How to craft the perfect brand pitch email [2 examples]

If you've answered yes, stick with us through this article as we're gonna talk about two brand pitch email templates that hit a 67% (influencers) and 40% (Youtube vloggers) reply rates.

Hopefully, they will inspire your next campaign in these industries...

One thing though... before we show you the templates, let us give 2 technical tips that have direct influence on your reply rate and how good you're protected against spam filters.

If you want to jump into specific sections, just click below:

• How to avoid spam filters
• How to find email addresses
• Cold email template for YouTube vloggers
• Cold email template for Instagram influencers

Let's talk about two tactics first, starting with...

How to avoid spam filters?

It doesn't matter how good your offer is if your emails go to spam.

Nobody checks SPAM folders. It's a dark place... darker than the 2nd page of Google. 😬

There are many factors that impact whether your emails go there or not. We've outlined them all in our email deliverability checklist.

Today, we'll cover the top 3 things you need to keep in a good check.

1.  Set up your email account... PROPERLY

We highly recommend creating a dedicated professional email to communicate with brands.

Having an @gmail.com account doesn't look professional and has higher chances to draw spam filters' attention.

2.  Set up DKIM and SPF

Looks like I jotted down some weird acronyms? 😂

But, this is an easy to set up and important factor to avoid SPAM.

When an email provider performs an “ID check”, they want to verify that the email is actually coming from you and not somebody else.

To make sure that goes smoothly for you, just follow these two links.

• follow this guide for the DKIM
• this tutorial for the SPF

Or in other words, don't go to the "cold email airport" without your passport. 🤓

3.  Warm up your email account

If you've just created your email account, you need to warm it up.

Email warm-up is a process that involves a gradual increase in the sending volume. A warmed-up email address is one that has been sending and receiving messages as a real person would.

To do that, you can use lemwarm that will automate the whole process for you.

How to find brand and influencer contact details?

You can connect with people via direct messages, but email remains the #1 channel for professional communication.

Sometimes though, it's hard to find their email addresses. Let me give you a few tips to ease the pain.

There are 2 types of contacts you can find:

1. general email address, like pr@company.com
2. person's email address, like name@company.com or name@gmail.com

Usually, it's easy to find pr@company.com email. All you have to do is visit their contact page.

However, you can get a much quicker and more relevant response if you contact a specific person.

We've already written about the tactics to find anyone's email address, but I'll show one of the tactics here:

1. Go to LinkedIn
2. Play with search filters
3. Use tools like ColdCRM to find their emails

Don't forget to verify those email addresses to avoid painful punches on your email deliverability.

The process depends on the person you're looking to contact. If it's a Youtube vlogger, you can just visit "About"->"View email address".

For example, here is the WPCrafter.com Youtube Channel:

If you're trying to cooperate with Instagram influencers, you can locate their email address in their profile description. Most of them have it there.

And now... time to show you the networking cold email templates we promised in the beginning.

Brand pitch cold email template #1

This is the template that a lot of founders can use to promote their software though different influencers, but also to get on their podcast or show.

It worked pretty well for us in the past:

• 5 shows scheduled in our podcast outreach with this message
• 2 YouTube reviews our of 5 emails sent
• One of the key campaigns in the early stages of our marketing

This email is a variation of one of our past campaigns, designed specifically to pitch YouTube influencers.

1.  A great research is worth a million bucks

If you do your homework well, you'll gain amazing insights into your influencer's world, what they like to talk about, how they run their channel, topics they've addressed in the past, and so on.

This gives you an opportunity to make content references and open the conversation. The ideal stuff for your intro line.

2.  Personalize your cold emails

A quite important concept that allows you to catch influencers' attention.

In this case, you can use personalized image feature by lemlist. This way, when people open the email, they'll see a screenshot of their own channel. We think that's pretty cool. :)

And works so good...

3.  State your reasons

Always share the reasons why people should collaborate with you.

For example, you can share this video with your client base and your X number of your clients will check then channel.

Don't forget the proof behind your words, because otherwise they are just words.

Brand pitch cold email template #2

How to grab the attention of Instagram influencers that are right for your brand?

Don't know if you know, but I've given a brief overview of this campaign in our new cold email templates hub.

Briefly, besides being the Head of Growth at lemlist, I have a "work hobby". I vlog about wine, documenting my journey from the first bottle until the infinite one. 🍷

In any case, the objective was to collaborate with several influencers my friend and I targeted on our bombshell giveaway - free wine for a year for 4 lucky winners.

We pitched most of them with a cold email. Here are the stats:

• Cold emailed 12 influencers
• 67% reply rate
• 4 collaborations agreed
• 3x profile size + cool brand awareness from their profiles

Let's take a look at my campaign that's translated from Serbian:

Here's a step-by-step overview...

Step 1: Relationships come first

Approximately one month before we started executing, we divided influencers into two buckets. Ones we already know and engage with, and others that we've just discovered.

For the latter, we started following them on Instagram and engaging on their content... in a cool way, not 💩 meaningless comments.

Objective? Get them to notice us by replying to a comment, DM, or liking our content. By doing so, we don't have to introduce ourselves and the tone is way more friendly. Not everybody noticed of course, but some did.

In our target, there were 3 micro and 9 macro-influencers, from various industries such as TV, photography, food, wine, lifestyle, etc.

Step 2: Simple pitch

Continuing on the previous section, most of the influencers already knew our brand at least a little. With that in mind, we kept the cold email text-only and super short.

Just in case, we had our profile linked in the signature if they wanted to check it out.

FYI, two influencers that we didn't manage to grab the attention of in phase one, they both declined our offer.

Step 3: Easy-to-understand follow-up

If the influencer was interested, we would follow-up with precise details of what we need and what they get in return.

Again, the focus was on keeping a really friendly tone.

Step 4: Working on long-term partnerships

Now this segment has nothing to do with the cold email template or its analysis, but I thought it might be useful for those of you who are swimming in this ocean.

For all the influencers we targeted, we had another project in mind... a long-term one. Therefore, we continued to work on these relationships by personalizing their compensation packages and by analyzing if they hit our expectations.

To hit them, we gave influencers room to create their own Instagram Stories and promote us in any way they see fit. Based on that and how our live meet-up went afterward, we were deciding whether to take things forward.

3 out of 4 influencers passed that test. And obviously, we passed their tests too, as I'm sure they were paying attention on the flip side.

Bottom line

Well, there you have it. Two brand pitch cold email templates to boost your reply rate + tips to make sure your messages land in the primary tab.

Mission accomplished! ✅

Make sure you don't go and just copy/paste our templates before pressing send.

It's important to adapt the emails to your target audience and the way you speak in real life. Putting in that extra effort can go a long way for you and your business.

Happy cold emailing guys...