Have you considered LinkedIn InMail as a part of your overall marketing approach? If not, then you should. And if you do, then you should take a look at this – the team from email marketing platform Lavender recently analyzed 28.3 million emails to glean more insight on the key trends and message traits that can help to maximize your LinkedIn outreach success.

Check Your Mail

Again, if you’re looking to use InMail, despite LinkedIn having moved away from calling it such, then it’s worth taking note of these five analytics notes, which could help to boost your response rates. First off, the analysis suggests that shorter is better in LinkedIn messaging outreach: According to Lavender:

“Emails that are 25-50 words get 65% more replies than the usual 125-word cold email.”

Simply put, people don’t have time to read a novella to understand your sales pitch – get to the point and give people a chance to quickly assess, as opposed to asking for too much time commitment up front to go through the intricacies of your message. Worth noting too that, similarly, LinkedIn has previously reported that InMails under 400 characters perform best. Fewer words and less time commitment = better response.

Next – simplify your language:

“70% of emails are written at or beyond a 10th-grade reading level. If you take that 10th-grade writing and bring it to a 5th-grade reading level, you’ll see 50% more replies.

Sure, while you might sound smarter by using more verbose language, if people need to refer to Thesaurus.com just to understand what you’re saying, then you’re asking them to commit more time, which goes against the earlier finding. While storytelling has been a key element of every content marketer’s slideshow presentation over the last decade, there is value to sharing the ‘why’ of your business. However, you also need to be wary of your audience at each turn, and for each element of your communication.

The next element is ‘Personalization’. Here, how you specifically measure personalization in this context is subjective, but the concept is that the more you can create messages intended for each reader, the more likely they’ll be to open and read what you have to offer. Such can be hard to scale, but the idea does hold true across the board – the more you can spell out why this message is specifically relevant to each reader, the more success you’ll see. This is where audience segmentation comes into play; by segmenting your audiences and continually refreshing which outreach list they’re on, you can improve response rates.

The next key element is the tone of the language that you use – and specifically, the need to avoid trying to ‘educate’ the buyer. Lavender’s analysis suggests that you should avoid talking about yourself and even your brand, and instead try to invite engagement based on what you’re offering. Asking questions like: “if that sounds right, then let’s connect” can work really well here.

The Wrap

Lastly, Lavender also suggests that, once you do get a reply, asking even more questions and inviting further personalization and engagement can be key. Again, this leans into the concept that people want to be heard, not ‘sold’ to. The thing to aim for is to improve relationships and connections, which will eventually translate to better purchase rates. Conversion won’t always happen, but these empirical pointers do teach you how to better talk to people, not at them, and how this can be beneficial for your engagement and brand messaging.

These are worth considering for your LinkedIn outreach, and with LinkedIn just recently launching a new  ‘Other’ folder  in your inbox, where junk emails head to the afterlife, you’ll need to consider how you can maximize engagement and keep yourself in the main InMail Feed to maintain a connection with prospects.

Subscribe to our ‘Bottoms Up!’ Newsletter. Get the latest social media blogs about news, updates, trends, and effective social media strategies to take your business to the highest level from Tristan Ahumada and Jeff Pfitzer.

Sources

https://bit.ly/3BmI0rk