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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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:
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.
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.
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:
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