LinkedIn Messaging

LinkedIn is a great resource for sales and marketing. There are many different methods to generating leads on LinkedIn, but our primary tactic is to send invites to top prospects with a custom invitation message. Then once the the prospect accepts the invite, we thank them and send them a custom message describing how our products can make their life easier or make them more money. The key to social media messaging is to be informal (aka. conversational) in tone. If a prospect does not reply, we send them a follow up message. This is what we call a LinkedIn Messaging Cadence.

The benefit to prospecting on LinkedIn is that it can expand your reach and it is also the preffered commucation channel for a percentage of your target market. Firstly, it expands your reach because you will not be able to find or purchase the email address of everyone in your target market, but you can always reach out to them on LinkedIn as most business professionals maintain a profile on LinkedIn, as LinkedIn acts as many people’s resume. Secondly, it is the preffered commuication channel for 20-30% or your taget list, as many people enjoy the fluidity of a LinkedIn chat compared to email or LinkedIn, this is generally becuase you are able to learn more about the person on the other end of the chat by viewing their LinkedIn profile and you are able to chat in real-time and see when a person is online aka. communication is faster in general.

This always depends on the industry, but when comparing LinkedIn to email using our entire client base, the channel itself is just as effective. In fact, LinkedIn has been the most effective channel for some of our clients. The biggest variations occur when comparing industries or target personas. For specific industries such as IT or Marketing, LinkedIn has been proven to be significantly more effective than email. But, when reaching out small businesses like restaurants, or target personas that tend to not care about their professional online presense, email and cold calling can be far superior. It all comes down to your market, and we’d be happy to discuss this with you to see what makes the most sense for your business.

LinkedIn is not too crowded, particularly if you are going after a niche job title because they wil not be receiving thousands of LinkedIn invites and messages per day. Yes, the CEO of Uber will most likely not respond to your LinkedIn request, but the Head of Logistics at a growing transporation company might love the attention and respond as soon as they see your message. So in short, the more targeted and niche, the better. That’s not to say we haven’t booked meetings through LinkedIn with big companies or executives either, but in general it can be less effective as you target the same prospects hundreds of other companies have tried to target as well.

This depends on the quality of the LinkedIn profile. If the LinkedIn profile has been around for a long time (5+ years) and has many connections (1000+), then we typically send 100-200 invites per day. But if a LinkedIn profile is anything short of that we don’t recommend anything over 100 invites per day, typically we will sen 50-100 LinkedIn invites per day on average. It is also important to make sure that you don’t have too many pending invites, typically we recomend to remove pending invites once you exceed more than 1500 pending invites.

We send anywhere from 1 – 10 messages per prospect, depending on if the initial connection request is accepted and if the prospect is being retargeted in a campaign after going through a break to avoid annoying them. We recommend making these messages informal, personal and well thought-out. If you feel the need to send a very large LinkedIn message describing your service/product and value proposition, we recommend the follow-ups to the first message to be short and refer back to the original message, such as “Did you get a chance to read my first message” or “If you don’t want to discuss let me know” in order to keep from burning prospects out with repetitive and lengthy messages.

LinkedIn profiles can get restricted for many reasons, but here are a list of a few: 1) The profile is manually flagged by several people on LinkedIn as spam. 2) Too many pending invites outstanding (but usually this leads to not being able to send invites not a profile restriction) 3) Sending too many invites in a given 24hr timeframe (we recommend 50-100 invites per day, even if you are using a paid version of LinkedIn).

You can get your profile unrestricted by submitting a copy of your ID to LinkedIn, while this is not ideal and seems like an invasion of privacy, it is possible to get you profile unrestricted. Something very important to note here is that if you are using a paid version of LinkedIn, then you will need to make sure you are not getting charged for your subscription. LinkedIn is notorius for charging users for accounts that are restricted because they make it difficult to cancel the transactions with your credit card company or bank by changing their name by a digit on their billing. For example you will see a transaction link this LINKEDIN-506*5839696 LNKD.IN/BILL CA 10/18, then the next one will look like this LINKEDIN-505*123523452 LNKD.IN/BILL CA 10/18, thus they purposfully make it impossible to block the vendor on your credit card or bank. So it is very important to get your account unrestricted or you may billed for perpetuity for the account. They also make it very difficult to call them or get in contact with their team.