How to Respond to a Brand Collaboration Email or Ambassador Request

If you’re a creator, chances are you’re wondering how to respond to a brand collaboration email or a brand ambassador request after getting a ton of them in your inbox.

It’s a great position to be in because it means that you’re making yourself appealing enough to brands that they’re actually interested in working with you.

But, how the heck do you navigate the process after you get these emails? How do you respond if they want to work with you? What if they’re only offering unpaid partnerships? How do you respond to brands and turn these requests into long-term, compensated partnerships?

Let’s dive into it.

Don’t forget that we interviewed Jordynn Nicholson, a successful full-time creator, on our podcast Soulcial Scoop, and it’s available now for you to binge everywhere you listen to your podcasts. You’ll learn everything you need to know about getting a brand’s attention and turning your opportunities into long-term, high-quality partnerships.

Whether you’re pitching the brand or you’re getting an email straight from there, there are multiple different situations that you may find yourself in where you have to respond to a brand and simply don’t know what to say.

We’re going to walk through a few of the month popular situations.

The brand is offering only gifted campaigns.

Unless you’re a brand new creator, you really should be getting formally compensated of the work that you’re doing with brands. There’s no reason you should be putting in hours of time and energy in exchange for a t-shirt that you could have just purchased yourself for $20 and saved yourself all of that effort.

If a brand responds to my pitch or cold emails me saying they want to partner but are only offering gifted campaigns, my response is typically written up to show them that I’m really interested in working with them, but the bottom line is that I can’t work for free.

I typically start my email off sharing why I’m interested in working with the brand and why I believe it will be a well-performing partnership.

I then go into my 1-2 sentences explaining that I am unable to take on unpaid partnerships. You don’t ever have to explain why you want to be paid to work, but just to strengthen my response, I typically do explain to them that I need to be fairly compensated for the value of my endorsement after I’ve built trust with my audience for 10+ years and that I need to sustain the resources it takes to create the high-quality content that I’m providing for them.

AKA I have bills to pay and it takes time, money and energy to create this content. We can’t do that for free.

I will then ask if there is any wiggle room in their budget where they can accommodate some sort of formal compensation. I also like to mention that I’m open to creating a custom package for them based on their budget too.

The brand is offering only affiliate partnerships.

This is a really similar situation as to the brand only offering gifted campaigns, but there’s a bit more of an opportunity to sell a long-term partnership with that specific brand.

Typically, my email response looks really similar to what it would look like with gifted campaigns, but instead of just explaining that I don’t do unpaid partnerships, I try to really bring home the point that I’m interested in working with the brand long-term as an affiliate would.

My email might say something like “I’m really interested in being an ambassador of the brand as I’d love to help contribute to your long term success.”

Then I’ll go into my spiel about how I’m unable to do collaborations that are unpaid, but will end asking if they’re interested in chatting about a long-term partnership.

The brand is not currently working on partnerships.

You may come across this situation if you are sending out a pitch email and they respond with this. The difficult part is that you don’t really ever know if they’re being truthful or not.

So, there’s really only one way to respond to this email: Just let them know that you’re there if anything changes. I also typically tell them that that I’ll check in about a month from now to see if anything has changed with their partnership strategy.

If you have a finished media kit, you can also send it in this email too so that they can keep it on file for future reference.

The brand is interested and asked you to send rate.

This is the best case scenario! This means that the brand is considering working with you and you’re starting the negotiation process.

In this email response, I typically thank them for taking the time to response and that I’m happy to hear that they’re interested in working together.

If the brand has explained me to exactly which deliverables they’re looking for, this is when I will send over a proposal that outlines what my rates are for that specific project.

If the brand has just overall explained that they’re interested in working with me and asks for my general rates, this is where I send my rate card.

You can also offer to hop on a call with the brand at the end of your email too so that you can answer any further questions that they may have about working together.