Email marketing is one of the most scalable and ROI-sensitive channels in B2B. A very effective method, but also a time-consuming one, especially when you have to search for relevant leads.
In order to make it easier for you to understand, let us explain how to automate sending highly personalized emails to your leads found... on LinkedIn!
LinkedIn has 875 million members worldwide in 2023, and it is estimated that 94% of BtoB professionals use the 💥 platform.
And here are the 9 steps to complete this workflow in less than 9 minutes 👇🏻
1. Create a lemlist account
lemlist is a platform designed to send highly personalized prospecting emails. The solution allows you to personalize almost everything: each email sent is unique and adapts to its recipient.
👉 Create your lemlist account. No credit card is required, and you can test the tool for free for 14 days.
🚨 REQUIREMENTS: To optimize your deliverability rate, you must create and configure your Custom Domain. To understand the importance of the custom domain, please refer to our reference article: "Guarantee an opening rate > 70% thanks to the configuration of your domain".
2. Create your first cold email campaign with a sequence of 2 or 3 emails.
lemlist guides you step by step through this vidéo👇🏻
3. Retrieve your lemlist API key
Your unique and personal key is available in Settings > Integrations > API section.
Remember to keep that key handy.
4. Find and enrich my contacts' email addresses
Dropcontact enriches contacts data and professional email addresses and completes the entire prospect (or customer) record.
👉 Create your Dropcontact account and get your personnal API in My Account.
🎁 When you register Dropcontact offers you 100 credits (i.e. 100 contact lines) to try the solution. No credit card needed.
5. Do your LinkedIn search
Define your target
Before sending out your first prospecting emails, remember to define your target precisely.
Most important thing to keep in mind: be precise! The quality of your leads should be more important to you than the quantity.
Perform a LinkedIn search
Once your target has been defined, do a search on LinkedIn and be as precise as possible.
- Sector of activity
- Country
- Position held
- Exclusion criteria: it is imperative to refine your search, and exclude, for example, trainees, investors....
- Spoken Language
To become a pro at LinkedIn search, you must use the advanced search, boolean, and especially negative filters :
- AND: selection of several words: useful in combined searches
- OR: choice of either term
- NOT: exclusion of a word from the search.
- Quotation marks: expression of related keywords
- Brackets: sa uccession of conditions
Note that the system first deals with what is in brackets. We advise using Sales Navigator so that you are not limited in your searches.
🎈 Let's make a concrete use case: You are looking to get in touch with the marketing department, here is what your LinkedIn search could look like:
title: marketing AND (responsible OR CMO OR "Head of" OR Director) NOT (Trainee OR Internship OR Alternating OR Internship OR Alternating OR Investor OR Assistant OR Assistant)
Check whether your results are in relation to your target.
6. Install the Phantombuster cookie
To make it easier to configure its workflow, Phantombuster offers a free extension available on Google Chrome.
You must be logged in to your LinkedIn account.
Now, all we have to do is...
7. Create a Phantombuster account
Phantombuster is a platform dedicated to marketing automation that offers pre-designed workflows to facilitate prospecting.
In concrete terms, the SaaS solution allows sales and marketing teams to create their own marketing automation strategy without the intervention of the dev team. Autonomy and performance guaranteed!
Phantombuster offers many automation possibilities to save a considerable amount of time!
- Send automatic invitations on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook
- Retrieve LinkedIn information
- Enrich the professional emails of your LinkedIn contacts
- Create highly personalized campaigns
- Automate your responses and interactions
- ....
👉 Create your Phantombuster account
A free limited version is available.
8. Select the Linkedin Search To Lemlist Workflow on Phantombuster
This ready-to-use workflow allows you to extract all the information from a LinkedIn search, enrich the data and push contacts into a lemlist cold email campaign.
- LinkedInSession Cookie: Phantombuster uses cookies from your LinkedIn session. To find your session cookie, click on the Chrome extension you just installed.
- Search URL: copy and paste the URL of the page where you performed your targeted LinkedIn search
- lemlist API Key: paste the API lemlist key you just retrieved
- lemlist campaign name: Choose the campaign you have just created in the drop-down menu
- Choose Dropcontact as a B2B email enrichment service
- Paste the Dropcontact API key retrieved earlier
Your phantom is almost ready: all you have to do is specify whether you want to launch it automatically or manually and whether you want to receive notifications. For these choices, to each their preference ;)
9. Last step: launch your phantom 👻
BAM 💥 today is an exceptional day because you have just put in place one of the best cold email and prospecting strategies for generating highly qualified BtoB leads.
10. Test, iterate, improve
All you will have to do is analyze the results and optimize the subject, the content and the CTA as you go along.
You could easily reach:
- An opening rate > 60% on the sending of at least 3 or 4 mails
- A response rate > 25%.
Test, test and, test again. Start with "small sends" of 25 to 50 emails a day and iterate until you get results that reach new heights 🏔
What about GDPR?
This commercial approach 👆🏻 is a B2B practice and can in no way be used to prospect personal email addresses.
When it comes to BtoB, GDPR allows the commercial approach if (and only if) the prospect has the possibility to oppose this practice and to stop the approach at any time.
👉🏻 Continue on the dedicated article: GDPR: can we still send prospecting emails
Some tips
💡 Depending on your strategy, you can, in the same workflow, send a connection invitation to all the targeted profiles of your search (select "invite the lead to join your connections")
💡 LinkedIn limits the number of profile searches, so don't be greedy, and remember to limit the number of queries per phantom trigger.
For more information 👉🏻 LinkedIn Automation Rate Limits - 2021 Edition
💡 If your target comprises several segments, create as many phantoms as there are groups.
💡 GoogleSheet tip: use the =importdata(name-of-resulting-file.csv) function to automatically update your prospect file
🔧 Good workers need good tools:
