“92% of consumers trust recommendations from other people, or ‘word of mouth’ marketing, over brand content."

Influencers are individuals who has the power to affect purchase decisions of their followers. Watch and discover three reasons why you should strongly consider working with influencers and four ways to work with an influencer.

Four ways to work with an influencer:

Product for post. This means you give them some of your product in exchange for a promotional post. Ideally, they will review your product. 1. Give them a unique discount code to promote with a link in their profile
Create a landing page to drive followers to a page to capture emails
Promote an opt-in offer like an eBook or bootcamp or a mini-course. I’ll share more details about this method in the next lesson.

Steps to Finding the Right Influencers for Your Business:

To start, the most important factor when finding influencers to collaborate with, is audience affinity (how similar your audience is to your desired audience).
Create a list of hard metrics and soft metrics to get clear on audience affinity.
- Hard metrics are quantitative metrics like how many followers do they have? What’s the average number of likes they receive on a post? What’s the average number of comments they receive on a post?
- Soft metrics are more qualitative and may be a bit more difficult to quantify. This includes feed aesthetic, tone of voice, is their images cohesive? Do they look like they put in time, effort and care for their feed? Do they have an emotional connection with their audience?

92% of consumers trust recommendations from other people or word-of-mouth marketing over brand content. This is why influencer marketing has skyrocketed in popularity in the last few years. If you're not working with influencers, you're missing out on a huge opportunity. Let's back up for a minute. What exactly is an influencer? Influencers are individuals who have the power to affect purchase decisions of their followers.
They have authority in their niche, are authentic, and over time have built a relationship with their audience. Followers trust them and are curious about their aspirational lives. Influencer marketing can be a huge win for you. So in this lesson, I'm going to teach you how to grow your email list by working with influencers. Let's start with three reasons why influencer marketing in combination with email marketing is a match made in e-commerce heaven.
Number one, exposure to an audience of targeted customers. Influencers thrive in niches. They build their reputation and expertise in specific niches such as fashion, food, yoga, cars, et cetera. And if their niche aligns with your product or service, you can get a warm introduction to a big community of potential customers and subscribers. Number two, content amplification. Top influencers are amazing at content creation.
If an influencer creates content for you and shares it on their platform, you can repurpose that content in your emails, on your Shopify store, and in other forms of marketing like Facebook. Number three, low-cost customer acquisition. This is the name of the game. You can only pay Google or Facebook so much for ads before your ROI disappears. The more you develop cheaper channels, i.e. email and influencers, the more profitable your business will become.
So how do you get started with influencer marketing? First it starts with clarity on your budget. Don't research the best influencers in your niche if you have a couple hundred dollars to spend. As you start connecting with macro influencers, which are influencers with over 100,000 followers, the price can start to increase from hundreds of dollars to thousands. In the Resource section below, there's a chart you can reference for the cost of micro versus macro influencers.
And for YouTube, the prices vary for a video. Though with entrepreneurs I've worked with, they use $0.05 per subscriber as an industry standard. So if the YouTuber has 100,000 subscribers, you're looking at paying around $500 per video. This will, of course, require negotiation with the YouTuber or you can use tools like Hey Influencers for Instagram or FameBit to manage your interactions and transactions with the influencers.
Personally, I found the best ROIs by working with B and C level influencers-- people who haven't made it big time yet. Get out an Excel doc and start researching influencers on YouTube or Instagram that you think can make an impact on your business. You should look at both hard metrics and soft metrics, and here are the ones I recommend you pay attention to. For hard metrics, write down how many followers they have and the average number of likes or comments they receive on a post.
For soft metrics, look at content like the aesthetics of their brand, their tone, and overall look. Do they look like they put in the time, effort, and care into their feed? Does it seem like they have an emotional connection with their audience? Is it in line with your brand? Once you have your list, it's time to reach out to the influencer and also be clear on what you want them to do. The goal here is to get them to promote your product and ideally get their audience onto your list.
From there, you can nurture that subscriber into a customer. Here are four ways you can work with an influencer. Number one, product for post. This means you give them some of your product in exchange for a promotional post. Ideally, they will review your product. Number two, give them a unique discount code to promote with a link in their profile. Number three, create a landing page to drive followers to a page to capture emails.
Number four, promote an opt-in offer like an e-book or bootcamp or a mini course. I'll share more details about this method in the next lesson. Once you know what you want them to promote, it's time to reach out. So how do you do that? In the Resource section below, you can access a template to reach out to an influencer. OK, so we've reached the end of our crash course in influencer marketing.
You learned why you should work with influencers, how much to pay them, and how to leverage their work for your email marketing efforts. In the next lesson, I intro one of my favorite tactics to growing your list-- the email short course method.

Influencer Marketing 101

Course content (38 lessons)

Overview

01 |Get Started with Email Marketing

02 |Create Your Welcome Series

03 |Optimize Your Shopify Store

04 |Grow Your Email List

05 |Measure What Matters with Email Analytics

06 |Advanced Email Strategy

“92% of consumers trust recommendations from other people, or ‘word of mouth’ marketing, over brand content."

Four ways to work with an influencer:

Steps to Finding the Right Influencers for Your Business: