To prepare for my upcoming talk at Jewelry Ecomm Live!, I published five posts throughout September about influencer marketing for jewelry brands. In this final post of the series, I share the most effective methods for contacting influencers and managing the influencer relationship from start to finish.

In the previous blog post, I described how you can find the right influencers for your jewelry brand. Now that you have a list of influencers you’d like to contact, you’ll want to know how to reach out to them, form a relationship, and manage the marketing campaign, so you yield the best results from your efforts.

Find the Contact Information

You may be wondering, “How can I get in touch with an influencer?” If you aren’t already working with a digital marketing agency that’s helping you initiate and manage the influencer relationship, then you’ll need to contact the influencer yourself.

Finding the influencer’s contact information can be as easy as visiting the influencer’s Instagram or Facebook profile or navigating to the contact page on the influencer’s website. If an influencer is actively interested in partnering with brands, then she will make it easy for you to find her contact information.

You may be surprised to discover that sometimes the influencer’s contact information is actually the contact information for a management or talent agency, which represents the influencer and handles brand inquiries. If that’s the case, then you’ll reach out to the agency rather than the influencer.

Reach Out

Regardless of whether you’re contacting the influencer herself or a talent/management agency, you’ll want to keep your email message personal and professional.

What does it mean to be personal? Writing a personal message means demonstrating that you took the time to familiarize yourself with the influencer and her content and that you’ve also thought carefully about why the influencer would be a good representative for your brand. To do this, consider pointing out a few of her recent posts and mention what you liked about them. Furthermore, you can explain what about her style and aesthetic draw you to her and make her a natural ambassador for your jewelry brand.

What does it mean to be professional? Treat this email the same way you would treat an email to a valued customer or business partner. Format the email like a traditional business email, using a formal salutation and signature. If you’re unsure how to do that, you can check out this helpful tutorial from Tutsplus. Avoid using slang or emojis, unless they’re relevant. Make sure to choose a subject line that’s descriptive yet concise, so your email doesn’t get lost in the influencer’s inbox or spam folder. Some examples of effective subject lines include “Let’s discuss a brand partnership” or “[Insert name of your brand] would like to partner with you”. Make sure to proofread your email and check for spelling and grammatical errors.

Begin a Relationship

When the influencer responds to you, she will likely share her rates and typical agreement terms. She’ll also reveal her personality and what it would be like to work with her. If she responds in an unprofessional manner, or she doesn’t seem genuinely excited about working with your brand, then it’s probably better to move on and choose another influencer. However, if she responds with enthusiasm, and you feel positive about her message, then you’ll want to focus on building a relationship with her.

You’ll want to reply to her email with information about your influencer marketing campaign goals, your vision for the content, your anticipated timeline, and details about the jewelry you hope to include in the campaign. You’ll also want to educate her about your brand, including what makes your brand unique and why customers love your jewelry.

You can compare this relationship-building period to an onboarding process for a new employee and do everything you can to get your influencer up to speed on your mission statement, unique value proposition, and company culture. This is also an excellent litmus test for your influencer; as long as she continues expressing interest and enthusiasm, then she’ll be an excellent brand partner.

Deliver a Contract

Now that you’ve developed a positive relationship with your influencer, and both parties have agreed on the goals and terms of the influencer marketing campaign, then you’ll want to formalize those things in a contract. If you don’t feel comfortable drafting the contract yourself, then you’ll want to work with an agency that can help you. However, you can also find guidance and templates for influencer marketing contracts online, like this one from Influencer Marketing Hub. In general, you’ll want to include things like standard agreement terms, timelines, deliverables, any cancellation clauses, collateral details, specific phrases to avoid, confidentiality, compensation, FTC adherence*, and payment terms.

*A note about FTC adherence: The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) first released Guidelines for Internet Advertising in 2000 and updated them in 2009 to cover social media endorsements. How does this affect influencer marketing? Influencers must disclose when they are being compensated to work with a brand, whether that compensation includes money, free products, or something else. Only choose to work with influencers who disclose paid brand partnerships. Even if the FTC doesn’t catch them, shady influencers can damage a brand’s reputation.

Launch the Campaign

You’ve done a great job of studying our blog post series about influencer marketing for jewelry brands this month, so you should be more than prepared to launch your campaign. As long as you’ve established your goals and expectations and have chosen an appropriate influencer who adheres to the terms of your contract, you should be very pleased with the results of your campaign.

Measure and Evaluate Your Campaign

As marketer Mike King says, “Simply put, if you’re not measuring, you’re not marketing.” At the end of your campaign, you’ll want to measure and evaluate your results. In our blog post “What to Expect When Partnering with Influencers for Jewelry Marketing“, we discussed the importance of Key Performance Indicators or KPIs, which you can use to determine the health of your campaign. For a refresher, I suggest rereading that post.

Then, to mine data about your influencer marketing campaign, you can use the appropriate tools like Google Analytics, Iconosquare, or Facebook and Instagram’s built-in analytics. Regardless of whether or not you’ve achieved your goals for the influencer marketing campaign, you’ll gain valuable data that will help you make better, more informed marketing decisions in the future.

Thanks for sticking around this month while we explored the topic of influencer marketing in great detail, and we hope you learned a thing or two about launching an influencer marketing campaign for your jewelry brand.