Automated influencer outreach: what to automate and what to keep human

Writing to a creator about a partnership looks like one task. It is two. The first is bookkeeping: who you wrote to, when, for which campaign, what time it is where they live, whether they replied, and whether today is the day to follow up. The second is judgement: whether this creator is right for you, what to offer, what to say when they ask for twice your budget, and how to treat them once you work together.

People are poor at the first job once there are more than a handful of conversations. Follow-ups slip, a creator in another time zone gets your email at four in the morning, and someone who said no in March hears from you again in May. Software is poor at the second, and pretending otherwise is how creator outreach got its reputation. So hand the bookkeeping to software, completely, and keep the judgement with a person.

The jobs where a machine beats a busy founder, and what Nakodo does for each. The full method is on how Nakodo works.

Four things stay with a person, and we built Nakodo so that they do.

Approving first emails

The first email decides whether a creator sees you as a brand or as a mail merge. By default Nakodo waits for your approval on each one. You can let first emails go out on their own, but each still waits 60 minutes, during which you can edit or stop it. We'd approve by hand until you trust the drafts.

The offer

What you pay, send and ask for is a business decision, not a writing task. Software can state an offer clearly; it can't decide whether a free product is enough for this creator. Nakodo answers creators' questions from the offer you wrote and passes everything else to you.

Negotiation

When a creator comes back with a rate, a counter-offer or a question about usage rights, a person should answer. Those replies set the terms of the deal and the tone of the partnership. Our guide to paying TikTok and Instagram creators covers the arithmetic.

The relationship

When a creator says yes, Nakodo sends one introduction in the same thread with you in Cc, then steps out. From there it's your inbox and your voice. Partnerships worth having outlast a single post, and nobody builds one through an autoresponder.

Most of what creators dislike about brand email comes from automation pointed at the wrong goal: more emails sent, rather than more good conversations. The patterns are easy to recognise.

• Blasting lists. Thousands of addresses loaded on Monday and a sequence that writes to all of them, though nobody checked who fits. We argue against buying those lists in a separate post.
• Guessed addresses. Tools that build firstname@ and hello@ addresses from a website and send to whatever doesn't bounce. The creator never offered that inbox for business, and the addresses that do bounce damage your sending reputation.
• Ignoring no. The sequence carries on after a polite decline, or a different campaign from the same brand writes again a month later because the no was recorded somewhere else.
• The same creator emailed by ten brands in a week. Every tool reads the same public profiles, so a creator who looks good is found by everyone at once. Their inbox fills with near-identical pitches, and they stop reading any of them.

The cost isn't only the creator's. Gmail's email sender guidelines ask senders to keep the spam rate reported in Postmaster Tools below 0.3%, and spam reports make it likelier that your later messages land in spam too. Careless volume is paid for with your own deliverability.

Some of that damage comes from many brands behaving reasonably at the same moment, so no single brand can prevent it. Nakodo applies these rules across all of its brands:

• One open conversation per creator across all of Nakodo. While one brand is talking to a creator through Nakodo, no other brand starts a second conversation with them.
• 14 days between brands. Two brands can't write to the same creator within 14 days of each other, so a creator found by several brands hears from them one at a time.
• 180 days after a decline. A creator who says no to a brand isn't contacted by that brand again for 180 days, whichever campaign it is.
• One click to stop. Every email has a one-click way to stop, and an opted-out or bounced address is never emailed through Nakodo again, by any brand.
• No guessing. Nakodo never guesses an address, never logs in as anyone and never gets around a captcha. If a creator publishes no email, Nakodo doesn't write to them.

These rules have a price, and it's fair to name it.

• Less volume. In automatic mode Nakodo contacts the best-scored fits with a published email, strongest first, within a daily quota. If you want to email every creator in a category this week, Nakodo is the wrong tool, and we'd say it's the wrong plan.
• Some creators are out of reach for a while. A creator already talking to another brand, or contacted by one in the last 14 days, has to wait. Sometimes that's the one you most wanted.
• Creators who publish no email are never contacted. Some excellent fits keep their inbox private. Nakodo leaves them alone. If you want them, use the route they do offer; our outreach templates for Instagram and TikTok include messages for that.

Automation also can't rescue a weak pitch: it just delivers a vague offer on time. The YouTube outreach email templates show what a specific first email looks like, on any platform.