Automate your messages on LinkedIn in 7 simple steps!

1. Introduction

In this article, you'll find out how I managed to contact 2067 people, open 113 new conversations about our new branded product to test and activated 2 new customers.

An activity of this kind usually require a long time to identify contacts, create a personalized message and send it to all your targets: assuming the sending of 100-150 messages per day, it’s a task that takes 13 working days.

We will see how you can do it all with a 5 days of work, and with greater effectiveness, using a basic LinkedIn account and some tools (both free) to automate the activities of sending messages.

The case study that I’m going to describe you is part of our corporate strategy started at the beginning of 2018 and aimed at the pre-launch of "Claudio": the goal was to perform rapid market tests to understand how developments were proceeding and to identify the correct buyer personas.

In the following paragraphs you will see which have been the main issues addressed, the solutions identified to solve them and some practical tips to copy this work flow to the fullest.

2. Main issues

Starting new activities is usual to face multiple and different problems.

In this section I’ll try to collect those I encountered, in the certainty that they are quite common among colleagues, and in the hope that you’ll find the right solutions for your problems without repeating the research work from the beginning.

The main problems I had to face:

• Small audience of the LinkedIn business page;
• A market target not well defined yet, and difficult to use to address efficient social campaigns
• Optimize the activity of contact people and gather feedbacks, in order to spend more time nurturing strategic prospects

Some of these problems have been so blocking to convince me to change the strategy initially designed for pre-launch.

• To address the difficulties related to the first point I thought at various alternatives. The growth of a page requires a lot of time and budget (in addition to a marketing team focused on this goal).

The most valid alternative was to directly use the audience of the personal profile which, although modest too, still reaches much higher numbers (we are talking about 2067 direct contacts, and a much wider potential reach).

Practical advice: every business professional should spend part of their day growing their own LinkedIn network. It's a time investment that comes in handy when you least expect it!

Ask for contact or Accept, only people that are interesting for your activity (in order to maintain a homogeneous audience and be more interesting and professional at their eyes).

• Once decided the channel to "attack" I moved to the second problem: the identification of the right group of people to contact!

Usually this task would require a fair amount of time and money for the various surveys and sector studies.

Given the limited time at my disposal I decided to analyze my own LinkedIn audience.

Instead of just contacting certain specific groups, I expanded the spectrum to all my contacts with experience in the areas interesting to me, regardless of Job Title, Seniority or other minor differentiations.

• The third phase was the most complex. He required a strategical study of needed activities to understand which could be more simplified, and then to do a research on how automate them.

Activities that could be more simplified turned out to be:

• Sending messages to identified targets
• Creating a list of the most interested people

Therefore, the problems faced during this step have been solved by using a personal LinkedIn page with a bigger network, a broad spectrum used to identify the most interesting people and the automation through tools of the most mechanical activities.

In the next section we will see how to choose these tools and how to use them to the fullest.

3. Use of Bot

At this point, like doing a puzzle, all the pieces seems to be in the correct place.

It remains only to choose an automation tool, similar to those that are so diffused on other social networks (i.e. Instagram).

These so-called BOTs are nothing more than tools that automatically perform one or more repetitive actions, in order to save the user time while ensuring the accuracy of the result.

The appropriate use of these tools would be worth of an entire paragraph, to spot the thin line of demarcation between a conversation and the spam.

Not being this my purpose here, nor of this document, I leave it to the good sense of each reader to understand the limits of use of a Bot, remembering that the effectiveness of any campaign and the credibility of each of us are always difficult to build, but fast to lose.

4. Choice of a Bot

The BOTs for LinkedIn are now as many as the needs, or the usage preferences, of each user.

Here are some features that usually differentiate one Bot from another:

• Price: many Bots are free or can be used for free for a short time. For the activity covered by this article, a test of a few days may be sufficient;
• Task automation: the automation carried out by this type of tool can be roughly divided into two types: simple and complex.

1. in the first case we could set the bot only to make simple clicks along a list of names / products;
2. in the second it will be set to store more actions within a single task. Example:

• expand a list to the maximum by pressing on "next page" or "view more")
• open an item description, capture the information, go back and repeat the task with the next item
• Installation Type: Most of the tools I've seen can be conveniently installed as Chrome browser plug-ins. If the use of this browser is difficult, you can choose other bots and install them directly on your pc / mac;
• Simplicity of use: I have tested several tools of this type and I have noticed that sometimes, some can be a little difficult for users who lack the bases of computer logic or not accustomed to these programs;

Practical advice: if you want to avoid searching for other Bots, I recommend you two simple and very useful programs:

• LinkedHelper: a free program when used on a single browser; it’ll allow you to perform complex actions (eg complex action: scroll through the contact list, enter on each profile, send messages).

Download it from here: https://linkedhelper.com/

• Leonard: free program for the first 14 days, offers more or less the same features of LinkedHelper. It also has a CRM in which the information obtained during its use can be saved (eg history of received messages, list of profiles, etc.)

Download it from here: https://meetleonard.com/

5. Set up a Bot

Referring to my prospect activity, after an initial scouting of tools I decided to use Linked Helper.

Setting Linked Helper is very simple: depending on your needs you can add features and enrich the process at will.

I simply followed these few steps:

1. Inserting a personalized message (in the next paragraph you can also read the template I used)
2. Connection filter: in particular I went to eliminate people who would have been really little interested in my messages (different professions, friends and work colleagues).

I have instead segmented the remaining links for macro-categories mainly concerning professional backgrounds (eg technicians separated from non-technical) and sector of interest (eg IT separate from the Food).

1. Definition of the number of messages sent. Like many other automatic tools, Linked Helper also allows you to define the number of messages that will be sent automatically (Send Limit for period: 180).

I recommend keeping the pre-set limit to avoid penalties from LinkedIn (or, at most, raise the threshold slightly).

1. Collect. In the main screen there is a "Collect" command that allows the program to search and insert in a list all the accounts that you want to contact him.
2. Send. Once you have collected the list you just have to press the appropriate "Send" button and wait for Linked Helper to contact you all.

The program works in the background, meanwhile you can dedicate yourself to other activities. Once the maximum message limit is reached, the Linked Helper stops until the beginning of a new period of work.

Practical advice: take advantage of the daily limits to analyze the initial feedback of your contacts; put them into practice daily by editing the message and other settings for the benefit of the remaining audience.

6. Custom Message

The structuring of a personalized message is something very delicate. I have created a different message for each macro-group. All messages were based on a single template, in which I tried to insert:

A personal and business presentation

The reason for the contact: es. free use of "Claudio" in exchange for feedback

Main benefits for users

"Call To Action" final to simplify the decision in the readers and push them to respond positively

This was the result:

"Hi {first name},

I would like to invite you to the free trial of CLAUDIO, the 1st software aimed at anyone who allows all programs and applications to communicate with each other.

Why should you care?

Because we created it to save you time when you work, and make your life easier

What do we want in return?

Anything! It's completely free for the first 3 months (and for the first 100 subscribers there will be a further surprise).

At the moment of the presentation Claudio will start in beta test phase; so any feedback and suggestions will be invaluable to us.

To learn more, write 'INFORMATION' in this chat.

See you soon,

Antonio

GreenVulcano Technologies "

7. Results

From this entire activity, carried out on 2067 contacts, the results have been interesting, either regards the number of feedbacks received and regards the number of positive feedbacks.

Some numbers:

• Number of replies to the message: 113 out of 2067 (5.46%)

In absolute terms the numbers above could appear a little low to someone. Comparing them to others figures resulting in my past activities, in which messages / emails have been sent using other channels / instruments, I can say that it’s really difficult to obtain similar results in other ways (and with such a low effort in terms of time).

Moreover, most of these were interested answers, with requests for more information, explanations on how to start, and so on.

• Number of positive answers: 89 out of 113 (78%)

Even people who have declared themselves not interested, or doubtful for various reasons, have been very useful for obtaining feedback on the message, on the offer of the product or on its usefulness in daily life.

I hope this little guide can help you in your sales, marketing, or even personal branding journey!

If you have suggestions to improve the process I have described here, or you have any doubt that you would like to clarify, do not hesitate to contact me: a.muggianu@greenvulcano.com!

[av_contact email='marketing@greenvulcano.com' title='Get a complete copy of this article in pdf format' button='Ok, I want it!' on_send='' sent='Thank you, you can get you pdf here: https://goo.gl/oDykRx' link='manually,http://' subject='' autorespond='' captcha='' form_align='' color='' admin_preview_bg='' av_uid='av-4675no']
[av_contact_field label='E-Mail' type='text' options='' multi_select='' av_contact_preselect='' check='is_email' width='' av_uid='av-azspg'][/av_contact_field]

[/av_contact]