet of influencer information.
Once you have their addresses, you can just package and send the products yourself. Here are a few tips to impress influencers with this step and deliver personalized experiences:
- If you sell makeup or fashion apparel, make sure to ask influencers their favorite shade or size.
- Include a personalized card referencing your previous conversations, your admiration of their content, and a “thank you” note for collaborating.
- Offer brief notes that they can have on-hand, like the history of your brand, your phone number, and your social handles. Your influencer will be grateful that they don’t have to go back to your email archives.
- You can also send your products in a custom packaging.
If you go the manual route, it’s best to use a trackable delivery method so you can keep tabs on your packages and make sure all influencers receive your products — and those personalized notes you worked so hard on!
This may seem like the most intuitive way to send products to influencers, but the problem is that it’s not the most scalable. Sure, it might be great if you’re only working with five or 10 people. But say you want to send 50 products — your workload starts to get really time-consuming. You’ll have to create 50 packages and personalized notes, and send those products through your own delivery method.
That’s tough to sustain! But don’t give up just yet.
The good news is that there are other ways to send products for your influencer marketing campaign.
Use your e-commerce website and promo codes
If you can, we recommend that you use your e-commerce website to send products to influencers. The easiest way to do this is to set up unique promo codes that influencers can use to order what they want directly from your website. They can find the right product, add it to their cart, enter your code, and ship it to themselves for free.
You can use e-commerce tools like Shopify to help.
The downside to this strategy is that you won’t be able to personalize your packages. But that might be a worthy sacrifice if you’re looking to build a scalable influencer gifting operation.
Deliver products at scale with helpful platforms
Not thrilled about those first two options? Don’t worry, because there are tools and platforms that let you combine the personalization of manual product delivery with the automation of e-commerce checkouts.
At Octoly, for example, we use the “pull model” — inviting our network of over 10,000 high-quality creators to pull their favorite products from a selection supplied by brands. That’s right. We let the influencers come to you.
You decide how many products you want to allocate to a campaign. Just send them to our Octoly warehouse and we will take care of the logistics for you. Once you’ve chosen the influencers you want to send the product to, we send it within 24 hours of your approval. The creators will receive their packages within four days. Octoly will also take care of any shipping issues that might occur. Easy peasy! Less hassle for you, a smoother experience for your micro-influencers. And if you really want to add a personalized touch, we can always work something out together.
Ready to get those influencer marketing campaigns fired up? Download our Gifting 101 guide, which compiles all our tips and tricks!
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