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Amine is La Growth Machine's content manager. He is responsible for the blog content, covering topics related to prospecting, LinkedIn, growth hacking, and lead generation in general. Apart from writing awesome articles, you can find him creating bizarre cocktails or listening to podcasts while cooking. A psychopath, I know 😱

La Growth Machine automatically enriches your leads’ contact info. All you need is a combination of Full Name + Company Name or a LinkedIn profile.

Depending on the audience, our tool will automatically enrich up to 80% of personal emails.

How does the magic happen? Let’s find out!

Why do I need personal email addresses?

Before we dive into the ins and outs of personal email addresses, there are a couple of issues we need to address.

The first thing to consider is that using personal emails is relatively invasive. As a general guideline, we advise against reaching out to leads on their personal emails for B2B or sales-related matters.

There’s not a lot you can do to annoy a lead more than to try your sales outreach on their personal emails. Trust me, I regularly block these people and throw their emails in the spam.

However, like any rule, there are exceptions, where using a personal email is acceptable:

  • Freelancers and/or professionals in less digitally-focused fields:

These people usually use their personal email as their professional one. And when we say “less digital fields”, we’re talking about the medical field for instance. A doctor who has their own practice won’t be using a custom email domain.

In these cases, using a personal email would be allowed because, technically, it kind of doubles as their professional address.

  • Recruitment purposes:

In the context of recruiting, sending job proposals to a candidate’s current professional email address can make things awkward really fast, and even potentially be problematic for the recipient.

Example 🔍

Let me show you why it can get messy really quickly.

Picture this: Your lead works with the HubSpot Chrome extension that syncs all their emails to the CRM.

These things just happen. And they end up having an email they can’t reply to, or if they reply and forget to delete the CRM entry, well they’re in deep waters.

Because tomorrow, their boss sees that they’re exchanging messages with a recruiter that potentially show their interest.

Anyway, you get the gist.

So, in this case, it makes a lot of sense to use the personal email, because it’s a personal contact that you’re making to offer them something that has nothing to do with their current job.

Hence, it’s especially relevant for recruiters, we would go as far as to say we made this feature primarily and predominantly for them.

How does LGM retrieve the personal email?

Well, it’s fairly simple actually; La Growth Machine can retrieve the personal email of your lead only if you are connected to them on LinkedIn.

Statistically, about 80% of people will share their personal email when you’re connected to them. They don’t do it intentionally, it’s simply how LinkedIn settings work, unless an individual specifies otherwise (in this case, about 20% of people).

When it comes to LGM, we retrieve it automatically. As soon as we see that you’re already connected, the tool retrieves it.

Furthermore, as soon as you connect to the lead -as part of your campaign, the tool uses enrichment to retrieve it.

Expert Tip 🧠

This implies that, as a recruitment strategy, if you want to use the personal emails of your candidates, you need to optimize your acceptance rate to the maximum.

And that leads to a number of questions; notably, whether you should include a note or not in your connection requests.

We don’t really have data on this, and it can go both ways:

  • On the one hand, you can include a note and have a more direct approach, but you risk losing the personal emails for a follow-up because the lead knows the reason you’re reaching out and they’re not interested.
  • On the other, you put no note, and the lead doesn’t know why you’re talking to them, which might lead to a high acceptance rate, but low qualification rate.

That said, if the individual is scouting the market for a new opportunity and they see a Talent Recruiter pop up in their invitations, they would be for sure interested.

That’s why you have to work on your bio and overall Linkedin profile, because it will come into play!

Addressing GDPR concerns:

Let’s address the elephant in the room, is what we’re doing GDPR-compliant?

As far as the Data Protection Act is concerned, LGM does not share data. Ever.

So, if you manage to get the personal email through LGM, it’s only because the lead shared it with you -through their LinkedIn profile.

Expert Tip 🧠

As a matter of fact, it allows you to quickly (and properly) address the question:

How did you get my email/phone number?

FYI: Those are the two pieces of personal data you have access to if you’re connected to someone on LinkedIn.

You simply tell them that you are connected on LinkedIn  and that you believe it’s a legitimate use of their contact information since you’re in contact with them.

Bam! Situation defused.

Implementing this in LGM – Decision Branches:

When using LGM, you’ll have access to various templates, mostly focusing on LinkedIn and Email (but we also gave Twitter some love don’t worry 🙂).

Since the retrieval of the personal email address is LinkedIn-based and requires the lead to accept your request on LinkedIn, you’ll have to go for LinkedIn-first templates, with email as a follow-up/ fallback option.

If you do it the other way around, you’ll never have access to the personal email in the first place, and the app will likely contact the professional one instead. So let’s take a simple example in this sequence:

In this example, all of this upper branch here will never run on the personal email of your candidate, simply because they never accepted your connection request and so you don’t yet have access.

In this case, you have 2 options:

  • Either remove the blocks and/or eliminate the branch completely.
  • Or, go to the email settings where you can configure what you want to authorize.

So, if a recruiter using our tool doesn’t want to use pro emails and only wants professional ones, they should change this setting like this:

Disclaimer ⚠️

Do not mind the warning as it is outdated and I’ve already gone over why we or you are not breaking any rules or laws as far as the GDPR is concerned.

So back to our example, if you only tick the “Send to Personal Emails”, you won’t even need to change the top branch. Since you don’t allow sending to Pro emails from the beginning, you won’t have them and the tool will simply ignore that branch.

In the bottom branch, it can work seamlessly as it segments based on whether you have a personal email. And that’s good. Your setup is good:

Final Thoughts

So, to conclude this article, I’ll leave with two main things to keep in mind:

For one, if you’re not too concerned about using professional emails, it’s potentially worth enabling both options to send emails to Professional and Personal addresses. But just make sure you tick the right boxes in the email settings.

Second, and I haven’t really touched on this throughout this article, but at the very least, your message should not be a pitch like:

Hello, I wanted to present you with an exciting opportunity. I haven’t been able to get in touch with you on LinkedIn.
I want to know if you were keeping an eye on the market and if we can talk in person, don’t hesitate to shoot me your personal email.

This is an actual (translated) message that I received not too long ago. If anything, this is not bad because you see that the recruiter is focusing on getting my personal email.

That’s the best practice to use! It’s best to simply check if your candidate is paying attention to opportunities and, if they are, emphasize discussing it through another channel. 😉