LinkedIn Outreach Beginners Guide: 7 Essential Rules – Expandi

Warming Up Your LinkedIn Account + Daily Limits

What? You thought you could just fire up a new account and get started with mass selling and outreach?

No, that’s not how it works.

Let’s say you create a new LinkedIn account, fire up your favorite LinkedIn social selling tool (is it Expandi by chance? 😉) and get to work on generating those leads.

Here’s what’s going to happen:

At first, you start connecting to only 1-2 people per day manually, and then, through the power of automation, you shoot up those numbers to 50+ people per day. This will be a HUGE trigger for LinkedIn, and most likely, they will easily detect and flag your account.

Why?

Simply because this does not seem natural and screams non-human behavior.

LinkedIn limits depend greatly on whether or not your account is warmed up and if you have Premium Account or not.

So, to ensure that your account is safe and sound before you get to skyrocketing your social selling and outreach, we’re going to first set some daily limits within your actions.

Let’s take a look:

LinkedIn Connection Requests

To ensure your LinkedIn connection requests are NOT spam-y, we recommend keeping them under a certain number, until your account is warmed up.

Something like…

• 1-5 days – 10 connection requests per day. 📈
• 5-10 days – 20 connection requests per day. 📈
• 15-20 days – 30 connection requests per day. 📈
• 20-25 days – 50 connection requests per day. 📈

And so on, and so on – you get the message.

Keep those suggested settings for about two weeks and monitor your account.

Now, once your account is warmed up and ready to go, here’s what you also need to keep in mind when doing outreach.

Use Personalization to Boost Your LinkedIn Connection Requests

Want to skyrocket your connection request acceptance rate and get answers to any Linkedin message sent? Use personalization!

But not just any personalization. It has to actually work, and be custom tailored to each prospect you’re interacting with.

There are two main reasons as to why you should do this:

1. First, if you’re sending the same generic LinkedIn outreach messages to everyone – LinkedIn will think you’re spamming people and probably flag your account.
2. And secondly, people in general, respond well to personalized LinkedIn outreach messages. It makes them feel unique and special, making them more likely to respond.

But it’s not that simple!

Here’s a list of all the personalization tags you can use in your LinkedIn sequence messages (at least on Expandi).

What’s the dynamic placeholder tag you ask?

It’s a unique little feature you won’t find anywhere else, we’ll explain it below so keep on reading! 😉

Now, most people assume personalization only starts and stops at {first_name}, {last_name} and {company_name}.

While it’s true that those are some of the main personalization tags people use, almost everyone is used to them at this point. To the point that they sound almost like spam.

So, what’s a LinkedIn marketer to do?

Well, you just need to up your game, use better sequence templates, and even consider how dynamic personalization can help.

With a dynamic variable, you can place the tag within your templates, and the placeholder will come out differently each time, depending to whom it is addressed! You can mentioned your prospect’s website name, mentioned solution and do all sorts of fun stuff with it.

If you have a specific group of people you want to reach out to, dynamic personalization is the go-to method to come across as natural, and boost your connection requests and replies.

Sounds nice, right?

In fact, it’s one of my favorite features as there’s just so much you can do with it.

I even managed to hit a 69% connection request acceptance rate and a 83% response rate to the follow-ups with one of my campaigns, using personalization. Check it out here 👇:

Personalization is essential to effective outreach and prospecting on LinkedIn. Read more about the different types of personalization campaigns (including the dynamic personalization one), and see the exact templates I used here: LinkedIn Personalization Growth Hack Beyond First Name and Last Name For 2022

Use a Cloud-Based LinkedIn Tool to Ensure Maximum Safety

Not all LinkedIn automation solutions are created equal.

There are many software programs, chrome extensions (Dux-Soup, for example), bots, browser plug ins, and a myriad of other tools out there.

But not all of them are safe. 😱

Guess what – if you’re using a chrome-based tool, that lives in your browser and changes your LinkedIn behavior from your browser, LinkedIn will be more likely to detect it.

Any tool that can scraper users’ information, is spammy in their outreach, and harms user data, goes against their User Agreement.

Read more about LinkedIn ToS here: LinkedIn Prohibited Software and Extensions

So, if you want to remain undetected, it’s better to use a cloud-based solution.

This simply means tools that live on the web (not in your browser), work 24/7, and are generally, much safer.

Here’s why:

1. They live on the web, meaning, they work as if you’re using LinkedIn from another computer, which makes it harder for LinkedIn to detect it.
2. Lots of cloud-based tools give you a dedicated IP address, meaning you’ll be logged in your LinkedIn from the same country as before.
3. It simulates human behavior and interaction. You can set working hours and days, daily limits, how connections are sent out, and more. All this is done in a natural way that doesn’t make your profile seem automated.
4. Some cloud-based tools offer advanced personalization. You can go beyond first name and last name personalization to boost your connection requests, and LinkedIn won’t think of this as spammy either.

There’s a ton to talk about when it comes to LinkedIn safety. To avoid making this article needlessly long, you can read more about generating leads from LinkedIn automation safely here 👉: How to Get More Leads From LinkedIn Automation Tools Without Getting Banned

Increase Your Response Rate by Using the Right Templates

What you say in your connection request and your follow up messages is what determines if your leads will reply or not.

Luckily, most people use the same old boring templates.

Something along the lines of…

“Hi {first_name}, saw you were working at {company_name}.

Thought I’d reach out and tell you a bit more of what I do, and see if there’s any room for collaboration.

X.”

I’ve found that the best LinkedIn outreach sequences have to do with the targeting.

If you’re targeting cold prospects who don’t care about you or your solution, you won’t get far.

But if you’re targeting a laser-specific group of people, with whom you have something in common with – you’re off to a good start! 😎

And here’s where personalization comes into play again.

Let’s take a look at another example.

I wanted to reach out to people who commented or liked a certain LinkedIn post (about growth-hacking).

Here’s the connection request template I used:

“Hi {first_name}, saw you also liked the amazing LinkedIn Growth Hack post by Ugljesa Djuric from Lemtalk. I guess we have growth in common. Love it! Let’s connect,

Stefan”

Yes, I ended up using only the {first_name} personalization, but because the targeting was on point, I still ended up with a 72%(!!!) acceptance rate.

Not bad, right?

Simple, but effective.

From the same campaign, 40% responded to my follow-ups. Read more and see the exact templates I used here: The Best LinkedIn Content Retargeting Growth Hack to Start Generating Leads For 2022

Pro tip: You can use a similar tactic and scrape Facebook groups so that you automatically have something in common with your leads! And before you ask, yes, I’ve done that as well. In fact, my acceptance rate here was 72% and 49% responded to my follow ups. You can learn more about that here: 👉The Best Growth Hack to Generate More Leads on LinkedIn for 2022

Set up Time-zone and Interaction Settings

LinkedIn’s monitoring also tracks the time your account is active at.

If you’re consistently sending out connection requests and messages every day at the same time, even during holidays and midnight, this could be enough reason for LinkedIn to flag your profile.

The goal here is to use a LinkedIn tool that mimics human behavior.

This way, you can control when your connection requests and messages are being sent out, on what days, hours, and more.

If you’re using LinkedIn at 10AM in the Netherlands, then at 5PM in the United States and 7PM in Berlin, something isn’t adding up and LinkedIn will notice.

The solution? Time-zone settings.

If you’re going to be automating your messages on LinkedIn, it’s a good idea to schedule specific hours and days, with a random delay interval for sending messages.

Like so:

Wait! Before you launch your first LinkedIn campaign, is your profile optimized? Here’s how to prepare: 5 Essential Steps to Prepare Before Launching an Automated LinkedIn Outreach Campaign

Summary

So, are you ready to launch your first campaign now?

By following the above tips, you’re ensuring that your profile stays safe and you’re getting more responses from your leads.

To recap, here are the rules again:

1. Warm up your account first before diving into automation so that your account won’t get flagged for spam.
2. Set specific daily limits so that you’re not spamming people.
3. Delete old pending connection requests (keep them below the amount of 300)
4. Use personalization to connect to your prospects and boost your connection request rate.
5. Use a cloud-based LinkedIn automation tool for maximum safety and advanced features.
6. Make sure you’re using the right sequence templates and targeting the right people.
7. Ensure your time-zone settings are correct so that your account mimics human behavior.

And now, you’re ready to go!

Do you think you now have what it takes to launch a killer LinkedIn campaign now?

Why not send me a friend request on my personal Facebook profile, I’ll grant you a free 7-day Expandi trial and you can get started straight away, just let me know!

Originally published March 5, 2020, updated January 27, 2022

Recommended reading:

• Guide to Smart LinkedIn Inbox Management: 10+ Features to Never Miss a Chat Conversation Again
• The Best Alternative to WeConnect
• Guide “The Top 3 LinkedIn Outreach Strategies“