If you have tried to reach out to people you do not know on Linkedin, you might find that generic messages or pitches are not always the best way to start communicating. But how to write a prospecting message that works and at the same time stays unique and discreet? Here we compiled LinkedIn message examples and best practices for writing invitation notes and prospecting messages to help you find your best customers.
What is LinkedIn prospecting?
Prospecting includes identifying and contacting your potential customers (aka prospects). LinkedIn prospecting requires searching for potential clients, creating relevant messages, and scaling sales processes with LinkedIn automation tools.
How to prepare for prospecting?
Before you are ready for active prospecting, make sure you have completed the following.
- Optimize your profile. It includes filling out your header, all the required sections in your profile, getting recommendations and endorsements. Check out how to optimize your LinkedIn profile in our step-by-step guide.
- Warm up your profile if it is new. Manually connect with your friends and colleagues, and add people related to your field to your network. Do it gradually, every day adding three-five people. Also, post or repost content at least once a week and comment, like, and contact others daily.
- Create your Ideal Customer Profile. Your ICP is crucial for building your contact lists, creating content and messages, and for your overall marketing strategy on LinkedIn. If you need help to build your ICP and plan your outreach campaigns, we recommend trying an automation tool with a consulting package — Impasto.io.
How to write prospecting messages on LinkedIn?
- Be concise. Do not write too much because LinkedIn is a network for professional communications, and it is important to respect time of others. Stick to no more than 300 characters for connection requests and up to 500 characters for messages and follow-ups.
- Be professional. Know your customers’ needs and goals and appeal to them in the content of your profile and messages. Form your value proposition and strategy in advance, and show how your business can help your customers.
- Prefer ‘You’ instead of ‘ I. Again, focus on your prospect’s interests and needs. Avoid pitching or selling your product right away.
- Provide value. Add value to each of your messages, such as linking to your research or giving a solution that your prospect might benefit from.
- Add questions to your messages. Try ending your messages with questions, such as “Is this topic of interest for you right now?”. This way, you will not only qualify your lead, but also nudge them to continue communicating with you.
- Look for icebreakers. Icebreakers are what make your prospect feel like they have something in common with you. It could be some humor (not too much) or common ground, like if you had the same education.
- Use personalization. When you use personalization, a person feels like you address them directly, no matter how often they saw personalization before. It grabs prospects’ attention and increases your chances for further communication. Personalize everything you can: add the prospect’s name, position, company name, and industry.
- Find hooks. The best practice to connect with a Linkedin user is to use hooks. Hooks are something that you know about your prospect’s actions. For example, you can find people who attended a particular event and write in your invitation that you find their contacts in the list of participants. Similarly, you can react to their posts, comments, likes, and shares. These are also kind of icebreakers that show your prospect you are serious about a particular topic.
- Share your expertise. Build trust with your customers by providing the information about your findings and achievements. You may mention your previous projects if they are related to your customer industry or their competitors if you had a chance to speak or work with them.
Connection requests, messages, and follow-ups
Now let’s dive deeper into the specifics of connection requests, messages, and follow-ups.
A connection request is when you ask a potential customers to add you to their network. You can send it blank or add an invitation note to it.
We recommend adding an invitation note, especially if you have some hooks. Even if you have no relevant hook, you can personalize your invitation note and show your intent for meaningful communication.
After your invitation is accepted, start sending prospecting messages using the above tips for LinkedIn outreach.
Send no less than two follow-ups after your first message. Tests showed that first follow-ups give 27% more replies and third follow-ups another 7%. So why miss the opportunity?
You can automate your message sequence in the Impasto.io platform. With this service, you can add personalization with variables like {Name} and {Company} and with personalized link previews. It is an additional attention grabber for your message.
Examples of prospecting message sequence
Let’s assume that you have built your ICP for LinkedIn prospecting messages: you know the pain points of your prospects and their industry and have your value proposition.
For example, I want to get leads for my new AI product that creates posts for social media. I have conducted market research and found out that it will better fit social media marketing agencies and small businesses. The pain point of my potential customers is that they spend a lot of time manually creating new posts. So my value proposition may sound like this: “Speed up your social media to keep up with the times”. And my mission statement is something like that: “To help businesses keep their social influence with no hassle”.
Let’s say I create my first campaign for small businesses that create AI products. I know that they lack high-quality content and time for improving their social media engagement. I will reach out to their Chief Executive Officers.
What will I do next?
I activate the corresponding filters on LinkedIn:
- Position — CEO
- Industry — IT services and IT consulting
- Location — United States
- Talks about #ai
To specify your search even more precisely use LinkedIn boolean search.
Now I have 687 results. Next, I copy the URL of this search page and paste it to Impasto.io.
Impasto.io searches for contacts and automatically builds my contact list.
Now I am ready to create a message sequence.
The following messages are for automatic campaigns with variables. You may use them for your future campaigns with changes relevant to your ICP.
My invitation note:
Hello {Name}! I noticed that we have a common interest in {subject}. Let’s connect and exchange ideas?
First message:
Hi, {Name}! Thanks for connecting. I’ve just finished research on {topic} – {link to research} – and thought it might be of interest to you as a {position}. Would you mind sharing your opinion?
First follow-up:
Hello, {Name}.
To make things easier, I have summed up some statistics from my research for you.
- 35% of companies boosted their revenue due to the right social media strategy in 2023.
- 55% of marketers in 2023 use AI to automate their social media campaigns.
What about {company}? Do you run social media campaigns?
Second follow-up:
Hi, {Name}!
We have recently completed the beta test of our product — an AI service for automatic social media posting. Over 20 companies from {industry} attended.
What do you think of a brief meeting with me? I will show you the results of our test and tell you how {company} can improve its social media influence.
Next, I add these messages to Impasto.io and start my campaign.
If you would like to get a customized message sequence for your campaigns to send them automatically, Impasto.io will cover this up. The message sequence creation is included in the consulting package of the service.
How can AI help you with prospecting on LinkedIn?
If you want AI to create your prospecting messages on LinkedIn, learn our tips for writing prompts.
To write concise but meaningful messages for your prospect you need to describe your task precisely.
Specify the following things in your prompt.
- The number of characters
- Target audience
- The objective of your campaign
- Style of your messages
- Format of your sequence
Here is an example of a prompt for our case with an AI product for small businesses.
“Create a sequence of 3 messages with no more than 500 characters each in Nir Eyal style for LinkedIn outreach. The objective is to spark interest in an AI product for automatic social media posting in a CEO of an IT company. Ask if he has problems with social media campaigns in the first message, Introduce our AI services in the second message, mention a recent successful beta test in the third message, and invite the recipient to a free consultation. Be professional, yet friendly, and avoid using too much sales jargon.”
Here is the result of our prompt:
- Message 1:
Hi [Recipient’s Name],
Ever faced challenges with social media campaigns? Curious to hear your experiences. Let’s chat about a potential solution.
Best, [Your Name]
- Message 2:
Hi [Recipient’s Name],
Saw synergy between your IT leadership and our AI services. Streamline social media effortlessly. Interested to explore further?
Warm regards, [Your Name]
- Message 3:
Hi [Recipient’s Name],
In a recent beta test, our AI amplified [Client Name]’s social impact. Could it align with your IT vision? Let’s delve deeper into a free consultation.
Cheers, [Your Name]
Not bad, right?
You can change the style using the list of LinkedIn top voices from your prospect’s industry to have a similar vibe.
Still, do not use these AI messages exactly as they were created. We recommend adjusting prospecting messages created by ChatGPT to your current vision and style.
If you need help launching your LinkedIn prospecting campaigns and speeding them up, try Impasto.io.