The 5-Step How-To Guide For Uniting Your Outreach Campaigns
This time let’s discuss what to do for LinkedIn and email work together and be happy ever after for the sake of your brightest outbound campaigns.
Table of Contents:
Step 1 - Invite your prospects on Linkedin
Ideal Customer
Before start doing anything with your LinkedIn or email or anything, please make sure that you know who is your buyer persona or the ideal customer profile. Otherwise, all your further efforts would be converted to spam.
Also, don’t forget to optimize your LinkedIn Profile before you start your outbound campaign.
10 Quick Tips To Optimize Your Linkedin Profile For Sales
Use filters like a pro
When you know who you need, filter the results in a proper way. Do not forget to use the “all filters” button, it allows choosing such things like the title, industry, profile language, and a specific company if needed.
Finally, inviting
Now we are ready with filter results, so the next step will be inviting the selected contacts on LinkedIn. Let’s use One2Lead for that purpose, click “collect” after you’ve set the filters.
After collecting all the desirable users you need to use “View collected” to get redirected to the list of all people collected. Remove all contacts you think do not fit for your campaign, then start inviting all the rest.
Divide and conquer
And here comes the crucial moment. All those people who have accepted your invite will start receiving messages on LinkedIn, and all the rest will go for the email campaign.
To divide them let’s use the “export” feature of One2Lead for the export of pending invitations. Just remove 1st connections from the export list and all the rest are your pending contacts.
NB: the exported .csv file would not contain the info about the company domain (the company’s website), so it has to be filled manually.
Step 2 - Collect and verify emails
How the email generation works
Knowing the company’s domain helps in defining the email addresses. Basically they are created on the basis of several patterns (e.g., firstname.lastname@companydomain or fn.ln@companydomain) that could be checked for validity both manually and automatically.
Please note that the majority of tools generate business emails, as their algorithm is based on the business domain of contacts. While business emails perfectly suit email drip campaigns, using personal emails or direct profile links fits more for running ads.
Email generation tools
Let’s save your time and choose the way of automatization. As for this step, we’ll use Snovio Social URL Search for generating email addresses from LinkedIn profiles.
Just upload the exported .CSV file from One2Lead and let Snovio do the rest.
Email verification tools
When an email is successfully generated it should be verified, and by doing this we decrease the risk of your message landing to spam. One of the most trusted tools for email verification among the free ones is MailTester. The only disadvantage - it does not allow verifying many emails at a time.
These are some tools for bulk verification of emails:
Also, don’t forget to check out the list of best tools for sales teams
Top 5 Productivity Tools for Recruiters and Sales Team
Step 3 - Prepare a smart campaign with mixed steps
It’s time to design your smart campaign! Let’s suppose that you have a chain of 4-5 messages for LinkedIn (one initial and several follow-ups), now we could mix it up with several email steps and maybe add some ads on Facebook or Google Adwords (if relevant). Now it’s possible thanks to the emails we’ve generated in step 2.
Besides, we recommend checking your email templates for spam words and also checking your messages for the sender domain reputation. The services like Mail-Tester perfectly work for that purpose (that is another Mail-Tester, not the same from the previous step).
Thus, your outbound strategy could look as follows:
- Send contact request on LinkedIn via One2Lead and start sending messages to those who accepted invite;
- Export all those who didn’t accept your invite and start email drip campaign with them;
- Run Facebook Ads for several segments from all the collected people (e.g. those who ignore both your emails and LinkedIn requests, and those who are likely to become a hot lead but they still need some push).
Thus, if you get no response on LinkedIn (request is not accepted), then start sending emails, and if there’s some response on LinkedIn, you could continue messaging via One2Lead or gently mix LinkedIn and email follow-ups.
Remember that LinkedIn is a social platform so that not only messages could be used as a follow-up - skill endorsements, starting to ‘follow’ profile and simply liking posts could also be used to remind the prospects about your existence.
Step 4 - Choose the tool for email automation
Remember that not all email automation providers allow sending cold email campaigns through their services (according to their policies).
In fact, those services who are not likely to allow cold mailing activities simply would not support you in case of domain reputation issues, and, in the worst cases, they’d stop providing you their services.
To avoid misunderstanding with the service pay attention to the company’s policies in this regard.
Some of the automation tools could be both integrated into your Gmail account and show there some useful data from LinkedIn, Reply.io is a good example of such tools. And Streak is a nice example of CRM right inside your Gmail.
Step 5 - Go through the checklist
Good planning and perfect timing is 80% of success in sales growth hacking. Use this checklist to launch your first campaign.
Check-list for Smart Prospecting:
- A list of contacts is properly filtered on LinkedIn, then collected via One2Lead and all those who do not look like your ideal customer are removed from the list;
- The selected contacts are invited and all those who remain pending for quite a long period of time are exported (to be used in email campaigns);
- The emails are generated and verified via tool(s) you have chosen. All those people without emails (not verified/bounced) are left for further outreach on LinkedIn (pending invitations could be removed so you could try one more time in a couple of months with another invite template);
- The perfect step-by-step campaign is designed and all scenarios for all channels are ready;
- The tool you are going to use for running ads is configured and ready;
- Email templates are verified, the spam words removed, sender domain reputation is OK;
- The tool for email automation is configured, integrated with necessary extensions and ready for use;
- You know for sure that the contacts on your list would not receive the same message twice.
Done, you’re awesome! Wishing you many great qualified leads in your outbound campaigns.
Don’t know how to handle your lead flow in a proper way? Check it out, our best practices on how to convert leads into paying customers.
How To Create A Predictable Sales Pipeline
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