Prospecting is a crucial part of sales and marketing. It involves researching and identifying potential customers that are a good fit for your product or service. Two of the most popular prospecting channels are LinkedIn and email. But which one is more effective for outreach?
Both LinkedIn and email have their strengths and weaknesses when it comes to prospecting. LinkedIn allows you to easily identify and connect with the right decision makers thanks to its robust profiling and search functionality. However, with email you can send more personalized messages at scale.
In this article, we’ll compare LinkedIn and email outreach across several factors:
- Open and response rates
- Making meaningful connections
- Personalization capabilities
- Nurturing and following up
- Targeting the right prospects
- Automation and integration
- Measuring success
By the end, you’ll have the information you need to determine which channel may be more effective for your unique outreach efforts.
Open and Response Rates
The open and response rates you can achieve with LinkedIn versus email outreach campaigns vary quite a bit:
On LinkedIn, open rates for InMail messages average around 30%, while response rates range from 5-15% on average.
The open rates are higher compared to email because recipients are notified of new messages directly on the LinkedIn platform and will often check them while browsing LinkedIn.
However, getting a prospect to not just open but respond and engage on LinkedIn can be more challenging. Many recipients see InMail as more formal communication and are less compelled to respond compared to a personalized email.
For email outreach, open rates average 15-25% for cold outreach campaigns. However, response rates are typically higher, ranging from 10-30% on average.
While email open rates are lower, prospects may be more inclined to respond. Email feels like a faster, lighter medium for engagement. Recipients will often quickly reply to an email if the message resonates.
Key Takeaway
While open rates are higher on LinkedIn, the response rates achieved via email outreach tend to be significantly higher. This means you may generate more qualified conversations with prospects through email campaigns.
Making Meaningful Connections
Beyond open and response rates, the quality of the connections and conversations you can achieve is important:
With LinkedIn InMail, you are contacting people directly through their LinkedIn profile. This immediately provides a more meaningful context to how you are reaching out to someone.
You can establish common ground and credibility by:
- Referencing shared connections, employers, interests etc. from their profile
- Mentioning specific work and background that is relevant
- Personalizing messages to align with their role, industry, goals etc.
This level of personalization and relevance right out of the gate can help demonstrate alignment and get the prospect’s attention.
With email prospecting, you typically won’t have the same depth of profile information and shared connections to leverage. More research may be required to understand the prospect’s specific role, goals, and background.
You’ll need to put in extra work to personalize emails and communicate alignment without the benefit of the LinkedIn profile for context.
Key Takeaway
LinkedIn provides built-in context and the ability to establish stronger connections right away through profile-based personalization. With email you’ll need to do more external research to craft relevant, meaningful outreach.
Personalization Capabilities
How easy is it to craft and scale personalized outreach messaging on each platform?
Thanks to LinkedIn profiles, personalizing each initial InMail message you send is more seamless. As discussed above, you can pull relevant details directly from the member’s profile to create tailored appeals.
You can scale this process by using mail merge fields to automatically insert personalized details into templates. For example, first name, company, role, interests etc.
Email personalization requires research outside of LinkedIn to identify relevant details on each prospect. This makes it more difficult to scale highly tailored messages.
You can leverage mail merge and templates in your email tool to automatically pull in names, company names, and other basic details. But the messages may end up feeling more generic overall.
Key Takeaway
LinkedIn provides built-in data to simplify personalizing messages at scale. For email, you need to put in more manual research effort per prospect to achieve the same level of personalization.
Nurturing and Following Up
What about keeping prospects engaged after the initial outreach?
After connecting on LinkedIn, you can leverage different tactics to continue nurturing prospects:
- Comment on and like their posts to establish familiarity
- Share relevant articles and resources based on their interests
- Connect them to people in your network they may want to meet
- Invite them to follow your company page and join relevant LinkedIn groups
This helps demonstrate ongoing value and relevance to prospects after connecting.
Similarly with email, the initial outreach is just the start. To nurture prospects over time you would:
- Send a series of follow-up emails with useful content
- Promote valuable resources they can access
- Answer questions and provide support via email
- Connect on additional channels like social media
Email allows you to easily automate sequenced, personalized follow-up messages after the initial contact.
Key Takeaway
Both platforms provide options for nurturing prospects after making the initial connection, either through social actions on LinkedIn or automated email sequences.
Targeting the Right Prospects
Reaching your ideal prospects amidst a sea of noise is key for effective outreach. How do the platforms compare when it comes to identifying and targeting the right people?
LinkedIn Campaign Manager provides robust targeting options based on profile data including:
- Job title, function, seniority level
- Company, industry, location
- Skills, groups, interests
- Engagement with content
You can dial in and find your exact audience based on multiple professional dimensions and interact with LinkedIn content.
With email, you are limited to targeting more basic attributes and behaviors such as:
- Job title or department
- Company and industry
- Location and region
- Email engagement
Without the depth of LinkedIn profile data, the targeting will likely be more broad based.
Key Takeaway
LinkedIn provides more nuanced targeting capabilities based on robust professional profile data for more effective audience segmentation.
Automation and Integration
The ability to automate outreach processes and integrate with other systems is important for scale. How do the platforms compare on this front?
In terms of automation, LinkedIn Campaign Manager allows you to:
- Create automated sequences for InMail messages
- Leverage lead scoring rules to trigger messages
- Use Saved Leads to automatically nurture new connections
For integration, the LinkedIn Ads API allows you to connect your LinkedIn campaigns with marketing automation platforms, CRMs, and other tools.
Email marketing platforms provide significantly more advanced automation capabilities such as:
- Multi-step sequences, branching logic, and workflows
- Dynamic personalization and content blocks
- Custom lead scoring and lifecycle models
Most also have open APIs and integrations with systems like Salesforce, Marketo, and Hubspot.
Key Takeaway
For automation and integration, specialized email marketing platforms are much more robust. LinkedIn’s offerings are more limited but improving.
Measuring Success
The ability to track key metrics and optimize is another important consideration.
In Campaign Manager, you can view reports on:
- Send rate
- Open rate
- Click rate
- Reply rate
- Lead conversion rate
This provides a good high-level view into the performance and results from your campaigns.
With email marketing platforms, you get access to more detailed analytical capabilities:
- Open, click, and conversion tracking at individual message level
- Conversion funnel and lead flow reporting
- A/B testing for subject lines, content etc.
- Email activity timeline and engagement scoring
This allows greater opportunity to tweak campaigns and optimize results.
Key Takeaway
For measuring campaign performance and analytics, dedicated email marketing platforms provide far deeper capabilities versus LinkedIn Campaign Manager.
Conclusion
So which channel is better for prospect outreach overall? Here is a high-level comparison:
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As you can see, both channels have unique advantages. Typically, the best approach is to leverage both LinkedIn and email outreach for a “surround sound” prospecting strategy.
You can use LinkedIn to identify and make initial connections with key decision makers at target companies. Then use email to drive ongoing conversations and nurture prospects towards a sale.
The specific channel you focus on most will depend on factors like your audience, offer, resources, and overall outreach approach.
Test out a mixture of LinkedIn and email to see what provides the highest quality connections and conversions for your unique business. With the right combination, you can maximize the reach and results of your prospecting efforts.