Influencer gifting: how to send your first product gifts

Influencer gifting, also called product seeding, means sending your product free to creators whose followers could buy it, with no fee and no promise of a post. For a small brand, a first round of gifts shows which creators bring in buyers and what a pre-order costs through them.

This guide is for a founder with a physical product, no budget for creator fees and a few units to give away. It follows the path Draper uses, where you sell online and take pre-orders at full price before your first factory order.

Product seeding vs paid creator deals

With product seeding you send the product and the creator decides whether to say anything about it. With a paid deal you agree a fee for set posts, and the creator delivers them. An affiliate deal pays the creator a share of each sale through their link. A small brand can start with seeding because it costs only product and postage, and it shows which creators are worth paying later.

A worked example: 20 linen bread bags

The numbers in this example are invented and round. A founder sells a linen bag that keeps a sourdough loaf fresh, at $36. She is taking pre-orders for her first factory order, where each bag will cost $9 to make. Each pre-order also carries a $1 payment fee and $7 to ship to the customer, so it leaves $19 toward the cost of winning it. Her ad test found that a pre-order through ads cost $30. For gifts she has 30 bags sewn by a local workroom at $14 each, and she plans to give 20 of them to creators.

1. List creators your first customers already follow

Start from the group you are selling to first. If you have not chosen one, read how to choose a beachhead market first. The founder sells to people who bake sourdough at home, so her list is home bakers who post loaves, starter care and kitchen routines.

Look for small accounts, often called micro or nano influencers, whose followers share one interest. Search the hashtags and phrases your customers use, open the accounts that come up, and check who those creators follow and who comments on their posts. Newsletter writers and people who run baking classes or local groups count too, since they reach the same home bakers.

Write down more names than you have units, because some creators won't reply and some won't pass the next check. The founder listed 30 for her 20 bags. Draper's Plan Your Go-to-Market workshop can build this list for you from your customer group, with a tagged link for each creator, as part of a wider launch plan.

2. Check that each creator's audience is real

Follower count tells you little, and engagement benchmarks vary a lot between the companies that publish them (our look at micro and macro creators explains why). Read the account instead.

The founder cut her list from 30 to 24. Four accounts had comments that read like bots, and two had audiences mostly outside the US. She messaged the other 24, and 20 said yes.

3. Ask before you send, and send the real product

Message each creator first and send only to those who say yes, which also gets you their address.

Send the full retail product in its normal packaging, with a short handwritten note saying why you chose them. Leave out any branded box of extras, since a creator will judge your product by what a customer would receive.

If you only have one or two prototypes before your first production run, lend them instead. Send one to one creator at a time with a prepaid return label, and tell them it is a prototype.

4. Write the pitch, including the disclosure request

Keep posting optional. If you want guaranteed posts, a set number of videos or the right to use a creator's content in your own ads, that is a paid deal, and the fee and terms go in writing. The founder's pitch read:

Hi Maya, I'm Sam. I make a linen bag that keeps a sourdough crust crisp for days, and your followers often ask how you store bread. Can I send you one to try for a couple of weeks? You don't need to post anything. I'd like your honest take, including what you'd change. If you do share it, please say it was a gift from us. Here is a link with your name on it, so I can see what it brings in.

Ask for an honest opinion and never for a positive post. Under the FTC's Endorsement Guides, an endorsement has to reflect the endorser's honest opinion (16 CFR 255.1), and the brand can be liable for one that misleads. Give creators time with the product before they say anything, because the FTC tells creators not to talk about their experience with a product they haven't tried.

Do influencers have to disclose gifted products?

Yes, in the US. The Federal Trade Commission counts a free product as a "material connection", so anyone you gift has to disclose it when they mention your product, even if you never asked for a post. The FTC's Disclosures 101 for Social Media Influencers says the disclosure goes in the post itself, not only the bio, and in a video it goes in the video, not only the description. Plain words work, such as "Thanks to" the brand "for the free product", while terms like "collab" or "sp" don't. The FTC's answers to common questions about the Endorsement Guides also accept "Gifted by" and the brand name when all the creator received is free product.

The brand has duties too. The Endorsement Guides, revised in 2023, give the example of a tool maker that sends a free lathe to a woodworking creator (16 CFR 255.5). The company should tell the creator to disclose the gift at the time it sends it, and should monitor their posts.

5. Give each creator their own link

Give every creator a link with a tag naming them, so each pre-order traces back to one person. Some followers who see a video will type your address in later instead of clicking, so add a "Where did you hear about us?" question to the pre-order form as well. A creator discount code is the usual alternative, but a pre-order at $5 off no longer tells you whether people will pay the full price.

Keep a sheet with one row per creator: the date you messaged them, whether they agreed, the ship date, whether they posted, the post link, and the pre-orders through their link or named on the form.

6. Follow up two weeks after delivery

Send one message asking how it went, and keep the questions open:

• What did you use it for, and what got in the way?
• What would you change before we make more?
• May we quote you, or share your photo with credit? (Get that permission in writing.)

Treat the answers as product research. The founder learned from three bakers that the drawstring was too short to close over a large loaf, and fixed it before the factory order.

7. Add up what the gifts cost and brought in

Each gift cost the founder $22: the bag at $14, $1.50 for the mailer and note, and $6.50 postage. The 20 gifts cost $440. Seven of the 20 creators posted, and their links and the pre-order form traced 20 pre-orders to them.

At these numbers neither channel pays for itself on the first sale. The 20 gifted pre-orders brought in $380 against the $440 the gifts cost, and ads lost almost four times as much on each pre-order. Ads would pay for themselves only below $19 a pre-order.

A second round sent from factory stock would cost $17 a gift instead of $22. At that cost, 18 pre-orders cover 20 gifts, so the same result would have paid for itself. The result was also uneven: two creators brought in 14 of the 20 pre-orders from two bags that cost $44 to send, about $3 a pre-order. Those two are the people to offer a paid post or an affiliate deal at launch, and creators like them are the ones to gift next.

Compare the result with what a small ad test costs per pre-order. Both figures go into the wider check on whether enough people will pay, covered in how to test demand before you build.

When gifting is the wrong channel

• If each unit costs a lot to make, 20 gifts can cost more than an ad test. Gift five creators instead and compare them with ads.
• If your product makes health, beauty or safety claims, you answer for what creators say about it. Give each creator a written list of what the product does and doesn't do, and check every post.
• If your customers don't follow creators, as with tradespeople or business buyers, messaging people directly works better. How to get your first customers without spending money covers that.
• If you have no units to spare and no prototype to lend, leave gifting until the first production run arrives.

Related questions

Which creators to pick depends on who you are selling to first: see beachhead market. To compare gifting with paid traffic, see how to run ads to test a business idea.