All posts by Alfie Lambert

Reading Time: 18 minutes

Cold email can be daunting. Finding leads, crafting copy, warming up your server, navigating GDPR… It’s easy to see why many people avoid it all together. The thing is, cold email has been proven time and time again to be on the best ways to find new customers, meet influencers, get PR, gain backlinks and generally grow your network. This guide is here to give you all the tools and confidence required to cold email like a pro. We will cover:

• Cold email fundamentals
• Campaign prep
• Building an email list
• Mail merging
• Cold email templates
• Deliverability
• GDPR & CCPA

👆 Use these links to navigate the guide & bookmark this page for later!

Cold Email Fundamentals

Whether you’re sending ultra-personalised emails to potential investors one-by-one, or mass mailing every CEO in London, there are some cold email fundamentals that should form the foundation of your outreach. Get these right, and the rest will fall into place. If you only digest and implement one portion of this guide – this is should be it it!

• Keep it brief
• Personalise
• Give Credentials
• Demonstrate Value
• Call to Action

Keep it brief

The average office worker receives 121 emails per day. For those in decision-making roles that number is likely much higher. Think about the emails you receive daily. When you open one up and see a wall of text, is your first thought “yay, lots to read”? Probably not! Don’t waffle, keep it short, sweet and to the point. Brevity is key.

Personalise

The degree to which you can personalise will depend on the volume of outreach. If you’re working with a short list of prospects, take the time to research your prospect and personalise every single email. Reference an article they wrote, a podcast they were on, a previous investment they made… Show that you know this person and that your outreach is relevant to them. If you’re doing outreach at scale there are still ways to personalise. Separate your prospects into relevant groups and write specifically for them. This could be job title, location, industry etc. Talk about the challenges / news / industry changes relevant to them and their group. Simply using a merge tag to include their name will not cut it!

Give Credentials

Why should this person trust you, or listen to your pitch? Strong credentials are a great way to cut through the noise of a busy inbox. Referencing clients you’ve helped that your prospect will know and respect is a great option. Otherwise perhaps use a qualification, or thought leadership pieces that you feature on… Know your audience and think about what will demonstrate your trustworthiness to them.

Demonstrate Value

How will your proposal benefit this person? Will it save them time or money? Perhaps help them to grow their business? This step is where a lot of cold emails fail. Don’t talk about features, talk about benefits. A classic example of benefit-based copywriting is this iPod ad from Apple:

Apple could have easily rambled on about megabytes of storage space, but customers don’t care about the inner workings. Think about the individual’s desired outcome for your product or service and sell that outcome.

Call to action

Another common mistake is not providing a clear call to action. Do you want the recipient to reply to the email? Watch a video? Book a call? Tell them! My advice here is to provide a low-friction action at this step to get the first ‘yes’. Trying to close a deal in the first email rarely works (if ever). Often, asking for a call can be high-friction too. Asking them to respond to a simple question, or watch a video, for example, will be easier. Again, put yourself in the shoes of the person receiving this email. Do you jump on Zoom with cold emailers you’ve never spoken to before? Probably not.

Jump to our templates to see this in action!

Campaign Prep

Before you start crafting copy and workshopping subject lines, you need to establish the audience, purpose and method for your campaign. It’s important to decide what exactly you want to achieve, what metrics you will track, what success looks like and how you want to approach the outreach itself.

Research audience size

If you’re reading this, it’s likely you have an audience in mind for your campaign. The first step for campaign prep is to ascertain exactly how many prospects are out there. As we know, cold emailing a list of 10 will be very different to outreach for a list of 10,000.

Set goals

It’s easy to skip this step and assume that the goal of each email is to close a deal – whether that’s making a sale, booking a call, gaining a backlink etc. While that may be your overall purpose, it can help to take step back and set goals for the steps along the way. It’s unlikely that you sales journey looks like this:

Email sent → Deal closed

Setting response rate targets, for example, helps you to hone in on what copy, which subject lines, times of day etc. work best. Your first email is initiating a conversation, not closing a deal – so target and optimise for that!

Map the journey

Too often I see people jump headfirst into a cold email campaign with no plan for what comes next – what happens if they don’t reply? Better yet – what happens if they do? Mapping the journey (sometimes referred to as a ‘flow’) is a really important step in your preparation. Plan your initial response, your follow ups, your closers. Never hit a point in your campaign in which you don’t know what to do next!

Building an email list

A cold email campaign won’t go very far without an email list! Before we get into this, it’s important to state that Lix is a b2b email finding tool and I will be talking about that in this section.

There are other tools out there that do this, but Lix offers more free emails (50 a month!) with an accuracy to match or surpass the others. If you have a favourite tool you like to use, please feel free to do so (give ours a try though, it is free and easy to use 😁).

There are two primary ways to find email addresses for your cold prospects – using an email finding tool (like Lix) or doing it manually. Which option you choose will be down to time and budget.

Manual email finding (free)

If you’re operating on a tight budget, or have a ton of time, you can sometimes find an email address manually with some sleuthing. Some people will have an email address listed on their LinkedIn, some will be displayed on a company website. This all depends on the type of person you’re reaching out to. Those in high-demand (decision makers, generally) will be less likely to have a email address listed publicly, though.

If your list is small enough to do prospect emails manually, I’d advise signing up for a free Lix account and using your 50 free emails. It’ll save you a day’s work (at least) – valuable time you could spend writing copy and doing research!

Automated Email Finding

Finding, testing and verifying email addresses for outreach used to be a slow and expensive practice. Now you can find thousands of verified emails every single day using a tool like Lix (other tools are available, but why would you ever need them when Lix is right here? 😁).

The majority of such tools work off of LinkedIn, for a very good reason. With 800m+ users and 33m+ businesses, LinkedIn is the largest store of publicly available b2b data in history – and it grows every day. Anyone who is anyone is on LinkedIn and they very helpfully provide their name, company name and the link to their website – the building blocks of email discovery.

If you’re interested in all the techie details on how we do this, read here. Want to just see how it works in practice? Watch this 40 second video:

Another great thing about LinkedIn for email list-building is the powerful search. You have a ton of great filtering tools at your disposal with which to hone in on your ideal audience. If you’re using Lix for your list-building, you can export searches into projects – helping you break your lists up, or collaborate on your list with colleagues anywhere in the world. Here’s a video on how that works, too.

List Separation

Now you hopefully have your list full of email addresses to reach out to, it’s important to break this list up into personalisation groups if you haven’t already done so. Personally, I like to separate a batch of my most-prized prospects for some ultra-personalisation, then group the others as per the cold email fundamentals (above).

Depending on your list size, it’s likely you won’t be sending all these emails at the same time, too. When cold emailing it’s important to ‘warm up’ your server by gradually increasing sending volumes (more on this later – I have a chart for you to follow!). Consider this when separating your lists – who should receive the first batch? Do you want to test your subject lines / copy against your least-likely prospects first? These are all things to consider before sending!

How to mail merge

Now you have a list of prospects to reach out to, it’s time to send those emails. If you’re working off a large list, you’ll need to find a way to mail merge. You can either use a mail merge tool (paid) or one of the methods that allows you to mail merge right from you preferred inbox (free). As always, the paid options do come with some benefits – including some tools for regulating sending, tracking etc. that are very useful when running cold email campaigns. They’re also easy to use and set up, whereas the free options do need a little work to get started. That said, sometimes we need a free option to get things off the ground and test the efficacy of an idea, so let’s start there.

Free mail merge for Gmail (with Google Sheets)

TLDR: Create a template in Gmail & pull recipient data from Google Sheets

This method allows you to create an email template in Gmail, which is then populated by data from a Google Sheets document. You can either read on for my guide, or go straight to the source and hear it from Google.

How it works:

You’ll need Gmail (Google Workspace is preferred due to sending limits) and Google Sheets for the data spreadsheet.

The easiest method is to use a copy of the sample spreadsheet from Google as it has the columns and script set up and ready to go.

Step 1: Enter your data

Once you’ve copied Google’s sample spreadsheet, you can set about editing the data within the columns. Add in the recipient email addresses, names etc. Please note that if you change the name of any of the columns, you will need to head to Extensions > Apps Script and edit the code (this is not advised unless you know what you’re doing!).

Step 2: Create your template

Create a draft email in Gmail as normal. Use the column names in curly brackets (this is called a merge tag) for customisation. For example:

Hi {{First name}}

Will pull through the corresponding first name for each person.

Step 3: Start sending

In the menu bar for your spreadsheet you see ‘Mail Merge’ click this and then ‘Send Emails’. If you don’t see the Mail Merge option, refresh your page.

You will be prompted to authorise the pre-loaded script – do so. Then, repeat the process (Mail Merge > Send Emails).

Enter the subject line for your emails and click OK.

Free mail merge for Outlook (with Excel & Word)

The process for Outlook & Excel is similar to Gmail & Google Sheets – the data is stored and pulled from Excel, to populate an email. The main difference is that this time, the email copy itself is in Word, rather than the email client itself. Here’s how it works:

Step 1: Prepare your data

Open a new Excel workbook and enter the identifying data (email, name etc.) as column titles. Ensure these are properly formatted for the correct data type. If you’re not an Excel whizz, here’s a guide from Microsoft.

Step 2:

Open Word and click Tools > Mail Merge Manager, Word’s Mail Merge Manager will give you a step by step guide for setting up your document.

When it’s time to enter your content, use the column names in curly brackets (this is called a merge tag) for customisation. For example:

Hi {{First name}}

Will pull through the corresponding first name for each person.

The example {{First name}} will only work if that is what you’ve named your column. These tags must correspond with the column names in your Excel workbook.

Step 3:

The Mail Merge Manager will ask you to ‘Select Recipients’. Choosing ;Use Existing List’ will allow you to select the Excel document you made earlier.

Next, click on ‘Preview Results’ – check that the emails and data columns match up and all looks correct. If so – hit ‘Finish and Merge’ and check your sent mail folder in Outlook!

Mail Merge Tools

Mailmeteor

Mailmeteor is designed to work with your Gmail account, and it currently the best-rated mail merge tool on the Google Marketplace. Where Mailmeteor is an improvement on the free Gmail method above, is in the added extras that improve things like deliverability and tracking.

For example, Mailmeteor makes it easy to add attachments, allows you to schedule your campaigns, import HTML email templates and collaborate with teammates. With plans from $9.99 per month, it’s worth giving this service a try if you’re going to be sending regular campaigns from your Gmail account!

GMass

Like Mailmeteor, GMass works with your Gmail account & Google Sheets to send mass email campaigns.

GMass has the added bonus of having an in-built email verifier tool too (this isn’t needed if you use Lix for your prospecting though, as we do this for you!).

Outreach

Outreach and tools like it are a little pricier than the previous options, because it is so much more than a mail merge tool. Outreach is a sales engagement tool – a class of software that assists with organisation, automation, integration, sending cadences and much more.

If you’re serious about cold campaigns, consider a tool like Outreach!

Tools NOT to use

I had to add this section in because it’s a mistake I see people making all the time. Please do not use email marketing platforms, or customer engagement platforms, like Mailchimp and Hubspot for your cold outreach. Firstly, it goes against their terms of service. Secondly, you will be flagged for spam and kicked off the platform very quickly.

These tools are not made for cold outreach and should not be used under any circumstances.

Cold Email Templates

Now we know the foundations of cold emailing, how to prospect and the basics of mail merging – let’s dive into some cold email templates. As we’ve covered, there is no one-size-fits-all cold email. The template you use will change depending size of the list, the amount of research you can do for each person and so on. Here are my 5 favourite templates, with examples, that you can use for different situations.

The Authority-Builder

This is a great template to use when mailing totally cold, large lists. When it isn’t possible to research each individual on your list and you don’t have an intro to reference, you need to lean on your authority.


Remember – keep it relevant! By referencing a credential that is relevant to your recipient, you still achieve some level of personalisation. This is all about showing them that you understand their role and have the credentials to provide a solution to their problems.

Example:


David is a sales representative for an SME selling medical instruments to private surgeries. There are 1,000 potential prospects for his product in the UK and personalising each email is not possible. However, David can group his prospects by job title (some large practices have dedicated buyers, in smaller surgeries it may be the lead GP), or by region, practice size etc. David’s credential, is that he works with a market-leader in this sector. The email he sends might look like this:

Subject: We’re helping Spire keep up with rising demand

Brief – 5 sentences

Personalised – Shows an understanding of the recipient’s role and industry challenges

Credentials – Reference to a large client

CTA – Low-friction, initiates a conversation and invites a follow-up

You can play around with this template and add in whatever credentials / authority-builder works for you and your list. Perhaps it’s a metric you achieved for a client, or a positive case study. Think about the USP you have that will cut through the noise and show a prospect that you’re the one to trust.

The Time-Saver

This again is a great template when you’re going in cold. If you don’t have a ton of credentials to shout about – perhaps you’re a new product or service – the time-saver template allows your product to do the heavy lifting. This template is all about focusing on the positive outcome for the end user.

Example:

Beth has recently started a new marketing agency. She has a ton of experience, but as the business is new there’s little in the way of case studies or credentials to shout about. What Beth does know, however, is that SMEs are spending up to 16 hours a week creating content and posting it on social media. Beth’s proposal is to take that work off of their hands, saving them a ton of valuable time. She has broken her list up into industries and niches, in order to add some personalisation to her emails.

Subject: In just 10 minutes I’ll explain how I can save you 16 hours a week

Hi [First Name],

My name is Beth, and I’ll keep this quick.

I’m a Social Media Marketing expert and founder of Example Agency, and I know businesses in [insert niche] are spending up to 16 hours a week writing content and posting on social media.

Could I have ten minutes of your time next week for a personalized demo that’ll demonstrate to you how I can own your content and social media, freeing you up to work on your business?

Either let me know a time that works for you or book a convenient 10 minute slot in my calendar: [calendar app link].

I look forward to hearing from you,

Beth

Brief – 5 sentences

Personalised – Referring to the recipient’s industry niche

Credentials – Demonstrated expert knowledge of the time challenges these companies face

CTA – Low-friction, 10 minute call

The Researcher

In the last two examples, we’ve looked at options for large lists, where deep research isn’t possible. This template, then, is for the opposite situation. Those prospects for whom you can research and draw from their work, or activities. If you have a large list to contact, it can sometimes be a good idea to separate perhaps 10-20 top prospects to do this kind of research on while using a different template for the others.



Example:

Anna is a startup founder looking for investors. Her goal for this campaign is to book calls with potential investors so she can pitch her idea. Anna has researched investors in her space and crafted outreach for each one individually. Email #1 is going to Elizabeth, who has invested in similar companies previously:

Hi Elizabeth,

I just heard your interview with Jason Calacanis on This Week In Startups, it was really inspiring to hear you talk about your goals for the sustainable tech companies you invest in.

My startup, EcoTech, helps Data Centres offset their carbon emissions. I currently have NTT and Verizon signed and 5 more major data centre operators interested.

Our pitch deck is attached, if you have 5 minutes I would really appreciate it if you could reply with a few lines of feedback.

Best wishes,

Anna

Brief – 4 sentences

Personalised – Immediately demonstrates knowledge of the recipient

Credentials – A short summary of current success

CTA – Low-friction ask – just a few lines of feedback.



Of course, yours will vary depending on the research that you do!

Pain-Agitate-Solution (PAS)

This is a classic copywriting technique that you can apply to your cold email outreach. I’m sure you can probably guess how it works from the name! The aim is to highlight a pain point your prospect is feeling, agitate that pain point by describing how this is negatively affecting their business and then – you swoop in and provide the solution. Let’s use Lix, for this example.

Example:

Alfie is the co-founder of a SaaS startup that uses AI to find email addresses from LinkedIn searches. He wants to sell subscriptions to users in the cyber security space, as he knows they do a lot of cold outreach to prospect lists. He knows that reps in large firms are spending up to 33% of their time prospecting, when they could be selling.


Subject: Your reps spend 33% of their time prospecting, when they could be selling

Hi [First Name],

As a sales leader for [Company Name] I know that lead generation must be a huge time drain for you and your team. According to Forbes [link] the average rep spends 33% of their time building prospecting lists – time they could be spending on building relationships and closing deals.

I’m the founder a company called Lix and our mission is to give your team that time back. Our AI email-finder can turn LinkedIn searches into clean, verified email addresses; ready for your reps to reach out and do what they do best – selling!

You can try it today with 50 free emails and 1,000 rows of data [link] – or book in a call with me and I’d be happy to demo it for you [calendar link].

Best,

Alfie

Brief – 5 sentences

Personalised – Mentions the company and the specific challenges faced by the receiver

Credentials – Uses trusted source (Forbes) to back-up statement

CTA – Two options, a free trial (low-friction) or a demo

The Personalised Video

This is a relatively new, but very powerful tool for cold emailing. It’s such a hot topic, I have a whole blog on personalised video for cold email. In it, I tell the story of a cold email I received from a CRM giant in which there was a video of the rep looking at my website and explaining, using examples from my site, how their tool could help me. It fits all the criteria for a good cold email – it was certainly brief, ultra-personalised! For a full guide to how to create videos for cold emails, please do read the blog.

I’m using myself again for the example, because I have an example video for you!

Example:

Alfie, the cofounder of the SaaS tool we looked at earlier, has separated 10 top targets from his prospect list that he really wants to book a call with. In order to cut through the noise, he’s going to make a personalised video for each of them.


Subject: [Your Company Name] & [Their Company Name]

Hi [First Name],

I made you a quick video (60 seconds), click here to watch:

Plus here’s a case study that shows how we helped [Company] achieve [outcome]: [link]

You can try it today with 50 free emails and 1,000 rows of data [link] – or book in a call with me and I’d be happy to demo it for you [calendar link].

Best,

Alfie

Brief – 3 sentences and a short video

Personalised – As personalised as it gets!

Credentials – Uses their own site to establish credibility

CTA – Two options, a free trial (low-friction) or a demo

Here’s a great infographic on the anatomy of a great sales email from IRC Sales Solutions that you can save and refer back to when writing cold emails:

Deliverability

This is a hot topic in the world of cold email and for good reason. Many people rush into cold emailing gung-ho and send way too many emails, or do outreach from a brand new email address, or spam people with poorly-targeted emails… and get marked as spam. If that happens enough times, you domain can be ‘blacklisted’ and your overall deliverability will tank. This will put an end to not only cold email campaigns, but it could even affect day to day business emailing with current clients and suppliers, etc.

It’s not just about reaching inboxes, either. It’s about reaching the right area of the inbox. The Gmail users among you can attest to the fact that an email in your ‘Promotions’ tab probably doesn’t get read.

How does it work?

In simple terms, when an email is sent it has to go through various checks and tests before it reaches someone’s inbox. Your email server (and often your service provider) perform these checks in order to protect you from malware, spam and all other manner of nasty things.

These checks include things like:

• Email Content

The content of your email can sometimes flag spam filters. This happens for various reasons, including using too many links, abusive language, spam trigger words and more. Hubspot have a great blog listing 394 spam trigger words. Avoid these!

• Domain history

Sometimes referred to as ‘reputation’. If you are flagged or reported for spam, or you try to send too many emails too soon, are blacklisted or send too many bouncing emails – this will affect your reputation.

How do I maximise deliverability?

This topic is a whole ‘nother blog in itself, but there are some very simple steps you can take that in most instances will be enough to protect you.

• Warm up your outreach

The max number of emails you can send in a day will vary by email client – for example a standard Gmail account can send a max of 500 emails in a rolling 24 hour period. A Google workspace account allows you to send 2,000 per 24 hours, but please bear in mind this includes all emails for your organisation!

Even if you are using a Google workspace account with a 2k daily limit, it’s not a good idea to try sending 2,000 emails in the first day. Especially if your domain is brand new! Instead, start small and build up gradually.

For a brand new account, start very small. Perhaps 10-15 non-cold emails per day for a few weeks, then slowly add in those cold emails. It’s frustrating, but less so than getting blacklisted. There are also some crucial technical steps you need take in getting your DNS set up – I’ll talk about those in the next section.

For an aged account, I would advise starting with 100-200 per day and adding the same amount daily until you hit around 1,000 a day, max. Some guides tell you to go up to the full 2,000, some say less. Personally, I’ve had the best results sticking at 500-800 per day.

• DNS set up

DNS stands for domain name system – I won’t get into too much boring detail (but you can read this great Quora thread if you want to know more), essentially having your DNS configured correctly lets the receiver’s email server know that you email and domain are linked and trustworthy.

There are three DNS record types – SPF (Sender Policy Framework), DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) and DMARC (Domain Message Authentication Reporting and Conformance). Until recently, DMARC was optional and only really used for large businesses. However, Microsoft recently announced that any email without DMARC will go to spam.

Setting these up will differ depending on your email client. Here are some guides for Google Workspace & Outlook:

Google Workspace

Outlook / Office 365

• Don’t spam

Seems obvious, right? This is the simplest step and often the hurdle people fall at first! If you follow the cold email fundamentals and list building protocols set out in this article, you will be fine. The most important points to remember are to keep your emails brief, don’t include attachments or images in your initial messages and only send emails to targeted individuals.

GDPR & CCPA

GDPR (General Data Protection Legislation) dictates the way companies are allowed to store, use and process personal data. It was introduced back in 2018 in order to protect consumers from unscrupulous spammers and give them back control of their data. Similarly, CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act) offers similar protections to the residents of California. The rules and their application to cold emailing are largely similar. The good news is that neither prevent you from sending cold emails – so long as you stick to the rules.

Sending cold B2B emails is legal under both GDPR & CCPA, you just need to meet certain requirements. The foundational principle is thus – the service or product you’re offering must be beneficial to the individual or company that you’re contacting.

These laws don’t exist to stop people from connecting with each other and offering useful services – it’s there to stop spam. As long as you’re choosing your prospects correctly and offering something that can make their lives / jobs / businesses better, you have a case for cold email.

With that base covered, the next step is to consider the use, storage and communication of said-use. Make sure that somewhere in your email you are letting the recipient know how their data is used and that they can remove their data from your list at any time. Also, don’t store their data for longer than is necessary. If a prospect hasn’t replied within 30 days, remove their data from your system. This rule applies more to GDPR (CCPA doesn’t have any strict rules about storage time) but it’s still good practice!

The biggest difference between GDPR & CCPA is that GDPR applies to all businesses, of all sizes, whereas CCPA only applies to large companies that fit the following criteria:

• They must be a ‘for-profit’ organisation, NFPs are exempt
• 50% of more of their annual revenue must arise from the sale or use of personal data
• That annual revenue must be more than $25m
• They process data of 50,000+ individuals, household, or devices

Now, that’s not to say that if you don’t meet these criteria you should ignore the rules set out here. You should always put yourselves in the shoes of the recipient. You don’t like being spammed – so don’t spam!

If you follow the above steps, there’s nothing stopping you from sending legitimate-interest cold emails under GDPR & CCPA.

Reading Time: 13 minutes

LinkedIn influencer marketing is being under-utilised by B2B marketers. We’re on a mission to change that.

 

In recent years, influencer marketing has grown into an essential part of every B2C marketer’s toolkit. The ability to leverage a trusting audience, pre-built by an influencer, lures in marketers like a moth to a flame. For many of us though, the phrase ‘influencer marketing’ conjures images of perma-tanned reality TV stars peddling protein shakes on Instagram. While this may be true, I certainly wouldn’t advise asking the cast of Love Island to promote your B2B product or service. So, how can us B2B marketers get in on the influencer action? With LinkedIn influencer marketing.

 

Why LinkedIn Influencer Marketing?

 

LinkedIn is the largest professional social network in the world, with a whopping 690 million users and counting. The platform has been on a steady growth trajectory since their acquisition by Microsoft in 2016, for a cool $26.2 billion. Microsoft’s investment into the business has reaped dividends, with LinkedIn’s membership growing 52% in just four years. 

 

In early in 2020, as I’m sure you know, the world went into lockdown. The coronavirus pandemic led to an unprecedented wave of people working from home. In fact, you might be reading this from the comfort of your home office right now, for this very reason. The rise in home working set off an explosion in LinkedIn’s engagement rates. In fact, LinkedIn saw its largest jump in DAU (daily active users) since 2011.

 

Amongst those users, from the casual to the committed, there are the individuals that we marketers dream of getting in front of: the decision makers. According to LinkedIn’s own stats, 61 million LinkedIn users are senior-level influencers and 40 million are in decision making positions.

 

Let’s take a moment to step back and consider this. We have at our fingertips, the largest business network in history. LinkedIn is an audience of nearly 700 million people and among them, tens of millions of decision makers. This is an unprecedented opportunity for B2B marketers. One that we have of course been leveraging for some time. I would argue however, that we have not been utilising LinkedIn marketing to its full extent. As marketers we run ads, content campaigns, perhaps even cold outreach; all the while LinkedIn influencer marketing remains largely untapped…

 

 

As marketers we seek two things: an audience to speak to, and buy-in from that audience. Influencers can give us both of those things at the drop of a hat. They have spent years cultivating a persona, engaging with their followers and establishing themselves as a source of information and inspiration. Yes, even the reality TV stars on Instagram and the dancing teens on Tik-Tok.

 

The Lure of Influencers

 

In bygone years marketers and advertisers had to create and manage long-running campaigns to build brand recognition with their audience. Hoping that their efforts along the way cultivated some kind of relationship between brand and consumer. Social media has done away with that in a relative heartbeat. We don’t need to shoehorn emotion, connection and trust into 60 second ads, spaced out and repeated over years. Audiences can feel like they know, and therefore trust, influencers within a matter of weeks. Through photographs, captions, story posts, live videos, podcasts, Q&A sessions… The opportunities to build those connections are seemingly endless.

 

There is of course another important layer to the influencer marketing cake: it is social. Although there is a huge clue in the name ‘social media’, us marketers can often forget this fact when trying to sell via social platforms. We may be there to sell, but users are not there to buy. They are scrolling through their feed, interacting with their friends and consuming media related to their interests. It’s not SEM, where there is clear intent to buy, or researching buying, a product. You are interrupting their flow with your ad or message. Do you think the user would rather have their flow interrupted by an advert from a business they don’t recognise… or a recommendation from a person they know and trust?

 

With this in mind, it’s easy to see the power of influencer marketing, and therefore LinkedIn influencer marketing. You are leveraging not only their audience, but trust and social connection. Something that would otherwise take you many years (and thousands of dollars) to build for yourself.

 

This powerful combination presents us with a massive opportunity. We have a thriving social-professional network, with millions of decision-making users and, if you know where to look, a plethora of influencers ready to promote your products.

 

LinkedIn Influencers

 

LinkedIn influencers have established themselves as thought-leaders in their field. Their written content, videos, perhaps even just witty status updates have earned them thousands of fans. Their posts reach the coveted top spots within the LinkedIn feeds of not only their followers, but also those connected to their followers.

 

LinkedIn influencer marketing is also largely untapped market. How often do you see B2B influencers pushing products on LinkedIn? It happens, but it’s not nearly as large a phenomenon as it is on Instagram and Tik-Tok. If those platforms are anything to go by, we are just a few years away from saturation. As with any new marketing trend, the time to get involved is now.

 

The early adopters will reap the most rewards. Much like the early days of Facebook pages, and the ease of follow/unfollow at the dawn of Instagram; this trend will become saturated and ROI will gradually decrease. We may reach a point where, much like Facebook, the only way to really reach an audience is pay-to-play. You don’t want to look back in three years and kick yourself for missing the boat.

 

Influencer Campaign Preparation

 

Before we delve into the specifics of tracking down influencers, we need to prepare our campaign. As a marketer or solopreneur you will already understand the importance of good prep and solid tracking.

 

Media, Location, Duration

 

Setting up a LinkedIn influencer marketing campaign is not much different to any other marketing campaign. There are a few extra things to consider, including the media used, the location of the post, duration and so on.

 

There are a number of factors that will contribute to your choice of media, including your chosen influencer’s preference.

 

Where possible, I advise opting for video.

 

A massive 84% of buyers say they were persuaded to purchase after watching a brand’s video. Since launching native video (uploaded directly to LinkedIn) back in 2017 engagement rates have rocketed.

 

Within LinkedIn there are three locations you could opt to post your content, whatever it may be:

 

1. The Influencer’s Feed
2. Within a Group
3. On your Company Page

Of the three, I would generally advise the first option, so that you can really leverage the trust and audience your influencer has built up. Groups can command excellent engagement but promoted posts are generally blocked by group admin. Some marketers advise posting on your company page to build better brand recognition, but unless you have a huge following there, I wouldn’t bother.

Tracking

There is no use throwing time and money at a LinkedIn influencer marketing campaign if you cannot track what works and what doesn’t. Depending on what your desired outcome is from this campaign (clicks, email signups, conversions) there are numerous ways to track. You may wish to send users to a designated landing page, with messaging that matches the content pushed out by your influencer for a seamless customer journey. This is time consuming and perhaps not the best option for your initial test. An easy way of tracking is simply adding UTM parameters to whatever links the influencer may share – this should make it easier to separate out the clicks, visits and conversions from a specific source. You can use Google’s UTM builder for free.

With your campaign idea in mind and your method for tracking results prepped – it’s time to find those influencers!

How to Find LinkedIn Influencers

If you’re familiar with LinkedIn you will probably know that they curate their own list of influencers by invitation only. There are a few hundred of these ordained influencers, including the likes of Melinda Gates, Mike Bloomberg and the ubiquitous ‘Gary Vee’. If you have the kind of budget required to hook one of these big fish, go ahead. For those high-profile targets approaching them via LinkedIn, or even by email, is probably not going to yield results. I would be incredibly surprised if Mike Bloomberg is checking and responding to his DMs on LinkedIn. Your best bet for an upper-echelon influencer like that is to approach their publicist or agent and go from there.

My guess is that if you’re reading this, you’re either marketing for an SME or you’re a plucky entrepreneur at a startup looking to make your mark. In which case, your pockets likely aren’t deep enough to pay Gary Vee to speak 7000 words a minute about you in a LinkedIn influencer marketing video. Never fear. There are thousands of influencers, thought leaders and LinkedIn populists out there ready to spread your message for a fraction of the cost.

Let’s dive into how we can unearth them before moving onto how to approach.

Get Targeted

Before we can begin our search, we need to think about our selection criteria. My suggestion here is to start with the end result and work backwards.

For example if I wanted to sell LIX subscriptions, I would start by identifying a vertical. I know that LIX offers the ability to export LinkedIn Company Data, and I know that there are four primary verticals that tend to buy this tool: B2B marketers, salespeople, investors and recruiters. This time around, I’d like to target marketers.

Now we have our niche, let’s think about numbers. Begin by thinking about how many individuals you will need to reach with this campaign in order to convert your desired number. I estimate that I can convert approximately 3% of all readers / viewers (depending on the media) and I’m looking for 50 signups to test the viability of LinkedIn influencer marketing.  Therefore, I need an influencer in the marketing niche, preferably with interests and content relevant to automation services, with at least 1,500 followers.

With this kind of laser-targeting, we know exactly what we want and what kind of person can deliver on the above. Now, we search…

Find Influencers on LinkedIn

Part of what makes LinkedIn such an incredible tool is its powerful search function. With the right keywords, filters, time and perhaps a helping hand from the LIX LinkedIn Search Exporter you can find relevant profiles, export their data from LinkedIn into a spreadsheet and begin panning for influencer gold!

Continuing our example project, we’re searching digital marketing automation specialists. If we enter that into the LinkedIn search bar and select the ‘people’ filter around 669k results are returned.

I would advise applying some filters in order to not only bring down that number, but also hone-in on your desired influencer. For this campaign, I want to reach influencers based in the UK, so I will filter by location ‘United Kingdom’ which returns 35k results. Then, we can filter by industry. We want somebody currently in the world of marketing and advertising. When I apply that filter, it brings us to a more manageable 6.2k results.

Now the real work begins. You have two options for sifting through these results: the free option, which is time consuming, but… well, free. Or, you can utilise LIX’s ability to export ‘deep’ LinkedIn profile data (there is a short ‘how-to’ for this feature within our video CV parsing on YouTube!).

Using LIX Deep Profile Extraction will allow you export up to 1k profiles per day, directly in to XLS or CSV. The tool will extract the number of followers a person has directly to your spreadsheet, making it easy to identify influencers within this niche. You can simply sort your results by ‘followers’ within Excel or Numbers and work your way along the top results to discover those who post relevant, engaging content. Voila! You have your list of targets. If your CRM supports CSV or XLS uploads, it’s a good idea to move these potential influencers over for better tracking and organisation.

If you’re opting for the manual method, the end result is the same but you will need to sort through those profiles one by one to find their follower numbers, select the best candidates and copy their details into the list-maker, spreadsheet or CRM of your choice.

When manually sifting through, head to the user’s profile and click on ‘activity’. Here you will find the number of followers, along with a list of their posted content (articles, feed posts etc.). With this information, we can make informed decisions about potential influencers.

Our example search led us to this handsome fellow, with following within our desired range and well-engaged posts. Maybe he’s right for our LinkedIn influencer marketing campaign?:

Groups

Another place to search is within the ever-popular LinkedIn groups. There are over 2 million groups on LinkedIn. According to Tech Crunch, more than half of all LinkedIn users are in at least one group.

Within these groups, you tend to find that there are usually a handful of regular posters. They tend receive a good response, with strong engagement on their posts. These are your influencers.  If we return to our example search, we can see that there are 289 groups that match our keywords. The largest groups should command the most engagement, therefore leading you to your potential influencers faster. My advice is to not neglect the smaller groups however – sometimes you can unearth a gem.

How to Approach LinkedIn Influencers

We have targets in our crosshairs, now it’s time to get them on board. This is not as straightforward as it may seem on the surface. Just because we want to work with them, does not mean that they instantly want to work with us. Remember, these influencers have spent years cultivating an audience and presenting themselves as thought leaders within their field. They will not risk sullying their reputation and standing in the community if they feel that your brand isn’t the right fit, or the product isn’t right for their audience. In order to leverage the trust that influencers have built up with their followers, you need to build trust with the influencer.

Email vs. LinkedIn Messages?

This may seem like an easy choice. We’re already using LinkedIn, so why not just message them there? In reality, it depends on how quickly you’re looking to receive a response.

If you’re a regular LinkedIn user you will no doubt receive dozens of messages every week. Many of which are ‘spammy’ or annoying. Usually they are connected to a connection request (the only way to message a user not within your connections, unless you have a paid version of LinkedIn such as Sales Navigator).

This, I think, is the reason why people put off regularly reading their LinkedIn messages. Personally, I check my emails 10+ times a day and my LinkedIn messages perhaps 2-3 times a week.

Want your message to cut through the noise of LinkedIn and receive a faster response? Find your influencer’s email address and contact them there. If in the last step you used LIX to export data from LinkedIn, you will notice that where a person has listed their email address on their profile, their email address will have been exported onto your spreadsheet. If you’re working manually, head to Google and do your best to find it that way. Happy sleuthing.

For those of you not in a hurry to receive a response, or struggling to find those emails, LinkedIn messaging is fine. My advice here is to start strong. You’ll notice in your inbox; you get a short preview of around 10 words before opening a message. Make those 10 words count.

Opening with a standard “Hi, I hope you are well” is not going to stand out in a crowded inbox. This is the exactly the kind of message I put off until I cannot stand the notifications any longer. Mainly because I have no idea what is inside. It could be anything from a cold sales pitch, a job offer, or just straight up spam.

What do you think will capture the attention of your chosen influencer?

Here are a few 10-word examples that I’ve used in the past with some success.

Paid promotion opportunity: We would like to work with you…

We’ve identified you as a LinkedIn influencer in ‘X’ field…

Excellent content, we would like to discuss a sponsored post…

These may seem a little impersonal, and they are. These openers on LinkedIn are not designed to build rapport (yet, that comes later). These are designed to grab attention in a stuffed inbox, enticing the influencer to read your message.

You can also use variations of these openers as email subject headers if you choose to contact your influencers that way!

Messaging

For some of us, contacting and building rapport with people comes naturally – for others, not so much. If you’re the kind of person who listens in to the sales team making calls and thinks “how do they do that??”, this section is for you.

You’ve already grabbed their attention and got them to open the message. All we need to establish now is who you are, what you do and whether they would be interested in learning more about this opportunity. That’s it. At this stage, don’t bog them down with a ton of details, don’t discuss fees or even what the promotion is. Those details can come after you receive your first ‘yes’. Up until the point at which they agree to talk further (your first ‘yes’) you are talking at them, not with them. We need to open up a conversation in which both parties are happy to participate.

Continuing our example, here’s a sample message I would send to our digital marketing & automation influencer:

It’s straightforward and to the point, without being pushy or presumptuous. Another technique that can work well here is referencing what you think makes them the perfect candidate. If they wrote a great blog about your niche, or received a ton of engagement for a post, reference it!

“I saw your blog about automation and thought it was excellent. I especially like your take on setting responsible limits….”

Influencers may put out content in order to win business, but they also like getting good feedback too! Even the least-vain influencers respond well to a little praise.

Some people like to use what is called ‘presumptive closing’. This when you push the person receiving your correspondence into agreeing to a proposition. Something like:

“We want to work with you. I’m calling influencers on Friday, what’s the best time for us to speak – 11am or 1pm?”

I tend to find, however, that influencers receive a lot of messages from a lot of salespeople and are pretty fed up with the pushy approach!

When you have their reply, hopefully saying that yes, they’re happy to discuss; you’re ready to go into details with them.

Now that you have read, absorbed and percolated this information it’s time to go forth and put it into action! LinkedIn is an untapped treasure trove of B2B influencers – get out there and tap it.

Find more blogs from LIX, here.

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Looking to find and extract LinkedIn emails? You’ve come to the right place! This blog is going to show you how to do it, give you 50 free email credits to try it for yourself and even explain how it all works.

For those of you who don’t want to read a blog and just want to get started right away – claim your 50 free emails and follow the guide on the Lix dashboard. You can also watch this super quick 46 second video that shows you how it works:

How to extract LinkedIn emails

The first step is of course to head over to LinkedIn. Then, search for the people you’d like to extract emails for. The search function is really powerful and offers great filters. We’ve even got a blog about LinkedIn search if you want some tips on making the most of it!

Now you need a way to find and extract their emails, that’s where Lix comes in. You get 50 free emails and 1,000 rows of search every single month on the Starter plan. Please do claim your free emails and give it a try. It’s really easy to get started – simply install the browser extension and head back to your LinkedIn search.

When you’re ready, click on the Lix browser extension icon and the toolbar will drop down. Simply select how many profiles you’d like to extract, what format you’d like the export in (CSV or Excel) and toggle on “Generate Emails”. Hit the LIX IT button and await your data!

It’s really that simple – LinkedIn emails, exported and ready to use in just a few clicks.

How it works

Lix’s AI-powered email discovery system matches people with companies, companies with domains, domains with emails and emails with formats.

Using this information, it puts together the most likely email address for that individual – and then tests it. Email addresses are run through a variety of tests to assure their validity, including some fairly standard ones (like real-time SMTP checks, MX & A records, DNS etc.) as well as some proprietary secret-sauce tests that allow us to determine if an email address is able to receive mail properly.

The emails that pass these rigorous tests go into the Valid column of your Lix export. If an email address doesn’t pass our tests, we won’t charge you for it.

An email export from Lix has been searched, discovered and rigorously tested before we deliver it to you. All in a matter of seconds. Meaning you can 10x your pipeline with LinkedIn emails, confident in the knowledge that your data is accurate and your emails won’t bounce.

Reading Time: 7 minutes

Sales intelligence has reached a tipping point. The sheer volume of freely available business data, combined with falling entry costs and a change-igniting global pandemic, is proving to be the trifecta of conditions necessary for what I believe is the largest leap forward in sales history.

Let me explain.

Just 33% of a salesperson’s day is spent engaging with customers, with the other 66% being taken up with prospecting, administration and research tasks. If human interaction is the key to sales, then this allocation of time and energy is completely upside down.

That’s a serious problem.

I believe that for the first time in history, we have a solution to that problem – sales intelligence. Imagine, if you will, the salesperson’s ‘second brain’: a processing powerhouse that reps can call upon to carry out these tasks for them. A partner in prospecting, freeing them up to spend more time connecting and less time administrating.

That is what sales intelligence is about to do for sales and it is time for you to make a leap forward… or get left behind.

In order for me to give context to bold claims, allow me to take you on a journey back to the dawn of advertising, a time when marketing and sales lived in technological harmony.

The History of Sales & Marketing

Almost 2,000 years ago, in 1st century CE, a gentleman named Umbricius Scaurus was the Roman Empire’s leading manufacturer of ‘garum’; a luxury fish-based sauce loved by Roman high society. We know all about Scaurus’ and his ancient fish sauce for two reasons: the preservation of Pompeii (thanks Vesuvius!) and Scaurus’ talent for sales and marketing.

During the excavation of Pompeii, archaeologists discovered mosaic advertisements for Scaurus’ garum in his family home and the local market. Advertisements that talked about the quality and pedigree of his particular fish sauce. Urns stamped with the recognisable Scaurus label have since been discovered as far away as modern France.

The term ‘marketing’ first appeared in dictionaries much later, during the 16th century, referring the process of selling at market. The term came from merchants, like Scaurus, finding ways to bring new customers to their doors. Customers that could be sold to.

The marketing channels available (mosaics, urns, brass plates, painted banners…) and the point of human interaction – the merchant at their stall – were perfectly balanced. The marketing drew them in, and the merchant closed the deal. Sales and marketing existed in this person-to-person harmony for many centuries.

Until it didn’t.

Merchants and markets fell to the industrial revolution, replaced by general stores and the supermarket. The Gutenberg press gave us the newspaper and with it, print advertising. During the advertising boom of the 1920s, the terms B2B and B2C were first coined, marking a split between the two. 1955 saw the first TV ad broadcast on ITV, the world’s first commercial TV channel.

The days of the merchant manning their stall was long gone. Consumer goods no longer needed human contact to close the deal. Advertisers could present a product, educate the consumer and convince them to purchase long before they ever stepped into a store.

Person-to-person selling was only required where costs were high and trust building was crucial: b2b and high-ticket items.

A chasm had formed, between the old ways of selling and the new.

The dawn of the internet

Web 1.0, the first iteration of the internet, widened this chasm even further. Uptake was slow, at first – new technology always takes a while to reach widespread adoption – but it was coming.

1990 saw the first (albeit limited) search engine: Archie. In 1993, clickable ad banners began appearing on websites. The digital marketing revolution had begun.

These technological advancements allowed marketers and advertisers to do something that person-to-person selling couldn’t match – messaging at scale. The evolution of these technologies gave marketers the ability to push their message out to ever more people. To track, to ‘personalise’ and convert at a scale never before imagined.

At the click of a button, a modern marketer can reach millions of people across the globe, in a matter of minutes.

Marketing technology left sales in the dust.

It’s true that marketing tech can be leveraged to help reps, too. The same channels and tactics exist in B2B lead generation as they do in B2C marketing: PPC, SEO, content marketing, webinars… all drive inbound leads and (hopefully) sales, but if a product or service truly requires person-to-person connection to get over the line, there’s a bottleneck. Salespeople, like all of us, only have so much time in their day, much of which is taken up by admin, research and prospecting.

There’s an important point for us to remember, here. Having a ‘human in the loop’ is not about pushing prospects into a purchase, it’s about building trust and forging personal relationships in a way that marketing alone cannot.

The true magic of sales lives in connection, in those moments where the expertise and intuition of the rep helps to solve a problem for the potential buyer. Where trust is built, and loyalty is won. That is what all truly great salespeople know and strive for.

This poses a question, one that – if answered – could propel sales into a whole new era:

How do we scale personal relationships?

Scaling personal relationships

Salespeople know the bottleneck of time is a problem. Countless surveys and studies show that reps feel hamstrung by unproductive prospecting and stifled by administration. According to one such study carried out by CSO insights, salespeople on average spend just 33% of their day actually talking to prospects, 71% of reps feel they spend too much time doing data entry and 68% of businesses report struggling with lead generation.

McKinsey’s comprehensive study on Automation and the future of work assessed the “automatability” of over 2,000 workplace activities in 2018 and concluded that over 40% of time spent on sales tasks could be automated.

These statistics are not anomalies. A casual Google search will reveal a multitude of blogs and papers that mirror these concerns. Salespeople (and therefore, the businesses they represent) are being held back from achieving their true potential. Their time, such a precious resource in relationship building, is being squandered on peripheral tasks.

Enter: Sales Intelligence

Sales intelligence (SI) refers to a broad range of tools and technologies designed to enable organisations to find and utilise sales-related data and insights.

In plain English, sales intelligence tools help salespeople find, extract and sort information in an instant: slashing the time required for quality prospecting, research and lead generation.

Better still, where sales intelligence meets sales productivity, these tools relieve reps of the need for monotonous data entry. Robotic process automation (RPA) and artificial intelligence (AI), the primary drivers of SI, have the power to eradicate the time lost to such tasks.

This is it. The salesperson’s second brain. The key to scaling personal connection.

Quality lead generation becomes a source of delight, not stress. Collecting information on prospects, discovering those all-important shared interests, finding contact information, spotting buying signals… all become effortless with the right tools.

There’s a force multiplier effect, here. In freeing your reps from manual prospecting and data entry you don’t just free up the 66% of their day spent on these tasks, you free them from the power drain of even thinking about it.

Imagine a sales team laser-focused on building relationships at 3x the rate they ever could before. A team with more time to spend nurturing, educating and exciting your customers.

For some businesses, this dream is already becoming a reality.

Sales intelligence has been a category on G2 since way back in 2012. Five long years ago, Harvard Business Review told sales leaders that it was time to develop ‘Machine Intelligence’. Some business leaders listened, and those that did, prospered.

Salesforce’s State of Sales (2020) shows that high-performing sales teams are 4.1x more likely to use AI and machine learning applications than their peers. According to Deloitte, 83% of B2B AI-adopters are seeing rapid and positive changes, with 53% achieving moderate benefits, and 30% experiencing substantial benefits.

As you might imagine many of these early adopters were large firms, or rather, firms with large budgets. This is no longer the case. In accordance with Moore’s Law, as computing power increases, it decreases in relative cost at an exponential pace.

Removing cost as a barrier of entry is a key driver for the sales intelligence revolution. Sales intelligence is becoming democratised. Salespeople with a drive to achieve don’t need the financial backing of their organisation. Entrepreneurs and small business owners can now utilise the same technology as the behemoths of business. For anywhere upwards of $40 a month, they can get in on the action.

Salespeople are cottoning on to the fact that the old ways are dying, and a new world of sales technology is upon us. A world in which they can focus on the magic of human connection.

Grand View’s Sales Intelligence industry report indicates that:

“The global sales intelligence market was valued at $2.3 billion in 2019 and is expected to reach $5.6 billion by 2027, growing at a CAGR of 10.5% from 2020 to 2027.”

These figures, published early in 2020, may even be conservative as to the potential for this sector. The Covid-19 pandemic has rapidly accelerated business transformation, in many cases lighting a fire under the (usually molassic) decision making process of large corporations. We’re in an age of flux, where digital change is being implemented at a speed never before seen.

The sales intelligence revolution is upon us. We are at the dawn of a new era and you have to decide as a salesperson, entrepreneur or business leader – will you take the next leap forward, now, or let your fish sauce be forgotten?

If you’d like to read the rest of the series, subscribe to our email list. If you’d prefer to just spread the good word of sales intelligence, hit the icon below for your preferred community.

Reading Time: 5 minutes

 

Back in 2006, British mathematician Clive Humby coined the (now ubiquitous) phrase, “Data is the new oil”. At the time it raised some eyebrows, now of course we know that Humby was right. Companies that know how to capture, refine and utilise data properly are on track for all the wealth and status afforded to those oil rush pioneers of the 1800s; but the parallel runs deeper than simply fame and fortune:

 

Data, much like oil, is worth far less in its raw state. It too needs to be refined and enriched to reach its true value.

With industries companies increasingly data-driven, knowing how and why to enrich that data is then paramount to success. If you, your company and your team are already putting data to work, it’s time to learn about data enrichment.

 

Definition

Example

Data Sources

• Equifax

• People Data Labs

• 411

• LinkedIn

 

It doesn’t work like this

 

So, what is data enrichment?

 

Data enrichment is, as the name suggests, is the process of enriching existing data with additional (typically external) data in an effort to support and improve upon what is there. Although the base definition remains the same, data enrichment will of course mean different things to different people depending on their job role, industry and desired outcomes.

 

For a salesperson, it might mean bolstering the customer information in their pipeline with external data to craft a more complete customer profile; providing them with a better understanding of their potential clients in order to pitch them correctly and close those all-important deals.  

 

Similarly, for someone in marketing, enriching their CRM data for example will allow them to better identify, segment and market to their chosen audiences. This is especially useful for those in database marketing roles, for obvious reasons!

 

A study by the ONS showed that 27% of the workforce switch jobs every 3 years, meaning every 3 years more than a quarter of your CRM data becomes inaccurate. Using ReTrace allows you to not only do you enrich the data you have, but also unearth potential leads – because every time a contact changes jobs, they take the relationship you have built with them.

 

At LIX we work predominantly with LinkedIn data, but where else can you find b2b data?

 

Source: Kinsta LinkedIn statistics

 

Data Sources & Providers

 

We’ve established that in order to enrich your data, you will need external data to enrich it with. There are a huge range of sources for data, from free directories to paid providers. For data scientists and researchers there are tons of free, public data sets out there. Two of the biggest sources for those are Google Public Data and AWS’ Registry of Open Data.

 

If you’re looking for b2b data to improve sales and/or marketing however, this free public data probably isn’t for you. If you’re looking for information on businesses and people in business, you will more often than not have to pay for that information. With that in mind, let’s run through some popular sources of b2b data.

 

Equifax

 

This might surprise a few of you, but a leading source of b2b data is the credit reporting agency Equifax. The data available leans towards the financial (understandably), but there are plenty of ways to utilise it.

 

According to their website they can help you to:

 

• Segment your customer base using a wide selection of personal attributes

 

• Build up a valuable, in-depth view of the risks and opportunities for your business

• Monitor individuals and businesses for changes, gradual or sudden, that affect their value as customers – such as credit limit changes, CCJs and trends in their financial health

• Accurately analyse the profitability, purchasing profile, buying behaviour and other predictive characteristics of your existing customers and target marketplace

• Determine how best to apply your findings to your marketing, lending, collections and other business strategies, to support your corporate objectives

• Add value for customers with personalized services based on their credit score and financial circumstances

 

People Data Labs

 

People Data Labs refer to themselves as The Single Source of Truth for People Data’ a bold claim – but they may just live up to it.

Their database includes “the resumé, contact, social, and demographic information for over 2.5 billion unique individuals, delivered to you at the scale you need it.”

 

They even offer a free Company or Job Title dataset too. So, if you want to test them out that’s probably the best place to start!

 

411

 

411, a Whitepages company, has been around in some form or another since way back in 1997. Essentially an online extension of the phone book, 411 primarily carries data about individuals and businesses in the US – if you’re looking for someone outside of North America, you may need to look elsewhere.

 

Their main offerings are:

• People Search
• Phone Search
• Address Search (including reverse address search)
• Business Search
• Background Checks
  

 

Does anyone in Gen Z know what one of these is?

 

LinkedIn

 

As you probably already know, LinkedIn is the world’s #1 professional social platform. What you may not know, is that there are almost 800m users on LinkedIn with over 33m businesses. It’s the single largest network of businesses and business professionals… ever!

 

What’s particularly great about LinkedIn, is that it’s UGG – User Generated Content. It’s in the best interest of businesses and individuals alike to keep their profiles (and therefore, data) up to date. Changed job? You will update your own profile. New hire? LinkedIn will add them to your organisation when they change their ‘current role’ data.

 

The issue of course is that LinkedIn don’t sell the data on their platform, but that data is public – so unless you want to copy data by hand, what you need is a LinkedIn data extractor, like LIX. Export up to 10,000 lines of data every single day with no risk to your LinkedIn account (give it a try!).

We have more guides, tips and tricks for LinkedIn here

Reading Time: 3 minutes

How to export someone else’s connections on LinkedIn is a question we get asked a lot here at Lix, so we put together this handy guide to walk you through the process. Before we get into this guide, it’s important to note that you can only view, and therefore export, the connections of someone you are connected to.

View and exporting the connections of someone you are not connected to, is not possible. This is a LinkedIn privacy rule that cannot be bent or broken! Connecting with that person via your LinkedIn, or perhaps a different account, is the only way for you to view their connections.

With that out of the way, let’s get into how to export someone else’s connections on LinkedIn. If you prefer video to text, skip to our video guide!

Step 1. Open your connections

From the LinkedIn feed, head up to ‘My Network’

Then, ‘Connections’

Step 2. Filter your search

Click on ‘Search with filters’

Then ‘All filters’

Step 3. Choose your connection

Scroll down to ‘Connections of’ and type in the name of the connect whose connections you’d like to view

Step 4. Hit the Lix extension

Head to your bookmarks bar and hit the Lix extension. If you don’t have Lix installed, you get it here for free. The Starter plan comes with 1,000 rows of search data exports for free – this should be enough to export the connections of one person!

Step 5. Select your options and export!

Choose your export options – XLS or CSV, whether you want to create a project (where you can save multiple exports into a deduplicated list), the number of profiles to export, you can even generate emails for the people on the list.

There you have it! Everything you need to export your connection’s connections from LinkedIn. Remember, if you don’t have a Lix account you get one here, for free and start right away.

Video Guide:

Lix can also do a lot of other cool things on LinkedIn, including producing email addresses from People searches, data from Company searches and much more.

Why not check out one of our other blogs?

LinkedIn Search: The Ultimate Guide

LinkedIn Helper Tools: How to Growth Hack LinkedIn

How to use LinkedIn: The Complete Walkthrough

Reading Time: 3 minutes

LinkedIn advertising costs are expensive; there’s no getting around it, but there’s good reason for it. On other social platforms, your ads can be seen by anybody with even a passing interest in your industry or niche. However, LinkedIn allows you to qualify your lead in a way the others couldn’t dream to offer.

Simply obtaining a LinkedIn profile URL allows you to check you’re hitting your ideal persona. With LinkedIn’s very own pre-filled Lead Gen form, users are more likely to click through as they feel safe. On your landing page, the chance of bouncing is infinitely higher.

In addition, anyone playing the LinkedIn advertising game will see that the costs seem to be ever increasing. The Campaign Manager seems like a daunting playground when its recommended bid-per-click rises from £8-£20 to £25-£75. But it’s all bark and no bite.

Minimum bid costs are rising slightly, but nobody needs to be paying that, and if we’re wrong, we’ll eat a print out of our words.

From bluechips to start-ups it’s all the same. Your ads may be seen quicker and at prime-time if you bid more, however, it’s not necessary. We’re going to explain why you should be advertising on LinkedIn despite the costs, and how to keep that cost as low as it’ll go.

High Quality Leads

From CEO to office temp, LinkedIn has it all. Using LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager, you can select the level of seniority you want to target. You can include specific job titles for highly targeted campaigns, or even those in fast growing businesses ready to innovate.

This is perfect for both sales and recruitment, giving you the ability to put your creatives right in front of those likely to consume it. You know your business better than any algorithm- choose exactly who sees it.

Additionally, as long as you bid per-click rather than impressions, you only pay when your persona has an interest in your product or services.

We’ve found leads are more likely to part with their profile URL than any other piece of information (it’s less personal). You increase your conversion rate and can vet your lead by asking for just this piece of info.

Also, this is GDPR-friendly and requires no tick-boxes as by continuing the conversation on LinkedIn, they remain the data controller at all times.

Adding to this LinkedIn’s retargeting tool for those who click but do not convert and you have the perfect recipe for filling your funnel with the right people at the right time.

Cost per Click/Result

Video ads tend to outperform image ads every time. This doesn’t mean you need Hollywood special effects – simply having moving text overlaying stock footage works well.

We recommend creating 1080×1080 videos. These are more likely to be seen than the 16:9 footage clogging up the news feed. This gives you the greatest chance of getting more clicks and ultimately more leads into the funnel.

Covid has changed behaviours. Time previously spent lamenting the delayed train lengthening a commute is now spent browsing and consuming content.

Typically, to encourage LinkedIn to run a successful campaign to your entire targeted audience, you bid between £2.50 – £6.00

Now, you can bid more, but the only benefit is that your ads will be seen quicker. Your conversion rates will remain the same, but your cost per click and therefore lead, will increase dramatically. Treat it like a marathon and you’ll get more bang for your buck.

Tips/Tricks to Keep LinkedIn Advertising Costs Low

A little tip is to immediately duplicate your campaign as soon as you start it. It’s more likely to be seen if it’s going out to the same audience twice. Most people scroll without really paying too much attention.

This is a great way with getting seen by more people without paying more. Remember, if you bid per click, you won’t be charged per impression, even if millions see it.

Give to get. Offering a free guide or ebook is a great way of getting a soft commitment and high conversion. Continue the conversation to sell or add them to your retargeting list.

Also, check out our Pinpoint Technique to maximise your ad performance whilst keeping your LinkedIn advertising cost as low as possible.

Reading Time: 8 minutes

If you’ve ever wondered how to export LinkedIn contacts, extract emails, automate lead-finding or generally extract data from LinkedIn – look no further.

Get 1,000 rows of data and 50 valid email exports every single month for free with Lix

In the 18 years since LinkedIn was launched it has become the single largest directory of businesses and business professionals in all of history. Boasting over 722 million members and 30 million companies, it is a veritable goldmine of data. Whether you’re a salesperson digging for leads or a marketer looking for influencers you can find them on LinkedIn.

The problem for many people however, is how do we extract that information from LinkedIn? It’s all well and good having access to the connections we’ve made, but when it comes time to organise and export that data LinkedIn often falls short.

LinkedIn offers a method that is quick and free, but will only export your connection’s name and current position. Not much data. Especially if you’re looking to build out a sales campaign or scour for your next big hire.

This article will explain how to export LinkedIn contacts and, depending on your desired outcome, full profiles and even email addresses into spreadsheets, cloud-based lists and your chosen CRM. This will allow you faster, organised access to your contacts for you to network, pitch to or build closer relationships with.

Export LinkedIn Contacts

You’ve had your LinkedIn profile for years, gradually building connections and forging relationships within your industry and beyond. Your contacts are a pool of useful information, potential clients and further networking opportunities. You have put in the leg work to build an impressive contact list – let’s use it.

Exporting LinkedIn contacts can be done directly from LinkedIn for free. Without the need for an additional tool. However, the free method has its limitations. If you don’t have the budget for an external aid to help with this process, you can skip to the free method.

If you’re looking for richer data, let’s take a look at Lix’s comprehensive way to export LinkedIn contacts. Lix’s dedicated LinkedIn data extraction tool comes with multiple options and features. Each designed for you to build a more complete data package.  Lix gives you 50 free emails and 1,000 rows of search data every single month – so if you want the fastest, easiest method, sign up for a free account and get started!

Here’s our step by step guide to exporting your LinkedIn contacts, followed by a handy video!

1. Ensure you are logged in to LIX and that your LIX browser extension is enabled.

When you initially sign up for LIX we will detect which internet browser you are using and provide you with the correct guide for that browser. We currently support all major browsers, so whether you’re a Chrome wiz, Safari stalwart or Opera fanatic we have you covered!

(Psst… We’ve listed the guides here in case you didn’t find yours!)

• Safari
• Edge
• Internet Explorer
• Chrome
• Firefox
• Opera

  2. Click on ‘My Network’ in the top toolbar, then ‘Connections’ on the left

  This will take you through to your connection list, ready to export. You can sort the list by recently added (your most recent connections), first name or last name. You can also filter this list using the powerful LinkedIn search filters.

  First, ‘My Network’:

  

  Then, ‘Connections’:

  

  3. Click on your (now activated) LIX browser extension

  Whenever you land on a page with data that LIX can extract, you’ll notice your browser extension activate, or light’s up. That means you’re ready to hit the button and open the LIX toolbar.

  Depending on your browser, it should look like something like this:

  

  4. Select your options from the LIX tool

  As the LIX tool unfolds, you will notice a number of options for you to choose from.

  

  Left Column Options

  The options on the left determine how many results to extract, and in what format to export your LinkedIn connections. You can choose to export as Excel, or CSV depending on which you prefer to use – or which option is best supported by your chosen CRM. Most CRM systems will allow you upload contacts in either of these formats.

  If you’re using the LIX Lists feature, you can select which ‘project’ or list you want to export these results to. This is especially helpful if you’re exporting multiple searches and want to de-duplicate results.

  Lastly for the left-hand option column, we need to select the number of results. Your selection here is impacted by your selections in the right-hand column

  Right Column Options

  We delve into these options further down the page. In a nutshell, these options determine whether you want to use the Lix email-finder to generate 98% accurate validated email addresses for your contacts, if you want to extract their full profiles or whether you want to use the automated profile viewer.

  The important thing to note here is the effect these options have on the number of results you would like to export. LIX cleverly keeps your data extract limits under LinkedIn’s fair use threshold. This means your account is always safe from violating the rules.

  The threshold is 1,000 viewed pages per day. So, if you decide to export just the search results as you see them (with or without emails) you can export a whopping 10,000 contacts in a single day.

  If you opt for ‘Deep Profile’ this will extract all the data from your contact’s full LinkedIn profile, meaning you can extract up to 1,000 in a day.

  ‘Generate Emails’ will use LIX’s intelligent email finder to search the web and provide you with 98% accurate validated addresses for each contact, automatically, within minutes. This is an extremely powerful tool for outreach and lead generation!

  ‘View Profiles’ is an automated profile viewer, recommended for use in People searches rather than with your current contacts. It automatically views the profiles of people in a given list so that they get a notification letting them know you stopped by. It can be a great way to warm up potential new connections.

  Want to know more about these options? Jump to Generate Emails, Deep Profile, View Profiles.

  5. Selected your options? Now LIX IT!

  Once you’ve made a decision about what kind of data you want from your LinkedIn contact export, it’s time to hit the button and extract those results.

  As your export processes, you will notice your LinkedIn moving through the relevant pages in the background as LIX does its work. Once it’s ready, you will see a new button appear:

  

  Your results are ready to be downloaded! Hit the button and download your exported LinkedIn contacts in your chosen format.

  If you opted to use a project, you can head back over to lix-it.com and head to your log in area. Here you will see the ‘Projects’ tab with your list ready to be exported and sent to your email address.

  We have also put this step by step guide into a handy video if you prefer to learn audio-visually!

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDUK8XzRI74

  If you’ve followed along with the steps so far, you have exported your LinkedIn contacts into a spreadsheet and are ready to get to work. Whatever your desired outcome is for the data, you should have everything in place to make that happen.

  If you’ve used LinkedIn’s free method, you will only have a list of your connections and not the added data we provide with the LIX tool. Extracting with LIX allows you to gain richer data and build a more complete picture of your contacts. Instead of simply working from their names and current positions, you have an email address, work history, education, number of followers, skills… Data you might need to build a sales campaign or locate your next hire.

  Export LinkedIn Contacts (Free Method)

  If you’re still not sold on the benefits of using LIX, or you don’t have the budget and basic data will do, LinkedIn provide a great step by step guide, here.

  In a nutshell, this is how it’s done:

  • Hit the button labelled ‘Me’ on the upper menu of the LinkedIn homepage
  • Click on ‘Settings & Privacy’ from the menu that unfolds
  • There is a tab labelled ‘Privacy’, open that tab
  • Inside the area marked ‘How LinkedIn uses your data’, click on the button that says ‘Change’
  • This will lead you to a ‘download your data’ page, here you must select ‘Connections’
  • Check the primary email address attached to your LinkedIn, a list of your connections will be sent there

  Additional LinkedIn Data Extraction

  Generate Emails

  This powerful feature is one our most popular, and it’s easy to see why! If the individual you’re exporting has their email address listed publicly on LinkedIn, we will export that for you as the simplest option. If, however, they have no email address listed (commonly this is case) our email generator will use a clever automated system to find it for you.

  This process involves scanning the web for possible email addresses, permutations and email addresses for others within that person’s organisation. When you export is complete, the data you receive will include that person’s most likely email address and a selection of other possibilities where possible. This means we can transform LinkedIn into a huge sales, marketing, events and networking outreach platform in just a few clicks!

  Profile Enrichment

  Exporting all the data from a LinkedIn profile without slow, manual copying was not possible until the LIX Deep Profile feature was launched. The Profile Enrichment tool will trawl through every profile in an exported people search, and extract their:

  • Name
  • Description
  • Location
  • Industry
  • Profile Link
  • Headline
  • Personal Website
  • Shared Connections
  • Education
  • Experience

  This is especially useful for recruiters looking to extract full CVs from a profile, but it’s also incredibly potent data for a marketer or salesperson. This deep dive into their profile gives you insight into their work background, education and possible shared connections. Data that can be used to build more complete targeted outreach campaigns, or indeed wider sales campaigns at an organisational level.

  https://youtu.be/xlo02MON9qk

  Profile Viewer

  LIX’s profile viewer is primarily for use when LIX’ing search results, rather than current contacts. If you’re a regular LinkedIn user, you’ll know that when someone views your profile LinkedIn lets you know.

  Using profile viewer, you can automate up to 1,000 profile views a day. Meaning 1,000 individuals you’ve chosen through LinkedIn’s filtered search will get that notification every single day.

  If you’re using LIX for data extraction, don’t use up your daily threshold with profile views! However on those days in which you have no searches or contacts to export, it’s a great tool to boost your outreach, even in a small way.

  A percentage of those who see you’ve viewed their profile will view yours in return (curiosity is a powerful thing!) – you can then offer to connect with them, having warmed up your introduction ever so slightly with mutual profile views.

  Export LinkedIn Search Results

  This article explored in-depth how to use LIX’s features to export LinkedIn contacts with the richest data possible. However, you can use these tools outside of your current network in conjunction with a LinkedIn search.

  Simply perform your search, filter your results, hit the LIX extension and select your options – just as we did with your connections.

  This opens up the entire LinkedIn database for extraction…. 722 million members, at your fingertips.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLHx5yBdKes

While you’re here, why not read our guide to LinkedIn Influencer Marketing?

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Most blogs about Sales Intelligence software start with a long blurb about what sales intelligence is, then go into the benefits of sales intelligence overall, before finally pitching you their tool as the one and only solution to all and any sales intelligence needs. Not this blog.

In this blog I am going to break down the different types of sales intelligence software, to help you find the one that fits you and your business. Yes, Lix (my company) will be on the list – but only for the niche we cover. There are lots of different tools, offering lots of different solutions. The truth is that most sales teams that are invested in sales intelligence use a combination of apps and programs to get the information they need. Be wary of anyone who pitches you a ‘one-size-fits-all’, because it just doesn’t (and couldn’t) exist.

If you don’t know what sales intelligence software is, I will very quickly explain before we get into the nitty gritty of what each tool does:

The category Sales Intelligence includes a range of apps and tools that broadly speaking, use B2B data from various sources (sometimes internal, sometimes external) to help sales teams reach a goal. That might be a lead generation or conversion goal, driving revenue into a business in the short term. It might also be an analytical goal, informing strategy for future quarters and targets.

As you can image, there are a thousand different ways to achieve these outcomes. Which is probably why you’re looking for a guide to which tool is right for you. So, let’s get into it. Below are my picks for the best tools in some of the top Sales Intelligence software categories. They’re loosely ordered to fit the sales journey – from lead gen, to reporting.

Lead Generation

Direct Dials: Zoominfo

If you’re looking for direct dials, Zoominfo have been in the game providing business phone numbers for over 20 years now.

The efficacy of ZoomInfo largely depends on where you live and where you sell. If you’re looking for phone number and data for US-based companies, you’re in luck. However once you cross the pond and start looking into EMEA, ZoomInfo can be less reliable.

They’re also the most expensive tool on the market, but they do offer the most functionality (that’s why they’re the only company to appear twice on this list!).

Email Discovery: Lix

Yes, I’m one of the co-founders of Lix and you are on the Lix blog, so of course we are on this list. That’s not the only reason we’re here, though. Lots of companies on the market offer email discovery for lead generation, but this isn’t a blog about email finders – this is about sales intelligence tools. Lix fits into this category where others don’t, because of the intelligence we apply to the data we find.

For example, our People search exports are all augmented by AI. Utilising our world-class database, our machine learning models are trained to recognise cues in profile text and social interactions in order to categorise users by job function and ascertain their seniority level. Your team can export up to 10,000 rows of augmented data every single day. We also extract more data points from LinkedIn than anyone else, meaning you don’t have to switch between multiple apps to enrich your contact data. Combine this with 98% accurate validated emails and you’ve got a powerful prospecting tool.

Of course, I am bias – so please give it a try and see for yourself. We offer 50 free leads per month on our freemium plan (which is also more than anyone else on the market, #bragging).

Buyer Behaviour

6sense

Buyer behaviour is an exciting new category. Tracking how and where your potential customers are researching your product… using AI to predict where they are in their buyers journey… it all sounded like science fiction just a few decades ago. Now, we have companies like 6sense providing these buyer intent insights to sales and marketing teams around the world.

In their own words, 6sense “use intent data to light the dark funnel” which is not as ‘sci-fi bad guy’ as it sounds. Essentially, they aggregate search and engagement data from across the web, to provide businesses with a picture of which companies (or which kinds of companies) are searching for their products and services. Their AI models then use this data to predict where these searchers are in their buyer journey.

Armed with this kind of information, you can strike at the right time – pitching potential customers just when they’re ready to buy. It’s sales, Jim, but not as we know it.

Sales Engagement

Hubspot

Hubspot are 15 year veterans of the CRM world and G3 category leaders in Sales Engagement, year after year. Hubspot’s Sales Hub is a powerful tool that will help your team with exactly when (and how) to engage with prospects.

Imagine a sales team who are automatically prompted to follow up at the right time, provided with templates to do so, with open rates, conversation and interactions all tracked. For the data-minded sales director, it’s a dream.

The Sales Hub is now also offering conversation intelligence – AI that automatically takes notes during calls. That conversation data is then filtered to discover top objections, competitive trends and coaching opportunities. Powerful stuff for the larger sales team.

Analytics & Forecasting

Adaptive Planning

Sales analysis and forecasting is nothing new, but we’ve come a long way from manual data entry and a sea of spreadsheets.

Workday adaptive planning allows you to monitor sales metrics with easy-to-digest visuals, whilst simultaneously using your sales data for sales forecasting, pipeline management, sales territory scoring and a whole lot more. They even offer the ability to run ‘what-if’ scenarios in real time. The benefits of having all that data not only on hand and easy to access, but actively informing your decisions going forward is a game-changer for large sales teams.

These are the kinds of insights that used to be provided by teams of analysts. The turnaround was slow, it was expensive and you certainly didn’t get real-time feedback. Tools like Adaptive Planning can do for sales what Google Analytics did for marketing.

Overall

ZoomInfo

Yes, Zoominfo are back for a second entry on this list, and for good reason. They are the closest thing to the mythical one-size-fits-all, as they have some offering to fit most of the categories listed here (but not all!).

As with all one-size products, they might not fit every niche perfectly. It will be easier to train staff in one system, though. Once again though it’s important to note that their data is very US-centric and it is fairly expensive. However if you are looking to purchase one tool that does (almost) everything, they’re your best bet. Just make sure you’ve got deep pockets!

Reading Time: 6 minutes

LinkedIn ads are expensive – and they deserve to be. Anyone who is anyone in business has a LinkedIn account. If you want to reach them while they’re in ‘work mode’, advertising on LinkedIn is a no-brainer. So what if there was a way to hack your ad targeting and drastically increase your ROI? The Pinpoint Technique does just that. If you’re running LinkedIn ads, jump on this method now while it’s still hot!

What if there was a way to hack your LinkedIn ads and drastically increase your ROI?

The real value of LinkedIn is in its data. Among the 800m users (and counting!) are an estimated 30 million decision makers. All of whom are neatly listed with their name, title, company and a wealth of other data points to dig into. Using the powerful LinkedIn search you can find the exact person, or group of people, you want to communicate with.

The problem is, that level of data detail hasn’t been available for use in LinkedIn ads. As you will know, LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager comes with certain restrictions. You need to create a large enough audience size to show your ads to before they will go live. The targeting options, while much improved, can still be a little loose. Many of us have found ourselves ticking boxes and selecting options that don’t exactly match our target personas, in order to reach our audience size goals.

Are you a cosmetics company looking to reach C-Suite individuals in the beauty sector? Well, you’ll be selecting a box marked ‘retail’ and showing that (very expensive) advertisement to thousands of completely irrelevant users.

That’s a big problem when we’re being prompted to bid up to $75 per click for certain keywords and audiences. No matter how big your marketing budget is, surely none of us are comfortable with burning cash like that. At least not unless we’re completely sure that the right people are clicking.

There’s been no way to harness the power of LinkedIn’s data for ads… until now

This is where things get really interesting. Finally, we can harness the power of LinkedIn’s search function, combined with the treasure trove of business data, to supercharge our LinkedIn ads.

The Pinpoint Technique enables you to search LinkedIn for your ideal personas, sort and filter the results to find the exact people you are looking for and then advertise to those people only! Combine that with some clever algorithm-gaming strategies and you’ve got the key to ultra high-performing LinkedIn ads.

Before we get into the process, really think about this for a second. Using this technique, you can personally choose the individuals that see your ads before they go live. That means not a single penny of your ad spend is wasted. Even if they don’t convert immediately, you have placed your brand in front of relevant industry professionals, rather than unrelated individuals who happen to fit into LinkedIn’s tickbox.

If you’re ready to hack your LinkedIn ads, let’s begin…

The Pinpoint Technique

The aim of the Pinpoint Technique is to build a list of hand-picked individuals that exactly match your desired personas. Then, you upload that list to your LinkedIn Campaign Manager. This can be done in two ways, one that you pay for (faster and more efficient) and one that is free (possible, but slower). You will likely recoup the costs of the paid method in your first campaign. If you’re a small business and those costs are prohibitive, take your time and use the free option.

Step 1. LinkedIn search

Search the desired personas for your campaign. There are a ton of powerful filters built into the LinkedIn search that can really help you get granular here. If you’re not au-fait with LinkedIn’s search, we wrote a whole guide on it here.

It helps at this point if you have LinkedIn Sales Navigator, as this will allow you to access more results from each search. Standard LinkedIn let’s you view the first 1,000 search results, Sales Navigator shows you the first 2,500. As we’re aiming to build a list of 10,000 individuals, Sales Navigator is a real shortcut.

Step 2. Export the results

Once you’ve found your ideal ad-viewers, it’s time to export. For this step, you will need to use a LinkedIn search export tool, like Lix. Again, there is a free option and a paid option here, depending on your budget and how quickly you want to move. Lix’s free starter plan allows you to export 1,000 search results every month. It would take a while to build your complete list, but it’s possible.

Lix’s Data Miner package costs $100 for a month, but will allow you unlimited search exports (up to 10,000 results per day!). You will almost certainly make that back in your first campaign. If you are already running LinkedIn ads, I would definitely advise that you carve that $100 out of your budget so you can hit the ground running.

One of the added benefits of using Lix for this, is Lix’s ‘lists’ feature. Instead of exporting each search into an individual CSV file, then combining and deduplicating them yourself (snore!), Lix can do this for you automatically in the cloud. You can export your searches from LinkedIn into a ‘project’, Lix will then deduplicate multiple searches for you – leaving you with one, pre-cleaned list of data ready for export.

Step 3. Contact targeting template

To upload your results ready for use in your ads, you’ll need to copy the data over into one of LinkedIn’s Contact Targeting templates:

Contact Targeting Template.

This is just a simple copy & paste job!

If for some reason you’re not using Lix lists, you can perform multiple exports and then copy the data into the template until you’ve reached the 10k goal. When that’s done, you’re almost ready to start those ads…

Step 4. Upload your list

Once you’re happy with your audience, head over to the LinkedIn Campaign Manager and select ‘Matched Audiences’ under the ‘Account Assets’ tab. Click ‘Create Audience’ and select ‘Upload Company/Contact List’.

Once you’ve uploaded your CSV you’ll need to wait up to 48 hours for LinkedIn to build your audience. Sometimes the Campaign Manager can’t match the names in your CSV to a profile, and not all of the people on your list make it through. If that’s the case, don’t panic, simply top-up your list by repeating steps 1-3.

When the green light appears next to your audience, it’s go time. You’re ready to send your LinkedIn ads out to your hand-picked list.

Bonus Content: LinkedIn Ads Tips and Tricks

The Pinpoint Technique is not the only way to improve the ROI of your LinkedIn advertising. Combine the method above with some of the following tips to supercharge your ads.

Video First

In our experience, image ads perform poorly both in click-through-rates (CTR) and conversions. Video ads consistently attract more attention, and allow you to convey more information about your offering. We recommend including text or subtitles wherever possible, particularly if your video contains sound.

This doesn’t mean you need to go out and pay for an animated explainer video, or have a crew go out and film testimonials (but if you’ve got that content, use it!). You can build a simple slideshow video, or use a stock template, in something like Canva, Lumen5 or Animoto.

Game the algorithm

The more engagement your ad gets, the less each click costs. If you’ve ever run Facebook ads before, you’ll know this as the ‘relevancy score’. If your ad gets lots of likes and comments, it is seen as being relevant to the audience and therefore less costly to run.

You can use an app like Podawaa to join LinkedIn engagement pods. Pods allow LinkedIn users to auto-engage with each other’s content. When your ad is live, simply instruct your pod to engage with it and watch your ROI increase.

Bidding

We almost always recommend bidding for clicks. You can mostly assume that if someone clicks on your CTA, they have some form of interest in your product. We can also build cohorts consisting of those who have interacted with previous campaigns for retargeting, allowing us to hone in on prospective clients.

Ignore LinkedIn’s ‘maximum delivery’ option and select manual bidding. LinkedIn’s recommended bid is always far higher than the minimum bid. If you allow the Campaign Manager to bid for you, you can be assured that it will almost always bid the maximum. LinkedIn is a business too, remember!

You can adjust your bid based on the data you get from the campaign. If you’re not getting the clicks you want, up it a little. Do this gradually to find the sweet spot. It takes a little more effort but it will make a huge difference to your ROI over time.

Retargeting

This tip is short and sweet. If you’re sending users to a landing page, make sure you have a retargeting pixel installed. This allows you to capture those that don’t convert. Maybe you didn’t catch them this time, but it doesn’t mean they’re not interested. If you can retarget them, it gives you a second bite of the apple.

Lead Gen Forms

If the capturing leads is your primary goal, then we recommend LinkedIn’s internal Lead Gen Form tool. We’ve found that the typical conversion rate with this tool is much higher than other types of LinkedIn ad. Users feel more comfortable when they don’t have to leave the page they’re on.

Unlike sending users to a landing page to capture their details, the lead gen form pre-populates their information based on their account details, allowing them to submit their interest almost instantly. They click the CTA. They click submit. They’re a lead.

If your team are comfortable prospecting via LinkedIn, you can optimise your form to include just the user’s LinkedIn Profile URL. This way, the lead is parting with as little information as possible, increasing the chance of conversion.

Plus, if you’re a Lix user, you can run a search for their profile and use our ‘Generate Email’ option to find and export their email address using our clever algorithm, allowing you to follow up via email.

Lead gen form do come with an option to acquire emails, pre-filled, but the email provided here is the email the user signed up to LinkedIn with, which is almost always a personal email. Most of the time businesses will want a business email address, therefore this feature can be fairly redundant.

There you have it, The Pinpoint Technique will supercharge your LinkedIn advertising and maximise your ROI. Combine it with our best practice tips and tricks and your campaigns will soon be the toast of the office.