The primary ways to drive revenue growth are generating leads and increasing sales. How do you do this? You reach out to new prospects.
The two highest-performing strategies to accomplish these objectives are LinkedIn outreach and email marketing. In this article, we’ll discuss:
- What is LinkedIn Outreach?
- LinkedIn Outreach Strategies
- Pros and Cons of LinkedIn Outreach
- What is Cold Emailing?
- Pros and Cons of Cold Emailing
- LinkedIn Outreach vs. Email: What Do the Stats Tell Us?
What is LinkedIn Outreach?
LinkedIn outreach means using the platform to identify, connect, and engage with prospects—the companies that might be interested in your products or services.
Your focus is on making meaningful connections with the people you want to do business with.
The primary way to do this is through LinkedIn messaging.
LinkedIn Outreach Strategies
Set your goals and KPIs
What do you want your LinkedIn outreach campaign to accomplish?
Once you know your goals, you’ll know what strategies to use. Defining your KPIs helps you track performance and measure progress toward your goals.
Do your research
Identify your target audience and prospects. An automation tool can help you with this. You want a well-defined list of relevant contacts with a high chance of converting.
Create personalized connection messages
If your outreach message looks like a template, your prospect will ignore it. Furthermore, if you send the same connection message to all your prospects, the LinkedIn algorithms might think you’re spamming. Be specific and authentic about why you’re reaching out.
Personalization doesn’t mean inserting a prospect’s name into the template. Find common ground that you share and mention that in your message.
Build the relationship on trust
Once you’ve identified prospects, start interacting with their posts before you send a private message. It will demonstrate that your interest is genuine and that you know something about them.
Send data and statistics, case studies, and other assets that establish your authority in the industry.
Keep the focus on your prospect–why they should care, why you’re reaching out, and what’s in it for them.
Speak to their pain points in a way that convinces the prospect that your product or service will make their life easier.
Follow up
You may not get a response immediately. Your prospect could be busy and not see your message. Send a follow-up message, different from the first one, emphasizing how they will benefit from you, along with social proof to help build trust.
What Are The Pros of LinkedIn Outreach?
- The average reply rate to LinkedIn messages, according to LinkedIn research, is three times higher than emails.
- 4 out of 5 people on LinkedIn drive business decisions. (LinkedIn data)
- You don’t have to collect prospects’ emails, validate them, and then add them to your email database.
LinkedIn outreach empowers you with the greatest potential to identify prospects who fit your customer persona, without wasting time and money.
What Are The Cons Of LinkedIn Outreach?
- You don’t have the field to yourself. There are millions of B2B companies on the platform which may be reaching out to the same prospects or offering similar products or services.
- LinkedIn imposes limitations on the number of connection requests you can make each week.
What Is Cold Emailing?
Cold emailing is sending an email to someone you haven’t met or done business with yet. Your purpose is to build a relationship with a new prospect and move them through the sales funnel.
Email was the primary channel for lead generation and driving sales. But, it took a bit of a back seat once social media gained relevance in the business world. Social media channels quickly became an alternative way to connect and reach your customers.
And as we discussed above, LinkedIn outshines all social platforms when it comes to B2B marketing. However, as businesses struggle with shifting social algorithms, email has recovered the ground it lost to social media.
LinkedIn outreach and cold emailing are similar in that both involve messages that arrive in a prospect’s inbox. LinkedIn happens on a social platform and emails do not.
How Does It Work?
Email marketing begins the same as LinkedIn outreach or any other marketing campaign.
- Identify your target audience
- Publish resources (lead magnet) that address your target audience’s pain points.
- Leverage social media by offering promos and digital assets that require an email to download.
- Keep your email subscribers engaged by consistently connecting with helpful content that gently moves them through the sales funnel.
What Are The Pros Of Email Marketing?
- With high-tech automation tools or software, you can easily launch a global outreach campaign to thousands of prospects at once.
- Email automation tools enable you to track open and reply rates, learn the optimum time to send an email, and automatically send follow-up emails to those who haven’t opened.
- Email campaigns can be highly segmented and personalized. With targeted automation, you can personalize your emails according to geographic location, demographics, or where they are in the sales funnel.
- Your emails can include a variety of media, such as videos and other digital attachments that make your message more engaging.
What Are The Cons Of Email Marketing?
- Cold emails can end up in your prospects’ spam folder. According to a Harvard Business Review article, 90% of C-Suite executives never reply to cold emails.
- You have little information about the prospect, such as you do when using LinkedIn.
- As a B2B business, you have a lot of competition from other companies who are also using cold email strategies to attract your target audience.
- Emails can be unwanted, even if the recipient opted in through your lead magnet.
LinkedIn Outreach vs. Email: The Statistics
According to LinkedIn research, sending a single, personalized message will increase your response rate by 30%.
The reply rate to a LinkedIn message is 85%, three times better than emails. (LinkedIn research)
According to the latest statistics on email marketing (2022), the average open rate across all industries is 21.5%, with an average click-through rate of 11.3%.
Conclusion
The best way to generate qualified leads and drive revenue growth is to create an outreach synergy that capitalizes on the power of both LinkedIn outreach and email marketing.
However, to help you reach your goals more quickly and efficiently we recommend a comprehensive multi-channel campaign that includes paid ads targeting the prospects you’ve identified for your outreach campaign. Targeted ads will warm up your prospects for better engagement and conversion rates.
A comprehensive outreach campaign requires the same essentials for success:
- Identify your target audience
- Know your prospects’ pain points
- Personalize your messages
- Use automation tools to improve organization and deliverability
- Set goals and KPIs
- Follow-up
