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Eric is in charge of content and SEO at La Growth Machine. A specialist in Outreach topics for over 8 years, Eric has written for numerous French and English blogs, sharing his experiences, hacks, and other use-cases. A trainer and speaker in his spare time, he is a reference for all topics related to B2B prospecting and automation.

LinkedIn is the best B2B database out there. If you want to start a cold email strategy on LinkedIn, you should always start by verifying if your target audience is on it. But…have you been wondering how to find the email addresses of those you’d like to reach out to? There are ways to contact people that are available to you – and are CCPA/GDPR friendly! 

If you want to contact people who are not currently in your circle, you’ll need to develop a great strategy around who you’ll contact, why, when, and where. Emailing without a strategy may easily lead you to certain failure. 

Take this tutorial as your guide for determining what you’ll need for this strategy and take it step-by-step.

Develop your LinkedIn for a cold emailing strategy 

Truthfully, the worst thing you could do in this process is to not have a plan. All of your work will be for nothing if you decide to send everyone the same message. 

Imagine being a CEO and receiving a message that says “I see you’re doing the coding for the software…”. You will immediately be turned off because you’re clearly not doing that type of job and they clearly didn’t do their research.

So, you’ll need to determine what types of emails you’ll be sending. Will they be strictly for relationship building? Will they be information collecting? Be absolutely clear on what your goal is before you start developing your strategy.

Now that you know the people you’re going to reach out to and why, you’ll be able to craft your cold emailing for LinkedIn accordingly!

Why is LinkedIn the best database to date for cold emailing?

When you start to create a cold email strategy, you might have considered renting or buying a leads database. Don’t be tempted! These databases are generally out of date and using them might put your email deliverability at risk. Not to mention it’s not a good practice to use people’s emails without permission.

If you’ve been wondering how to reach the people you want to connect with, ask yourself when was the last time you considered LinkedIn for cold emailing? This professional-focused network is not only a fantastic way to learn about people, but to contact them.

While yes, it’s social media, its focus is on connecting with people you can collaborate with, network with, learn from, and so much more. Utilizing this platform is a way for you to reach exactly who you need to reach.

Keep in mind that people on LinkedIn update their information themselves! It’s basically the best crowdsourced, always-up-to-date-B2B-database ever.

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How to find leads’ information with LinkedIn for cold emailing?

If you have specific individuals you want to reach, there are a number of ways to find their information as well. From various search tools (including Google) to educated guessing, you can make these attempts to reach people directly. 

In this step-by-step tutorial, you’ll be able to develop your plan, and your list(s), and organize them. You’ll need to determine exactly what your goals are for each, then begin with the first step.

Step 1 – Use Sales Navigator

What exactly is LinkedIn Sales Navigator? It’s a paid solution within their platform designed to do exactly what it was built for, which is Networking. 

Within the free part of the platform, you’re limited in who you can contact and how, as well as how many people per day. While you can find some information on people, it is only your direct contacts, and only what they allow. 

The Navigator platform allows you not only to contact anyone you’d like but create a search for specific people/titles in specific companies you want. You can also organize them into lists based on different titles, companies, regions, etc (more on that next). This is the perfect start to using LinkedIn for your cold emailing.

Step 2 – Segment your lists

In order to ensure you’re contacting the right people with the right message, you’ll want to create multiple lists within your navigator dashboard. Determine the people to whom you can send the same email, then create a prospect list for a specific filtered aspect.

linkedin for cold emailing

Whatever you choose, be sure that if you say “I know how [pain point] is difficult”, or something similar, it will apply to that entire list.

One way to set up your segments is if they’re a lead you’d like to contact from any company but with a specific region or title. 

For example, one of your lists may be all CEOs in any business with over 250 employees. This would be one message and sequence. Another example of a leads list may be all Human Resource Managers for non-profits in the United States. 

Another option to set up your segments is to search for a specific list of companies with any title you’d like. This is a more in-depth way of saving your segments and contacting them with a specific purpose.

For example, all sales representatives at the big 4 companies. 

Step 3 – Extract the information

Using tools like Phantombuster or Captain Data, you can collect the information from your leads’ profiles and enter it into your automation platform. These often require a skilled data engineer to pull and organize the emails you find.

You can also segment and extract your list directly from LaGrowthMachine. It will work with your Sales Navigator tool and extract your lists into your platform directly! This tool is ready-made for LinkedIn cold emailing.

Step 4 – Enrich your lead information 

In order to ensure you can create the best, most personal message possible, you’ll want as much information about your leads as you can. Try to ensure the data you’ve collected includes things like name, company, and title as well as their email.

With LaGrowthMachine’s templates, you can set up your leads to be extracted and then enriched with ease. This will include viewing their profile – which they will be able to see- and pulling their data like email, name, job title, etc. into the system.

Now that you have your completed profiles, you’ll need to decide how to contact them. You have 3 basic options:

  1. Contact them on LinkedIn
  2. Find their Email Addresses (more details on this below)
  3. Import those leads into LaGrowthMachine, and let the magic happen 😉

How to Find Their Email Addresses?

There are numerous tools to help you find email addresses by using just a first name, last name, and company domain. They can essentially be done in 2 steps:

Generate all possible emails for a person

Email addresses are not randomly generated. Most of the time, email addresses’ structures will follow one of these formats, where ‘f’ is the first initial and ‘l’ is the last initial:

Using LinkedIn for your cold emailing is a much easier tool. Though you could, in theory, manually test out each of these, one by one, however, we have a couple of better solutions.

Test those permutations

The way you would test these out is either by having your tech team carry out a test, using LaGrowthMachine’s system which does this automatically or by emailing each version yourself. 

Assuming you have no desire to do the latter, here is just a bit about how your tech team would carry this out:

Email servers are archaic. They communicate insanely slowly. When you hit “send” from your inbox, servers communicate with each other in order to send and (whether or not to) accept. 

The catch is that many of them will simply say they’re accepting, but not actually get to the recipient at all. You will be none the wiser. With LaGrowthMachine’s technology, you’ll be able to ensure your email not only gets sent but that the servers don’t block it!

To test if an email is valid, tools will execute steps 1 to 4, but never execute step 5 (sending the email).

That’s basically it :). Easy right?

To test all the permutations above, tools that let you find email will generate the permutations and test them one by one, to return you the one that the receiver’s server validated.

One thing to be wary of, however, is that some servers are configured to always reply ‘Yes’ to the ‘do you accept’ server question. This is what we call “catchall”. These email addresses cannot be verified with 100% veracity.

If you’re sending a lot of emails to catchall addresses, you may end up sending tons of emails to addresses that don’t exist. Beware of cold emailing software that will leave you in this situation so all your work doesn’t go to waste.

Good news: LaGrowthMachine’s platform determines if this is the case and it will check this first instead of sending it!

Quick Tip 💡

When using the catch-all feature in LaGrowthMachine, you’ll get more enriched emails. You’ll reach around 60%-70% enriched emails because if the tool has no available data to provide you with intelligible suggestions, it won’t provide you with an email. That would be too risky.

You now found email addresses thanks to LinkedIn, let’s start writing your cold email messages.

What do I do after finding their email addresses? 

So you’ve done all of the tedious filtering and searching work. Now it’s time to put it into action! Throughout this process, you’ve determined who you’ll write to and where you’ll write them. Now it’s time to create a specific goal for these messages.

Before you begin creating the sequence and content of your emails/messages, you’ll want to be very clear on what it is you want to accomplish with them. An email to get a scheduled appointment should be different than an email to get a direct purchase for example.

Now you’ll be creating your sequence to set up your LinkedIn cold emails for success.

Create your sequence 

Now that you know what you want to have them do, you can create a sequence. It will determine exactly how many messages you’ll send, where (especially if there will be more than one place like LinkedIn and emails), and how frequently.

Our recommendation is no more than once per day, depending upon your product or service. In order to create this plan you’ll want to:

  • Consider exactly who you’re sending the message to. Are they CEOs and extremely busy? Are they IT professionals always checking emails? Etc.
  • Consider how long your sales cycle is. If you sell enterprise solutions, they often take a great deal longer to discuss. Give them a little extra time by sending every 2 or 3 days instead of daily.
  • Determine how many messages you will want to contact them with. Is it worth sending 5 emails total or do you only want to send 3? Be aware that if they label your email as spam with their servers (like Gmail or Outlook), your emails won’t get through any more at all.

Once you have this plan laid out, you’re set up to start writing your emails!

Write your intro message

Now that you have a goal, a series of emails you want to create, and who you’re sending to, you can write up your first email. This should be an introductory email that talks about you and/or your company. You’ll also want to include why you’re emailing them specifically.

For example, if you’re writing to a middle manager, get to the point fairly quickly but be personable. Yes, this may be a bit of a challenge, but a poorly written intro email will fail your future emails completely so be most cautious here.

Next, tell them exactly what you want them to do. Do you want them to click a link to schedule a call? Do you want them to sign up for a webinar? Whatever it is, make it the one and only thing you ask of them in this email. Keep it simple.

Think about follow-up emails 

Your remaining emails will be to express in more detail what you can do to help them. How will their life improve by contacting you? What exactly will it take to do so?

You can try to answer their objections in these follow-up emails, create mystery or intrigue, or simply be friendly enough to make them eager to speak with you. Whatever your style, stick to it and plan them in order of how you’d want to be reached out.

Here is a sample layout for your email plan:

  1. Introduction to you and your company with a link to your website.
  2. Detailed email about how their life will improve once you speak to them with a link to schedule a call.
  3. Email with features, benefits, and data about the product.
  4. Final email – potentially with a limited time offer.

Be sure that each email conveys a simple message and clear call to action (schedule a meeting, demo the product, etc). Now you’re ready to send them off!

Final Touches

Each plan will depend upon what exactly your company does, the full sales cycle duration, who you’re contacting, the region in which they are, your industry, etc. Tailor this plan to your personal and company brand. Using LinkedIn for your cold emailing strategies is an ideal way to reach the exact people you want.

Launching this plan with LaGrowthMachine will make your life easier with its automation, but ensure that when you send these emails they are done at the right timing to the right people and, preferably, that you can track them.