No matter what you’re selling, the value of having a celebrity or a trusted influencer help extoll the virtues of your product cannot be overstated. While having a celebrity  or influencer is important, what is more important is securing their endorsement in the first place. And it begins by understanding how best to reach out to celebrity representatives and influencers in a way that sets you apart (in a positive manner) from everyone else. With this in mind, here are some tips to keep your emails at the top of the pile.

Be Concise

 
Celebrity representatives are flooded with requests on a daily basis. And because they only have a limited amount of time to read each request and decide whether or not it’s worthy of a response, the smart thing to do is be as brief as possible in your initial request. That said, however, you want to provide as many specifics as you can in a limited amount of space; if the request is too vague, celebrity representatives and influencers aren’t going to waste time going back and forth with you to get the full details, and you’ll lose your opportunity. By the same token, any email that takes more than a minute to read will be pushed aside.

You need to cram as much top-level information as you can into the initial email, while avoiding specifics that can best be left for a follow-up conversation. The goal is to give the person reading it a specific call to action (or CTA) while providing enough information for them to be willing to take that action. Assuming you’ve provided enough information for them to make a decision, the CTA can be as simple as “I would love to discuss this in greater detail and answer any questions you may have- are you available next Tuesday at 4 PM for a quick call?”

Do Your Research

 
You should also be sure that you’re reaching out to the right kind of celebrity or influencer. For example, reaching out to Stephen Curry with an offer to send him free shoes in exchange for him making Instagram posts about it is a bad idea. For one, the exchange is very one-sided, but more importantly, he already has an endorsement deal with Under Armour. Asking him to endorse someone else’s clothes is essentially the same as asking him to take money out of his own pocket and give it to you, and as nice as Stephen is, I don’t think even he’d be willing to do that.

When reaching out to celebrity representatives/influencers, it’s best to have an understanding of what’s important to them. It will help you tailor your message to them, and it will also give the impression that you’re not blindly firing off a form email to hundreds of celebrity representatives and hoping someone calls you back.

Before beginning your outreach, you should put together a list of the celebrities you think would be a good fit for the endorsement you’re looking for. You can use a service like Celebrity Endorsers to identify a celebrity or influencer that would be a good fit for your campaign based on their interests, endorsements, and charities that they support.

Celebrity endorsements can have a profound impact on the message you want to get out to the public, so you want to make sure you have the right person to convey the message.

Outline the Benefits

 
Let’s say you want Elton John to endorse your line of watches. Given his philanthropic history, if your business gives 20% of the proceeds of your sales to a charity supporting AIDS/HIV causes, don’t you think pointing that out would help your chances of getting him to sign on as a spokesman?

People tend to work according to their own self-interest, and celebrities/influencers are no different. When contacting a celebrity representative or influencer, be sure to outline how their participation can positively impact either their public image or their bottom line. If you’ve done your research on a particular celebrity, you’ll be able to tailor the list of benefits according to their interests, which will greatly increase the amount of positive responses you receive.

Follow Up

 
One of the trickiest parts about reaching out to celebrity representatives and influencers is knowing when and how to follow up. Because their schedules are so busy, you shouldn’t expect a response right away; if you get one, great, but by no means should you send follow-up emails every day until you get a response- that’s a guaranteed one-way ticket to the representative’s spam folder. If you believe in the value of what you’re selling or the service you’re providing, then it should feel like less of a request and more of an opportunity- if they’re not interested, then it’s their loss.

Give the representative time to read your request, digest it, and discuss it with their client. If you haven’t heard back from them in 7-10 days, you can send a follow-up email to check in; if you still don’t receive a response after that, cut your losses and move on to the next person on the list. Representatives will appreciate that you didn’t badger them for a response, and they’ll be more likely to respond to a future request.

When done correctly, reaching out to celebrity representatives can have an overwhelmingly positive impact on your business. And by keeping these tips in mind, you’ll position yourself as someone they’d be happy to work with.