Have you ever considered using LinkedIn to build a targeted email marketing list and generate new leads? If not, now may be the best time to do so. Whether you are a marketer or a B2B or B2C business owner, LinkedIn is proving to be one of the most effective ways to nurture potential leads in 2024.
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More than 75% of marketers believe LinkedIn is one of the best social media platforms for digital marketing, especially for B2B companies. Recent research shows that most companies use emails for lead generation. And LinkedIn is the best platform to use if you want to frame your email marketing strategy and build a comprehensive email list.
In this blog post, you’ll learn why this channel is the best (and easiest) way to attract new prospects and collect crucial personal information, including email addresses. But that’s not all.
10 steps for building a targeted email list using LinkedIn
By the end of this read, you’ll also know all the steps you need to follow to leverage the power of LinkedIn for email marketing.
Although there are many ways to use LinkedIn to build a targeted email list, the following 10 tips are the ones every business should follow. Let’s find out how you can use LinkedIn as a lead generation tool for building targeted email lists:
1. Make your profile stand out
Before crafting a lead generation strategy on LinkedIn, focus on making your profile more attractive and professional. Remember, your profile is the first place a potential prospect will take a look to see if you (or your company) are trustworthy and worth following. You should not just have an ‘average’ LinkedIn profile.
But how can you make your profile stand out? Well, it’s easier than you might think. To be precise, the elements you can focus on to improve your LinkedIn profile are:
- The profile picture and background photo of your account: Both your profile picture and background photo should grab attention and automatically explain what your business is all about. These initial visual elements are the best way to ‘force’ your potential leads to stay and explore your profile.
- Your headline and summary: You should use the headline and summary of your business profile to explain what your business is all about and share your business’s vision and story with potential leads.
- Your services and expertise: In the skills and services section, you can explain what exactly your business offers and how you can help your leads, what makes you stand out from your competitors and, in a few words, share your niche expertise.
- Keywords: Although keywords like ‘digital marketing’ or ‘SEO’ gather millions of queries every day, these are also the hardest ones to rank for, not only on LinkedIn but also on search engines. In other words, your keyword research strategy should also be applied when crafting your LinkedIn business profile.
- Testimonials and publications: Towards the bottom of your profile, you can find the Recommendations section. You can add some written testimonials you’ve gathered from previous and ongoing projects. At the same time, your LinkedIn profile allows you to share the top-notch content your business has created and published in the past.
Neil Patel’s LinkedIn profile
Don’t forget to update your LinkedIn profile regularly. It will help you stay current and share your company’s successes with potential clients. Now that you have a complete profile that stands out, it’s time to grow your audience.
2. Grow your audience
The most important thing when it comes to growing your audience on LinkedIn is relevance. Let us explain. A business account that is followed by, say, 1,000 people can be much more effective for lead generation than an account with 10,000 followers. The reason is simple. Your LinkedIn audience should always be targeted and relevant to your business.
The more relevant companies and people you target, the greater the chances that your lead generation and email marketing strategies will be successful.
Fortunately, LinkedIn’s algorithm is now very advanced, making the growth process much more challenging. You can start by connecting with companies and key decision-makers you have already worked with. As you interact with your customers and employees, a word about your business will most likely spread on its own.
At the same time, you can engage your team members and add them to your company page. Using SEO and analytics for your profile and LinkedIn posts (e.g. hashtags, demographics) is another smart way to attract new relevant leads organically.
Another way to grow your fan base is to partner with your niche stars and influencers. You can either approach them directly for a partnership or simply share (and interact with) their content. For instance, if your business offers a software solution for email marketing, you can write “email marketing” and get results for professionals who are CEOs (or any other relevant position).
Although these tips can be very effective when it comes to growing your audience on LinkedIn, there are times when you need to use some more advanced tactics. These include:
- LinkedIn ad campaigns
- Following and engaging in LinkedIn groups relevant to your niche
- Reverse-engineering (analyzing your competitor’s audience, pages, and posts)
- Employee advocacy programs (using tools like LinkedIn Elevate)
Once you have grown your audience, it’s time to look for potential leads. In other words, after key decision-makers who will help you build a comprehensive email marketing list.
3. Connect with potential leads
By now, you have already created an eye-catching company profile and expanded your audience. Now it’s time to use your business’s power to attract, interact with, and ultimately convert leads on the platform.
You can start by interacting with potential prospects in their groups, social media posts, and blog posts. At the same time, you can use some key information you have gathered from their profile to contact them on LinkedIn. There are several networking templates you can use to connect and interact with key decision-makers on LinkedIn.
Networking template example (source)
This will help you build a deeper relationship with your prospects. Don’t forget that, by emailing your leads, you should have already interacted with them. It will increase your email open rates and reduce bounce rates tremendously for apparent reasons. Also, consider using email clients to efficiently manage your email accounts which becomes extremely handy once you start reaching out hundreds of prospects.
Think of this initial contact as a foundation for future collaboration and treat it accordingly. During this nurturing process, do not forget to take notes on each contact you reach out to. This will come in handy when you are composing personalized emails for your leads later on.
In most cases, however, your initial LinkedIn growth will not be enough to build an extensive email marketing list. That is exactly why joining relevant groups is critical to your success on LinkedIn. You may even connect them by using a LinkedIn email finder to collect the correct email addresses and reach out to them by email.
4. Join relevant groups
Finding and interacting with users in LinkedIn groups relevant to your business is very important for lead generation. The reason is simple: LinkedIn groups allow you to showcase your company’s expertise, share your knowledge, and ultimately help others.
This is a smart way to promote your business and automatically generate new leads. At the same time, LinkedIn groups are the best way to connect with key decision-makers. Best of all, it’s easy to find such groups.
All you need to do is use the search box, select groups from the drop-down menu and type in some relevant keywords. Once you’ve joined these groups, you can use a LinkedIn Email Finder to efficiently gather contact information for promising prospects you encounter. Clearly, LinkedIn groups can help you drive engagement, ask and answer questions, and find valuable prospects to whom you can send personalized emails.
But when it comes to digital marketing, nothing is as important as content. And LinkedIn is no exception to that rule.
LinkedIn Group of startup professionals. You can meet new people here and find new backlink opportunities
5. Create outstanding content consistently
If you treat your LinkedIn account differently than your website and blog, you should probably realign your strategy. Social media content is just as important as the content on your blog and website.
When you regularly create outstanding, relevant, and educational written and visual content, you provide value to potential prospects. This will make your account worth following. Content is what will keep bringing new prospects to your account, at least in the long run.
From adding educational marketing videos and images to creating top-notch infographics with valuable statistics, nothing should be left out. In other words, you need to convey to your potential customers that your business is actively contributing to your niche.
Finally, you should ensure that your content is engaging, consistent, and, most importantly, helps deepen the relationship with your audience. And to achieve that, there’s one thing you should always avoid: Spamming.
Hunter’s LinkedIn page includes a mix of event announcements and articles with engaging tutorials and polls.
6. Don’t spam your connections
That should be a pretty straightforward tip, but unfortunately, it isn’t. After all, approaching potential leads isn’t always easy. There are times when businesses try to generate new leads, and during that process, they become (in most cases unintentionally) spammers.
To avoid doing that, there’s an element that should always characterize your LinkedIn and email marketing strategies: personalization. Message and email personalization, or better hyper-personalization, will help you reach out to potential leads and build a strong initial connection on LinkedIn without being seen as a spammer.
A smart way to achieve that is by using the key information you already know about your leads. You can use that information to explain why your business is relevant and how it can help your leads.
Only after you personalize your LinkedIn or email outreach it is time to include Calls to Action (CTAs) in your messages.
7. Implement CTAs
Writing actionable CTAs in your LinkedIn content is another smart way to create an email marketing list. Actually, CTAs are an effective strategy you can implement in pretty much anything. From your social media and blog posts to your LinkedIn messages and emails, there’s nothing that can’t be benefited by a well-crafted, personalized CTA.
Given that your business is relevant to your prospect, your services are most likely to be valuable for them as well. In the following example, you can have a look at how a CTA doesn’t have to be pushy, especially during a hyper-personalized email outreach:
Hyper-personalized LinkedIn post: CTA example (source)
The same is true for your social media posts and blog listicles. Encouraging your leads to contact you and test your services is a direct, non-pushy way to convert them into loyal customers.
8. Create landing pages
Landing pages are another way to collect email addresses and create a comprehensive email list effortlessly. There are multiple pre-made templates of email capture landing pages that you can use to get started.
Such landing pages aim to persuade visitors to share their email addresses with you. In that way, you can easily get more leads. But, to do that, you have to offer something in return. This could be a free (demo) subscription to one of the tools or services you are offering, a discount coupon, a webinar, and more.
Yet, no matter which approaches you opt for to create a targeted email marketing list, there’s something you should always do before you start your email outreach campaign. And that’s verifying the information you gathered.
Landing page to gather emails: source
9. Verify contact information
Before starting email marketing campaigns, verify all contact information to avoid email deliverability issues. Sending emails to invalid email addresses will not only cost you time (and money) but also damage the integrity and trustworthiness of your email address.
Your emails may even end up in your contacts’ spam folders because of this. Luckily, there are a few tools that can help you avoid this. With an email verifier, you can easily ensure that all the addresses you have collected through LinkedIn or landing pages are valid.
And that was the last step you needed to do before creating your personalized email campaigns.
10. Personalize and segment your email campaigns
Personalized emails increase the chances your email will be read and tailor your communication to recipients’ needs. Writing a personalized email copy is easy when you follow a specific methodology and include certain elements. These include your email subject line, opener, sign-off, and of course, CTAs and email signature.
In order to write a winning personalized email, you need to make proper research and learn as much as you can about the company and the person you are going to contact. The better you know the receiver, the better offer you can include in your email.
The most important thing is to use the information you have gathered about the potential customer (in the email opener) and make sure your email answers 2 crucial questions:
- What’s the reason you’re getting in contact with this lead?
- How can your business help them?
When you send personalized emails, make sure to address recipients by their names, ask questions to provoke the conversation, and schedule sending letters in the receiver’s time zone.
Thankfully, there are multiple subject lines, openers, email signature guides and templates that you can use to speed up the process.
Final Thoughts on Creating an Email Marketing List
LinkedIn is proving to be an extremely effective way to build a targeted email list for your business. The platform gives you access to valuable information about key decision-makers and allows you to interact and develop an initial relationship with them.
After that, you must review their information and create a hyper-personalized email marketing strategy using the following tips. Don’t forget that your services are valuable. So, just explain to your prospects why that is!