How To Cold Message Someone On Linkedin

Then, you can start reaching out to them one-by-one.

Usually with a pretty standard template like:

"Hey {first_name},

Came across your profile when I was looking for like-minded marketers in the same area to connect with.

Loved your latest post on automating emails to save time.

Hope to connect and keep up with more of your content.

Cheers,

(your name)."

Few notes here:

You should always strive to find some common ground . Same industry/location or something you found interesting about them in your cold message helps.
Personalization is super important. Mention something unique so that it shows you care. Some flattery about how you liked their latest blog post with specific info from it usually works (of course if it's sincere).
Give them a reason to reply . Make sure you're not pitching in the very first message. You can instead ask a question about how they got certain results in their latest case study. This shows you're actually interested, and in 9/10 cases, they're going to appreciate the kind words and reply.

But if you really want to take things a step further, here's what you can do.

Using LinkedIn advanced filters

The more specific your LinkedIn cold messages – the higher your reply rate.

So, here are a couple of underrated tricks you can use in your filtering:

Use a Boolean search (most people don't even know about this feature). Essentially, you can use different words to describe similar concepts on their profiles. For example, you can search for "marketing" OR "growth-hacking" (our target audience), LinkedIn will give you the results of people who have any of those terms in their profiles.
Similarly, you can do an AND search that shows results for people with both terms in their profile. E.g. "marketing" AND "LinkedIn" for people who work with LinkedIn marketing.
Use LinkedIn Sales Navigator for better prospecting and target people based on job change alerts , use the advanced search filter to target even more specific LinkedIn groups, and even find prospects similar to your existing customers (something like lookalike audiences).

So, now you've found your target audience on LinkedIn and you're ready to reach out.

Here are some proven strategies that focus on boosting your reply rate that brought results for us.

boost-your-outreach

Top 5 LinkedIn Outreach Message Strategies and Templates That Get a ~49% Reply Rate

Part of why certain cold messages work so well is because of the outreach campaign.

If you want to boost your LinkedIn cold messages reply rate, you'll need to think about your outreach message strategies .

Every time you're doing outreach, keep these 3 things in mind:

Personalization.

Common ground.

Value.

Because once you find your target audience, you'll need to make sure you're mentioning the above in your cold messages.

With that said, let's take a look at a couple of outreach strategies and templates that worked for us.

Content retargeting LinkedIn growth-hack

This is a favorite of ours and is super useful for connecting with your exact target audience.

The process goes something like this:

Find a post that went viral by an influencer in your niche.
Scrape the list of people who commented or liked it.
Automatically reach out to them using the world's safest LinkedIn automation tool (yes, that's Expandi ).

Simple, right?

Check out the full content retargeting LinkedIn growth-hack case study here for a more detailed breakdown of why this outreach message strategy works so well.

Here's the cold message template used for this cold message strategy that more than 70% of the people accepted the invitation for and 40% responded to my follow-ups.:

Connection Request Template (Interest in the Same Post)

"Hi {first_name}.

Saw you also liked the amazing LinkedIn Growth Hack post by Ugljesa Djuric from Lemtalk.

I guess we have growth in common.

Love it!

Let's connect,

Stefan"

Follow-up 1 (1 day after connection request was accepted)

"Great to be connected {first_name}!

Which part of the Growth Hacking techniques that Ugljesa shared did you like the most?

I just finished writing a step-by-step LinkedIn growth hack that includes the templates and tools that generated me 40 conversions a week.

I thought it might be useful for you too… So here it is: https://blog.expandi.io/the-best-way-to-generate-leads-on-linkedin/ "

Follow-up 2 (7 days after no reaction message 1)

"Hi {First_name}, was wondering if you had the chance to read my article and if it gave you any ideas for your LinkedIn growth strategy?

Would love to hear your thoughts"

Facebook group LinkedIn outreach growth-hack

This is another simple LinkedIn outreach strategy that works just like the above one.

But in this case, we'll be scraping a Facebook group and reach out to its members on LinkedIn.

As long as there's a popular Facebook group for your niche (which there should be), this cold message strategy should work for you as well.

Here are the steps:

Find a Facebook group you want to target.
Use the Phantombuster free Facebook group extractor tool (basically a tool that scrapes the group members list for you).
Use Phantombuster LinkedIn profile URL finder API to find the LinkedIn profile of the people on your list.
Upload the final list on Expandi and launch a connector campaign to connect with them.

Check out the full Facebook group LinkedIn outreach growth-hack case study for more info on LinkedIn automation and more LinkedIn message examples here.

If done well, this is another great way to reach out to like-minded people in a non-spammy and intrusive way.

In my case, I reached out to the Dux-Soup User Group .

Dux-Soup is a LinkedIn automation tool like Expandi, but it's chrome-based and lacks some of the advanced outreach features.

By focusing on the common-ground (LinkedIn automation and growth-hacking), I managed to gain a 72% acceptance rate, 49% response to follow-ups, and 42 total booked demos .

Here's the outreach template for this:

Connection request

"Hi {first_name}, I noticed your profile and wanted to reach out as I see we are both members of the Facebook Group Dux Soup users.

I guess we have growth in common.

Love it!

Let's connect.

Stefan"

Follow-up 1 (1 day after connection request was accepted)

"{first_name}, I'm working on a much safer tool for LinkedIn automation (It's cloud based, so LinkedIn doesn't detect it), and to avoid making something useless, I wanted to find people who can help me by sharing their thoughts.

I'd love to get your feedback on it, if you don't mind?"

Follow-up 2 (5 days after no reaction message 1)

"Does this sound interesting enough to justify a short conversation? Please let me know what you decide, {first_name}?"

Follow-up 3 (7 days after no reaction message 2)

"I still love to show you this amazing software in person {first_name}.

Just look if you can match a day and time in my agenda right below. You won't regret I promise https://calendly.com/expandi-demo "

PS – And if you're wondering about Dux-Soup, learn why Expandi is the best alternative to Dux-Soup here.

LinkedIn outreach strategy that gets you light years ahead of your competitors

This outreach strategy is a little different from the above ones (more complex too), but it's also incredibly powerful .

Why's that?

Because we'll be targeting a hyper specific target audience using a specific tech stack.

In fact, it's going to be so specific that your leads will want to accept your request because they'll be curious as to how you found that information about them in the first place.

Here's how it works:

Use BuiltWith to filter websites in the United States using Albacross (who we'll be targeting)
Use FindThatLead to upload the domain names from the CSV file and find information about those sites.
Use Phantombuster LinkedIn URL profile finder to turn the above names into LinkedIn profiles we can target.
Finally, use our favorite LinkedIn outreach tool Expandi to reach out and connect to our leads.

Full case study here as well as more info on using a dynamic placeholder tag and an alternative outreach campaign template.

Make sure you mention Albacross in your outreach message and you should be good to go.

With that, more than 70% of the people accepted my invitation request and 50% responded to my cold message follow-ups .

Here are the outreach templates for this:

Connection request

"Hi {first_name},

Came across your profile and wanted to reach out as I see we are both Albacross users.

Would be great to connect with someone like minded because I have some questions to share.

Stefan"

Follow-up Message 1 (1 day after accepting connection request)

"Great to be connected {first_name}!

I really like Albacross, but how do you reach out to the visitors identified on {IF EXIST=Website} Type your message containing the {Website}{ELSE}your website{ENDIF}?"

Follow-up Message 2 (5 day if no reply on message 1)

"Btw, we developed an automatic follow-up sequence on LinkedIn for Albacross users like you. (It increased conversions up to 400%).

I wanted to find people who can help me by sharing their thoughts {first_name}. I'd love to get your feedback on it, if you don't mind?"

Follow-up Message 3 (7 day after no reply on message 2)

"Does this sound interesting enough to justify a short conversation?

Please let me know what you decide, {first_name}? Glad to answer any questions you might have."

That's a dynamic placeholder we used in the follow-up message 1. Basically, the code in it will be replaced by their website name.

The ultimate omni channel LinkedIn growth-hack with hyper personalization

Here's another interesting outreach strategy that goes way beyond the norm.

In this tactic, we go all in on personalization and reach our prospects on channels outside LinkedIn.

It may sound a bit complex, so, hope you're ready.

Create a strong and relevant offer for your target audience. Remember ours? It's this top 3 LinkedIn outreach strategies guide. Then, make a LinkedIn post and tell your followers to comment if they want to receive it.
Promote the post via Lempod to get people automatically talking about your post (also great for social proof).
Once you have a long list of people who commented on your post, create an Expandi campaign to connect with them (if you're not connected yet) and a messenger campaign (if you're already connected).
Use Zapier to connect Expandi to Lemlist (email outreach tool we'll be using).
Create a Lemlist email outreach campaign and add it to the rest of the Zapier campaign.

Check out the full LinkedIn lead generation email omnichannel outreach growth-hack for a more detailed guide and the exact cold message templates used.

Seems complex, but if you follow the step-by-steps it's pretty straightforward.

Essentially, we connect with people who commented on LinkedIn and then reach out to them via email (Lemlist).

This way, we make sure they've read our PDF and then we ask what they thought of it and if there's anything we can do to help. This is also super useful for lead generation , in addition to making sure they reply.

With this cold message outreach strategy, I gained a 80.2% acceptance rate on LinkedIn.

Connector Campaign Request Template:

"Heyo {first_name}

I saw your comment on my post about the Top 3 LinkedIn Outreach Strategies.

Would love to connect so I can send you the PDF. :-)"

Messenger Campaign Outreach Message:

"Heyo {first_name}, I saw you comment on my post about the Top 3 LinkedIn Outreach Strategies.

Cool! I will send it over soon via mail."

Increase brand reach and awareness with a PDF lead magnet LinkedIn growth-hack

Last but not least, here's another LinkedIn outreach strategy that's really thinking outside the box.

We'll be using Expandi to reach our prospects on LinkedIn, Hunter to scrape the emails of our leads, Facebook Ads to retarget our warm leads, and of course, Zapier to connect all of the tools together.

Here's how:

Create a strong, valuable offer (we'll be using our LinkedIn outreach strategies PDF here again).
Use LinkedIn Sales Navigator to prepare a search for our target market.
Create a connector campaign on Expandi and import the above sales search to the Sales navigator search tab.
Connect Zapier with Expandi.
Log in Hunter , connect it to Zapier.
Now, you need to create a custom Facebook audience and connect the Zap to the Audience you created.
Finally, go to Facebook ads manager , select Customer List and upload a CSV list with some emails to create the audience.

Check out the full LinkedIn growth hack to increase brand reach and awareness case study here.

Now, that might sound really complicated. But this long LinkedIn and Facebook cold message outreach strategy does pay off in the end.

We tested 2 different LinkedIn outreach campaigns with Expandi here, and the results are as follows: