How Email Deliverability Affects Influencer Outreach Success

You may think that a successful influencer outreach heavily depends on the quality of your pitch. Most brands do. But that’s only part of what makes such a campaign succeed. Email deliverability is the other part. Just because your pitch shows ‘sent’ from your end, doesn’t mean that the influencer you targeted received it. The email may have ended up in spam, promotions, or buried under a pile of other pitches just like yours. So, how do you ensure your emails are visible? It’s simple. By putting as much effort into improving your email deliverability as you do refining your pitch.

Why Email Is Still Essential for Influencer Outreach

In an age where social media is growing rapidly, it’s easy to question why emails are still necessary to reach out to creators who are mainly on social platforms. But inasmuch as you can now comment or directly message these creators on their socials, emails remain the professional channel when you're reaching out for collaborations.

Influencers themselves include their email addresses in their bios for brands interested in collaborating. It just goes to show that even they prefer emails as a professional means of communication.

Email also plays a major role throughout the outreach campaign lifecycle. Right from the first email introducing the brand to the contract email when the partnership is formed.

Plus, try to imagine the headache your team will have as your influencer program grows. They’ll have to keep track of the various DMs from TikTok, Instagram, or other social accounts. But with emails, you can easily communicate with multiple creators and keep things organized. It's the best channel for scaling without sacrificing efficiency.

Through emails, you can also segment creators and personalize your outreach to make it more relevant. You can even automate follow-ups where appropriate for timely communication. All of these benefits are the reasons why email will continue to be an important part of influencer outreach, possibly for many years to come.

You can also check out more insight on how to reach out to influencers here.

Why Influencer Outreach Emails Often Go Unanswered?

An influencer campaign doesn’t only fail because of a bad pitch. Sure, generic messaging and unclear value or deliverables may contribute to getting fewer responses. But more often than not, the reason is a much less obvious issue called deliverability.

There are a lot of factors that affect your email deliverability, and one of the biggest ones is inbox placement. It’s why marketing teams need to learn the difference between it and delivery. Your pitch may be successfully emailed to the creator's mailbox provider, but then get placed in spam or a low-visibility folder. If creators never get to see your pitch, it’s hard for them to respond to it.

A well-established creator also probably receives numerous collaboration emails within a week. Given the high volume, they’re probably quickly scanning through these emails for opportunities.

If your emails don’t grab their attention or feel relevant to them, then they’ll land in the pile that gets skipped or marked as spam. This then signals to mailbox providers that your future emails are also not worth placing in the primary inbox. Your campaign ends up losing even more visibility and getting fewer responses.

The lack of responses may also lead to sending more follow-ups or reaching out to more creators, extending the timeline of the campaign. You also miss out on partnership opportunities with your preferred creators. And if your influencer campaign is tied to a limited event or product launch, then any delay from the slow response could have a significant impact on your ROI.

Need to know how to fix this? Learn more about how to write influencer outreach emails that get responses.

The Relationship Between Sender Reputation and Influencer Outreach

For inbox providers to know what to do with your email, they look at your sender reputation. It’s a trust score that helps them evaluate your credibility as a sender. It also changes based on your sending behavior and how people engage with your emails.

If many people click, open, and reply to your emails, it gives a positive signal that your emails are important, and they gain more visibility. But if recipients are constantly ignoring, deleting, or reporting your emails, it’s a negative signal that affects your future inbox placements.

Even your sending frequency and consistency can affect your sender reputation. Just because the first 10 emails you sent received a positive response, doesn’t mean you should jump to sending 100 emails a day. Inbox providers find such spikes suspicious and may scrutinize your emails more.

Simply put, your sender reputation affects the visibility of your campaign. If providers can’t trust your emails, they’ll likely keep them away from the influencers and creators you’re targeting in your outreach. And if your pitch never gets read, then you're less likely to convince potential influencers to work with you.

Common Deliverability Issues That Hurt Influencer Campaigns

1. Authentication misconfigurations.

A common mistake marketers make is not taking time to ensure their SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are properly configured. These three are important parts of your email infrastructure that help providers authenticate that you’re a legitimate sender. Without a proper authentication setup, even a well-designed influencer campaign may not get through to the targeted creators.

1. Poor email list quality.

Influencers can change their email addresses if they change agencies or go under new management. Or maybe they may decide to rebrand. Either way, using the same old database without checking if the addresses are still valid could lead to more unnecessary bounce rates that negatively impact the visibility of your future emails.

1. Sending too many emails too quickly

When launching your influencer campaign, you may think sending more emails means more reach. But in reality, it hurts your campaign. As tempting as it may be, it could lead to more spam complaints and providers not trusting your domain.

1. Sending from a new domain without preparation.

New domains have little to no sending history, so it’s harder for providers to determine whether to trust you as a sender or not. That could mean that your emails may be filtered to folders recipient barely check, especially if you're already launching large campaigns without properly warming up the domain.

Building Trust Before Scaling Outreach Campaigns

Let’s say you create a new domain, specifically for your influencer campaign. Not a bad move. But if you start sending hundreds of emails from that domain immediately, it may end up killing your outreach campaign as soon as you launch it.

A new domain doesn’t have a lot of history for mailbox providers to go by. You need to take time and properly warm up your domain. Start with a few emails to active and interested influencers. From there, gradually increase the number of emails you send based on the engagement they get, while constantly reviewing your list quality.

Doing this gives providers enough time to evaluate your domain and build trust in the emails you’re sending. That improves your sender reputation. Eventually, with a proper warm-up, your emails get better inbox placement, which means better visibility. And if influencers can see your emails, they are more likely to respond to your pitches and start up a conversation.

Some companies or brands prefer to manually warm up their domains, which is fine. But the most efficient strategy is to apply an automated warmup process and pair it with good deliverability practices before launching your influencer campaign.

When to Seek Professional Deliverability Guidance?

It isn’t always easy to tell if deliverability issues are what are stalling your campaign. Of course, there are the obvious telltale signs like a consistent drop in opens, replies, and clicks. But these signals could also point to other issues, like a poor pitch or generic messaging. Still, it’s worth taking time to confirm that it’s not because of poor deliverability.

Then there are more complex deliverability issues that are much harder to spot and may require a level of expertise to solve. For example, if you’ve developed a poor reputation or inbox placement, you may need help figuring out how to improve them by troubleshooting to find the root cause. A professional can also help you troubleshoot authentication issues and ensure that everything is set up well.

When you think about it, investing in professionally improving your deliverability is more cost-effective than simply increasing outreach volume without considering the underlying issues. And for brands that continually experience these challenges, consulting email deliverability experts helps them properly troubleshoot and optimize overall outreach campaign performance.

Best Practices for Improving Influencer Outreach Deliverability

Having the best campaign, the best deliverability tools, and even expert guidance means nothing if you’re not constantly applying good deliverability practices. That means personalizing your pitches and tailoring them to the target creators. It also means constantly checking and removing invalid or outdated email addresses to avoid bounces.

You also need to get into the habit of regularly tracking key metrics like open rates, response rates, bounce rates, and spam complaints. These help you identify deliverability issues and tackle them more quickly before they bring down your outreach campaign. And overall, prioritize relevance over volume. You’re better off starting with a few well-targeted emails to interested influencers and then slowly growing your outreach as engagement increases.

Conclusion

As long as you rely on email for your influencer outreach, email deliverability will always be a foundational factor that determines a significant part of your campaign’s success. Good deliverability supports your entire outreach campaign from sending the first pitch to building a lasting partnership. It ensures your emails get seen and possibly responded to, leading to better influencer marketing outcomes.