In 2018 we sent 700 emails to companies asking them to sponsor our travels. About 10% replied. About 10% of those became sponsors.
Seven sponsors out of seven hundred emails. That is a working method and a brutal hit rate at the same time — and the only way we found out which parts mattered was by getting 693 of them wrong.
If you are still working out what travel sponsorship even involves — what a brand will and will not cover, and what they expect back — start with our wider guide to how travel sponsorship works. This page assumes you already know, and deals only with the email.
This page is the autopsy. Below is the structure of the email that worked, what each part is doing, and the specific mistakes that killed the ones that didn’t. At the bottom you can download the fill-in version free, along with the guide to building the list you send it to.
Why most sponsorship emails fail before anyone reads them
Three reasons, in order of how often we see them.
They go to info@. A shared inbox belongs to nobody, so nobody owns answering it. The single highest-return thing in cold outreach is finding a named human being, and almost nobody does it.
They ask before they offer. “I’m a travel blogger and I’d love to partner with you” is a request dressed as an introduction. The reader has seen forty of them this month.
They are vague where they should be exact. “A large and engaged audience” tells a marketing manager nothing except that the number is probably small. A real figure — even a modest one — is far more persuasive, because it can be checked.
The nine moves, in order
Here is what the email that worked actually did. The order matters as much as the content.
1. Say who you are in one line
A name and the thing you run. Not a paragraph about your passion for adventure. They will decide whether to keep reading in about four seconds.
2. Arrive as a customer, not a supplicant
This is the sentence that does more work than all the others combined:
I’m about to order [specific product] from you, but I thought I’d reach out to you first.
You have just become a buyer who might become a partner, which is a completely different person from someone asking for free stuff. It has to be true — pick a product you would genuinely buy, because the follow-up question is sometimes “which one?”
3. Say why now
A brand can act on “we leave in March”. It cannot act on “someday”. Deadlines are what move a request from the someday pile to the this-quarter pile.
4. Give them the ambition
One sentence on the single biggest thing you are going to do. A marketing department is buying a story and this is the story — the full length of a continent, a named route, a crossing that sounds difficult.
5. Prove you have done this before
Two or three past trips, briefly, with a link to the actual route. This is the line between a traveller and a dreamer, and the reader can tell which they are talking to.
6. Give numbers, specifically
Monthly visits. Followers. Where your audience actually is. Say “between 23,000 and 27,000 page views a month” rather than “lots of traffic”.
Never round upwards. If you have 4,812 followers, say 4,812. Someone will check, and when the number turns out to be inflated, everything else in the email becomes suspect too.
7. Attach your evidence — and repeat it in the body
Put the analytics screenshot on the email and write the headline figure into the text. Corporate filters strip attachments routinely. We nearly lost a deal to exactly this: the recipient never saw the file and the body never said the number.
8. Borrow other people’s credibility
A magazine piece, a podcast appearance, a guest article. Anything written about you by somebody who is not you is worth more than anything you write about yourself.
If you have none, delete the line rather than padding it — and then go and get one, because it is the highest-value thing you can do for your next ten approaches.
9. Pre-empt the obvious objection, and then prove it
They are thinking another blogger wanting free kit. So say you are not — and then put three links underneath. Without the links it is a claim. With them it is evidence.
Start smaller than you think
Before any of that, there is an easier first move, and it is the one we would give a complete beginner.
Ask for a sticker.
A sticker costs a company nothing, so the answer is usually yes — and a yes gets you three things a cold pitch cannot: a named human being who has now replied to you once, a reason to write again that isn’t a pitch, and something physical to photograph.
Our vehicle crossed three continents covered in other people’s logos. Every one of them started as a conversation, and a surprising number of those conversations started exactly here.
The sticker email is in the free download.
How long does any of this take?
Honestly? Longer than most pages like this will tell you, and the real numbers are more useful than a round one.
From our own records:
- 21 days from a cold email to a 4x4 accessories manufacturer to their first reply
- Five months from that email to a signed arrangement
- Five months after that, the same company came back asking for a wider collaboration — and that relationship was still running two years later
One approach to a large outdoor brand got an automated shop reply and then eight months of silence. It never converted. That is normal, and it is not a reason to stop.
The practical version: expect about nine weeks of real work before you see much — profile built, list built, emails actually sent and followed up. Results follow the groundwork rather than arriving instead of it.
How big does your audience need to be?
Smaller than you think, and the honest answer has two halves.
One to two thousand engaged followers is genuinely enough for some sponsorships. Not every one, and rarely the biggest companies — but plenty of smaller brands will send product to an account that size, particularly when your travel style is exactly what they build gear for.
Our own numbers are bigger than that, and they’re an outcome rather than an entry requirement. The email above cited around 11,000 followers. The Instagram account is approaching 18,000 now. None of that was true when we started; it is what the work compounds into.
What size actually changes is your hit rate and your ceiling — not whether you are allowed to start.
Before you send a hundred emails
Every address this method uses is one a company publishes about itself: a press contact, a marketing address, a named person on a team page. Write to companies, not to private individuals.
Even so, the rules on unsolicited commercial email vary by country, and both yours and the recipient’s can matter. We are not lawyers and this is not legal advice — look up what applies where you are and where you are writing, before the hundred emails rather than after.
Get the template
Get “The Sponsorship Email That Worked” — free
The fill-in template, the sticker email, and how to build the list — free, straight to your inbox.
The download includes the full email with every blank marked, the much smaller sticker request to send first, and the prospect-list guide: where to find companies worth writing to, the ten columns that matter in the spreadsheet, and the two that actually convert.
What it doesn’t cover
Deliberately. These are the parts that took us years and 693 failed emails to work out: finding the person who decides instead of emailing a shared inbox, the follow-up sequence (the first email is usually not the one that works — the second one is), the two other approaches, negotiating so nobody is surprised six months later, getting a sponsor’s gear to you while you’re moving, and turning free product into actual income.
That last one is the part we were slowest to see. Six months into a sponsorship that began as free gear, the brand asked whether they could buy our photographs. Fifteen-plus items licensed at $30 each, $390 confirmed inside two months, and two years later the same brand was inviting us into paid campaigns.
All of it is in our full course — 14 lessons and 6 fill-in templates.