The Higher Creativity Bar for LinkedIn Outreach
When it comes to one-on-one outreach via LinkedIn direct message (DM), you now need to treat it like email.
What do I mean by this?
The “noise” on LinkedIn has gotten so great that you need to be more creative and diligent to cut through it in order to achieve the same response rate that you used to be able to get from a single DM not that long ago.
A case in point from my own recent LinkedIn DMing
In the last two weeks, I reached out to nine of my first-level connections. These are people I know and with whom I’ve communicated in the past, and I’ve met several of them in person.
My “ask” for this subset of my LinkedIn network was to get my company in front of their business networks — not on LinkedIn, but through organizations they run; whether free to me or through paid access.
Out of the nine first-round DMs, I heard back from two contacts. At first, I was surprised that I didn’t get a higher response rate. (After all, I was offering to pay if that’s required — who turns down money?) But then I realized I needed to do the first of the three tips I’m going to share with you below.
Here’s what should be in your toolkit for the ‘new normal’ of LinkedIn DMing:
Make sure your ask is super clear and to the point. In my case, I asked, “Do you happen to know of options for me to get in front of your audience at [organization]?” A better initial ask would have been, “I want to make [organization] aware of my company. Can I pay you for this?” (As a bonus tip, if you have a budget for what you’re asking for and your ask includes an offer to pay, you can put a “subject line” that mentions “pay” or something that refers to them getting money at the very top — before “Hi [name],” — so that the offer to pay line is the first thing your contact reads.) If your contact replies that money is not needed, great. But placing an offer to pay right up front will, in most cases, get him or her to keep reading and make it more likely that he or she replies to you.
Try a voice memo as your first message. I got this tip from Danny DelVecchio. To do this, pull up your contact on your phone; hit the Message button; look for and hit the 🎙 icon at the bottom of your screen; and on the next screen, hold down the record button to record your message. You’ll have the option to re-record it if you’re not happy with it, or to send it if it’s all good.
Be prepared to turn your single ask into a drip campaign. It’s noisy in general on social media, and ever more so these days on LinkedIn. Your target contacts are no doubt being inundated by other cold pings, including for product and service offers tied to the businesses or nonprofits they work for. All this — plus whatever they have going on outside of LinkedIn, including in their personal lives — adds up to a metric ton of noise. If you don’t hear back from your first message within, say, a week, send another one that’s phrased a bit differently (so you sound like a human, and don’t repeat literally the same ask from message one). I personally would end your “drip sequence” at three messages total, but that’s up to you.
I hope these tips help you cut through the noise on LinkedIn, get quicker replies, and make more things happen for your small business or nonprofit.
