Overview

“I’ve reached out to a few creators but no one has responded”. That’s a typical phrase I’ve heard from hundreds of founders and marketers when they’re testing out influencer marketing for the first time. 

To try and set some expectations for how often you can expect responses from creators, we wanted to share some of our own internal data around response rates we’ve gotten from 100k sample outreaches across 100+ different brands.

Here were some of our main findings:

• Our response rate across those 100k outreaches was 32.8%. Our baseline for a good response rate for an influencer campaign is a response rate >30%.

• About half of all responses occurred within 1 day of outreach. We looked at a 28 day window when computing response rates. So if a creator responded within 28 days of our initial outreach we counted that as a response, but we see that the vast majority of responses occur within 3 days of initial outreach. 

• The biggest factors in determining response rates: Company size and whether your brand or agency has ever partnered with the creator before. Larger, well-known companies have over double the response rates as smaller companies. Similarly, creators who had previously worked with either us or the brand before had over double the response rates as creators who were new to us or the brand.

Read more below for a deeper cut into the data along with actionable tips that your brand can take to increase response rates for your influencer program!

Our Outreach Process

Our outreach process happens strictly through emails. When a brand begins their campaign, we’ll immediately outreach to all the creators they’ve added into their campaign. Our outreach messages usually follow a standard template, that looks like the following:

Hi Nick,

I'm Michael, the Creator Partnerships Lead here at 1stCollab. We find great influencers and help them get paid partnerships with brands they love. I’m reaching out because Nike would love to partner with you on a paid campaign!

Nike, Inc. is a global leader in athletic footwear, apparel, and equipment, known for its innovative designs and iconic “Swoosh” logo. Based in Beaverton, Oregon, it shapes sports and culture worldwide.

They’re looking to spread the word about their new Alphafly running shoes and are excited to work with running influencers like yourself to help show how these shoes can help you achieve new PRs!

A few additional details:

• Number of videos: 1 video

• Eligible format(s): TikTok Dedicated Video, Instagram Reel

• Here's the link to their creative brief for more info and inspiration!

• Includes link-in-bio or link added to your Linktree/Beacons/etc for 7 days

• Usage rights: Not required

If you’re interested, please let us know within the next 5 days!

If you have any questions, you can also reply to this email and I'd love to help. Hope to work with you soon!

Michael

We’ll then follow-up with the creator 2 days and 5 days after the initial outreach.

It’s important to note that our outreach process is standardized across all of our brands and campaigns, thus allowing us to limit confounding variables between different brands and campaigns. 

Diving into Results

Here were some of the most interesting trends when looking at factors that impact response rate.

How long does it take creators to get back to an initial outreach message?

Creators (and especially creator managers) respond quickly. We looked at different time windows to understand how quickly we usually hear back from creators:

• Response rates plateau around 28 days. Looking out to 60 days, we found virtually no difference compared to the 28-day mark. So if you don’t hear back within 28 days after initially outreaching to the creator, you’ll likely never hear back from them for this campaign.

• 47% of total responses occurred within 24 hours of our initial outreach email. So if you’re looking to get quick data about how many creators might be interested in the campaign, you can roughly double the number of responses you get within the first day to estimate how many responses you’ll get 28 days into the campaign.

• 91% of total responses occur within 7 days of initial outreach. So after a week, you should expect almost all interested creators to have responded to  your initial outreach email.

Do well-known brands and companies get higher response rates?

One of the biggest factors that’ll impact your response rate / creator interest in your campaign is unfortunately outside of your (near-term) control. If a creator has heard of your brand, they are just much more likely to be interested in working with your brand.

One way to understand this is by looking at creator response rates based on the company’s stage. The idea here is that later stage companies likely have much more brand awareness than early stage companies.

In the graph below I classify our clients by the following:

• Early: Pre-seed and seed stage

• Growth: Series A - D

• Pre-IPO: Series E up to IPO / Exit

• IPO / Exited: Public companies or companies that have exited

In the chart below, I show response rates for different stage companies based on different time windows (essentially this is another cut of the data above). You’ll notice that for almost every response window, our largest brands have response rates that are more than double what the response rates are for our smallest pre-seed / seed companies. 

Do creators you’ve previously worked with respond at a higher rate?

It’s no surprise that creators we’ve worked with before respond more often—but the scale is striking. They reply at nearly 2.5x the rate of new creators. Prior partners know our contracts are fair and straightforward, which saves time on negotiation. And in a space where brands sometimes don’t pay or disappear mid-campaign, creators naturally gravitate toward the relationships they can trust.

One big takeaway for all brands is that things get easier over time. When initially outreaching to creators, expect that your response rate might be lower, but as you build your list of trusted creators, you should find that campaigns get easier to ramp up.

So what’s a good response rate for my campaign?

So, what counts as a good response rate for a campaign? As you’ve seen above, that’ll depend on quite a number of factors, including your brand size, how long you wait for responses, and what portion of creators you’ve previously worked with before. 

That said, the chart below shows 7 day response rates for campaigns we’ve run with over 200 outreaches. You’ll see that about half of our campaigns have a response rate of at least 30%, while the other half falls below that rate. So in summary:

• If you’re running a campaign, anything over a 30% response rate is considered strong.

• If everything lines up well, you can expect response rates to exceed 50%. 

• If you’re seeing response rates under 25%, consider revising your outreach message or the creators you’re targeting. See the section below for some things we did to improve our response rates!

What we’ve done to improve response rates

At 1stCollab, we’re responsible for reaching out on behalf of all of our brands to get the best creators into partnership. As a result, maintaining high creator response rates is critical for us, and we’ve invested a lot of time in testing out different outreach messages and messaging different types of creators to see what works. 

Before jumping into what we’ve done, it’s worth just first understanding the creator's experience. Even smaller creators (<25k followers) receive dozens of partnership emails weekly, while larger creators often get hundreds. As a result, it’s critical to stand out amongst these emails to catch the creator’s attention!

Here are some observations we’ve had around what gets high response rates from creators:

• Be clear that this is a paid partnership. Most partnership offers are usually gifting or affiliate style offers which creators are much less likely to respond to (since there’s no guarantee of any payment). Stand out from other partnership offers by making it clear to creators that this is a paid opportunity. 

• Include deadlines in your emails. Creators have busy schedules, so it helps to be clear about deadlines for an opportunity so creators can prioritize responding to your email. 

• Keep emails as short as possible. Creators have a lot of emails to browse through, so keeping emails short and to the point will let creators quickly evaluate potential opportunities. We generally recommend trying to keep emails under 250 words.

• Make sure creators are relevant to your product. If you’re selling a B2B product for example, don’t just go after any lifestyle influencer. In the worst case, if creators think your company is just mass emailing all creators, they are more likely to mark your email as spam. Reaching out to relevant creators who already talk about products in your vertical is critical especially if you’re a startup. As mentioned above, you’re much more likely to get responses if creators know your brand, which might be the case for creators with expertise in your vertical.

  • Ideally include a short, personalized snippet explaining why the creator is a great fit for your campaign. See our sample outreach email for how we personalize our snippet!

• Include 1-2 follow up emails after your initial outreach message. We’ve seen creators often miss our initial emails so a follow up email can help. Just don’t over do it, or you risk getting marketed as spam!

Working with us

Want us to help optimize your brand’s response rate and access the hundreds of thousands of creators we’ve worked with in the past? Book a demo to see how 1stCollab works. 

We run some of the largest and most successful influencer marketing campaigns on social media and would love to help take your brand’s efforts to the next level!