We Offered 260 Creators Free Product. Here Is What They Wrote Back

Most of what gets written about influencer gifting is written by people who never counted the replies. So we counted them.

Between 25 March and 14 April 2026 we emailed over 260 creators on behalf of Nami Matcha, a premium Japanese matcha brand, and offered to send them product and work on content together. 79 replies came back. We read all 79, one at a time, and sorted each one by what the creator actually asked for rather than by how friendly they sounded.

Here is everything that came back.

1. Who replied

68 real people wrote back, and 13 of those replies came from a talent manager rather than the creator. That number alone tells you what kind of list this was. These are not hobbyists posting for fun, they are people with representation, and a manager answering your gifting email is a manager deciding whether you are worth their client's time.

The combined following of everyone who replied was 4.31 million, with a median of 63,631 followers each. That is a mid tier group, not a celebrity list, and it is the part of the market where most gifting programs actually live.

One thing worth being honest about, because almost nobody is. A sum of follower counts is a ceiling on how many separate people you could reach, not a view count and not impressions. Audiences overlap, plenty of followers never see a given post, and adding follower numbers together is the single most common way a creator report gets inflated.

2. What they actually asked for

This is the part that surprised us.

More creators wanted paying than wanted free product. 32 against 26. And 44 of the 68, nearly two thirds, would not commit to anything at all until they knew what the deal was. A lot of those replies were simply a rate card, sent back in the first message, before any conversation had happened.

That is not creators being difficult. At a median of 63,000 followers these people are running a business, and a business does not give away its main product because someone sent a nice email. The mistake is going into a gifting round expecting free product to do the work of a budget.

3. The four who wanted to stay

Dennis asked me a specific question when we started this: how many of them wanted to become long term ambassadors? There was no field in any of our systems that answered it, which is why we had to read the emails.

The answer is four. Out of 68 people who replied, and out of more than 260 we emailed.

Here is what three of them actually wrote.

"I'd also be happy to explore long-term opportunities together as we see how this collaboration performs."

"I'd also be happy to discuss how we could structure this into a longer-term or paid collaboration if the content performs well."

"I'd love to build a relationship and turn this into a paid partnership as well."

Read those again and notice the condition in each one. Three of the four tied an ongoing relationship to payment, or to seeing how the first post performed. Only one was an unconditional yes.

So four is the honest number, and even four is generous. If you are planning an ambassador program off the back of a gifting round, this is the realistic shape of it: a handful of interested people, most of whom are waiting to see whether the first post works before they commit to anything.

Where we come in. This is the part most brands get wrong on their own, because reading 79 replies properly takes a person a full afternoon and most teams just skim the inbox and count the smiley ones. We do the reading, we sort every reply by what was actually asked for, and we hand back the short list of people worth building around instead of a spreadsheet of everyone who was polite.

4. The numbers our own tools got wrong

This is the least comfortable section and the most useful one.

Our reporting tool said this campaign got 75 positive replies. Reading the actual emails, 26 creators accepted the product. The tool was not broken and nobody was lying. It was labelling any warm, polite reply as positive, and a polite reply is not a yes. A creator who writes "thanks so much, I love your brand, my rate is 150 dollars a reel" is a lovely message and a no to gifting.

The email platform had its own problem. It reported 76 unique replies against 69 remaining leads, which is more than 100 percent, because leads had been deleted from the campaign after the sending finished. A separate audit we ran earlier had graded the same campaign at 30 keen replies out of 550, using sends as the denominator rather than people.

Four different sources, four different answers, on one campaign:

We could not even establish a clean reply rate. Our record of who was emailed holds 232 addresses, but 28 creators replied from addresses that were not in that record, so the real number contacted is at least 260 and we cannot recover the true figure. Which means any reply rate we publish is a ceiling, not a measurement.

If you take one thing from this post, take this. Before a number from your outreach tool goes into a client report or a deck, open twenty of the raw replies and read them yourself. The gap between what the dashboard counts and what the emails say is not small, and in our case it was nearly three times.

5. What we would tell a brand to do next

A gifting round is a filter, not a campaign. That is the whole lesson.

You are not sending free product in order to get free posts. You are sending it to find out which creators genuinely like the thing, will talk about it without being managed, and will still be talking about it in three months. In this round that group is somewhere between 4 and 26 people, out of more than 260 contacted.

So the sequence that works looks like this. Send product to the people who said yes, and give every one of them their own discount code, because a code is the only part of this that tells you the truth later. Wait 60 to 90 days and let the codes sort the group for you. Then build the paid program out of the five or six whose codes actually returned something, and pay those people on a schedule rather than once.

That is not a clever strategy, it is just the honest order to do things in. What it protects you from is paying 26 people up front and hoping, which is the version most brands try first.

Where we come in. If you are about to run a gifting round, the useful thing we do is not the sending, it is the counting. We build the list, we read every reply properly, we tell you which numbers hold up and which ones your tools are flattering, and we tell you which handful of creators are worth a retainer once the codes have earned it. If that is the stage you are at, book a call and bring your last campaign's numbers, we will tell you what they actually say.