How Agencies Run Influencer Gifting Campaigns for Brands (Step by Step)
·10 min read·By Abubakr Chan
Agencies run influencer gifting campaigns for brands in seven stages: a scoping brief that fixes the product, units, creator profile and approval rules; a creator list cleared against the agency’s other clients; outreach sent from an inbox the brand has agreed to; opt-ins and addresses turned into orders in the brand’s store; follow-ups; post tracking; and a report the client can act on. What separates an agency that scales from one that drowns is how much of the middle runs without a coordinator typing.
This guide walks the process and the decisions that only exist when the brand is someone else’s: whose inbox, whose store, whose creators, and how to price it. Disclosure: Cheerful is our product and agencies are among the teams that use it; the last section says what it does for multi-brand work, and what it does not.
What does an agency gifting campaign look like, step by step?
- 1Scope the brief with the client. Products and variants on offer, units available, markets you can ship to, the creator profile (niche, platform, size band), what success means (posts, content for ads, code sales), and who at the brand approves what. Write down the approval rules now; they decide how fast everything after this moves.
- 2Build the list, then clear it. Check every creator against the agency’s other clients (a creator mid-campaign for a competing client is a conflict, not a lead) and against the brand’s existing relationships, so you do not cold-pitch someone their team already knows.
- 3Agree the sender identity (next section). It is the decision clients most often want to revisit mid-campaign, so settle it before the first send.
- 4Pitch for an opt-in, with follow-ups. Personal first messages, two or three follow-ups spaced days apart, and a yes that comes with an address and a size.
- 5Fulfil through the client’s store. Orders created in the brand’s own store keep inventory, addresses and tracking in the system the client already reconciles.
- 6Follow up after delivery and track posts, including the untagged ones. A meaningful share of gifted posts never tag the brand, so tracking by tag alone under-reports the campaign.
- 7Report, then recommend. What posted, what content is reusable, which creators to pay or whitelist next. The recommendation is what renews the retainer.
Whose inbox should agency outreach come from?
| Sender | What the creator sees | Trade-off |
|---|---|---|
| A mailbox on the brand’s domain | The brand writing to them directly | Highest trust and reply rate; needs the client to provision a mailbox and grant access |
| The agency’s mailbox, on the brand’s behalf | “Sam at the agency, working with the brand” | Easiest to set up; reads as an intermediary, which some creators discount |
| A separate sending domain for the brand | The brand, from a lookalike domain | Protects the brand’s main domain from cold-email risk; needs weeks of warm-up before volume |
Whichever you pick, pace it. A new mailbox should send tens of emails a day, not hundreds, and follow-ups count against the same daily budget as first messages. Campaigns that need more volume need more warmed mailboxes, not a faster send from one.
How do agencies handle fulfilment for a client’s gifting campaign?
- From the client’s store (the default). Gift orders are created in the brand’s own Shopify store at $0, so stock, addresses and tracking sit with the client. Tag them, so they can be filtered out of the brand’s sales reports.
- From stock the agency holds. Faster to ship and easier to kit, but every unit has to be reconciled back to the client, and returns become your problem.
- Through the client’s 3PL. Same as the store route from the creator’s side; confirm the 3PL will pick $0 orders without a manual hold.
The step that eats agency hours is not shipping. It is turning a creator’s reply (“the medium in green, and here’s my address”) into a correct order. Automating influencer gifting with Shopify covers which parts of that can be automated and which should keep a human approval.
How do agencies keep several brands’ creators separate?
- One creator roster per brand, with each creator’s stage in that brand’s program, so a creator can be “posted” for one client and “never contacted” for another without anyone confusing the two.
- A conflict check before every list goes out, against active campaigns and exclusivity windows for competing clients.
- Client data stays with the client. Rates a creator agreed with one brand, and that brand’s results, are confidential; quoting them to another client is how agencies lose both.
- Separate reporting per brand, even when the same creator worked with two clients in the same quarter.
What does it cost an agency to run a gifting campaign?
Product and shipping are usually billed to the brand at cost; what the agency sells is the coordination. That is also the line automation moves. The one comparison we can publish with real numbers: for a 474-creator seeding campaign run over three weeks, Spacegoods was quoted $12,000 by a manual agency and ran the same scope on roughly $1,000 of platform cost (Spacegoods case study).
Agencies price the service as a flat fee per campaign, a monthly retainer for an always-on program, or a fee per creator handled. Per creator is the easiest to defend to a client, because it scales with the work; it is also the one that punishes an agency still coordinating by hand, since its cost per creator does not fall with volume.
How do agencies report gifting results to brands?
A report a client can act on follows the funnel and ends with a recommendation. For reference, Spacegoods’ campaign pitched 368 creators, drew a 58.7% response rate, and produced 220 Shopify orders and 89 creator discount codes in three weeks.
| Line | Why the client needs it |
|---|---|
| Pitched, replied, opted in | Shows the targeting and the pitch worked, separately from whether the product did |
| Shipped and delivered | Units out of the client’s inventory, reconciled |
| Posted (including untagged posts) | The headline result; untagged posts are real results the client will not find on their own |
| Reusable content pieces | The asset that outlives the campaign, and the input to paid ads |
| Code redemptions and revenue per creator | The part of the sales effect that can be counted |
| Cost per post | The number that compares gifting to the client’s other channels |
| Who to pay or whitelist next | Turns the report into the next brief |
The method for turning that into an ROI figure is in how to measure influencer gifting ROI.
What Cheerful does for agencies, and what it does not
- Campaigns are grouped under the client brand, and each brand has its own creator CRM showing where every creator stands in that brand’s program.
- Team seats, and campaigns that send from a team member’s connected Gmail (a mailbox on the client’s domain included) once that mailbox’s owner grants it. The credentials are never copied to the team.
- The gifting workflow end to end: personalised outreach and follow-ups, replies answered, addresses read from the conversation, $0 orders created in the client’s Shopify store after approval, one discount code per creator, and automatic post detection on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube.
- An Agency plan with custom volume, dedicated onboarding, SSO and custom contracts.
What it does not do: it does not read tracking numbers from Shopify or send tracking links to creators, and it does not manage inventory, so your client’s existing fulfilment still ships the box. The gifting page shows the workflow; the gifting campaign playbook is the same process from the brand’s side.
Frequently asked questions
- How do agencies run influencer gifting campaigns for brands?
- In seven stages: scope the brief with the client, build and conflict-check the creator list, agree the sender identity, pitch for opt-ins with follow-ups, fulfil through the client’s store, follow up and track posts (including untagged ones), and report with a recommendation for who to pay or whitelist next.
- Should agency outreach come from the brand’s email or the agency’s?
- A mailbox on the brand’s domain earns the most trust, because the creator is hearing from the brand. An agency mailbox is easier to set up but reads as an intermediary. A separate sending domain protects the brand’s main domain but needs warming. Whichever you choose, pace it at tens of emails a day per mailbox.
- How much do agencies charge to run an influencer gifting campaign?
- Pricing varies by agency and is usually a per-campaign fee, a monthly retainer, or a fee per creator, with product and shipping billed at cost. One real comparison: Spacegoods was quoted $12,000 by a manual agency for a 474-creator, three-week seeding campaign that ran on about $1,000 of platform cost.
- Can one creator work with two of an agency’s clients?
- Yes, if the brands do not compete and neither deal carries exclusivity that covers the other. Run a conflict check before every list goes out, keep one roster per brand, and never share one client’s rates or results with another.
- Do gifted posts need disclosure when an agency arranges them?
- Yes. A free product is a material connection whether the brand or its agency sent it, so the creator should disclose it, with the same clarity as a paid post.