Exporting your LinkedIn contacts with emails: effective methods, tools and GDPR
You know, LinkedIn is a powerful social network, focused on professional world. Whether you use it for your business in prospecting and forging partnerships, looking for an opportunity professional, for business use to promote the values of brand, or even to extend your network and share your creations professional, there are many ways to navigate LinkedIn.
Mainly used for B2B and business leaders, or salespeople who want to boost their sales and obtain new prospecting leads, LinkedIn is a great tool and a precious help if you know how to use it correctly. LinkedIn expert, I gather in my blog advice, tips and methodologies that help you to grow your business. Today I decided to tell you about prospecting through LinkedIn … And export of LinkedIn contacts!
Please note, I am not a lawyer and this is an article detailing how to do as well as a personal interpretation, I would not be held responsible for your use of data and / or actions taken following reading this article.
1. Export your LinkedIn contacts and emails: why?
Prospecting is the sinews of war in business. Without it your clientele dwindles over time. You need to be on constant watch and constantly looking for new prospects to convert them into customers faithful. LinkedIn is a huge and very rich database of which you can be used to generate leads. With a strong and good network frame, with which you interact in a relevant way, you have to available to a whole community which, if its members are part of your buyer personas, widens the horizon of your prospecting.
You can prospect with LinkedIn directly on its platform, by canvassing the members of your network one by one, or by using Sales Navigator , or simply by publishing high added value content that will generate traffic to your LinkedIn profile and website and boost your sales.
Mais vous pouvez également exporter vos contacts LinkedIn pour en retirer une liste d’adresses mails vers lesquelles vous allez diriger une campagne de prospection par cold emailing.
Regarding e-mailing, it is a prospecting method that has made its proofs, but which is not as popular today as it used to be. TO force of being constantly spammed, Internet users have taken certain provisions to no longer suffer from the massive sending of emails that they do not have wished to receive. However, an email campaign can be effective if it is well done and that it incorporates the principles of Social Selling: personalization, interaction, relational.
For further : Social Selling LinkedIn, how to prospect in BtoB?
Still getting a list of email addresses directly from the LinkedIn database, which is remembered, a source gigantic number of potential customers, is an avenue to be explored.
2. Export your LinkedIn contacts and their emails: how?
Avant toute chose, il est essentiel de dire que le RPDG, depuis le mois de mai 2018, a considérablement modifié l’approche de la collecte des données de contacts. S’il est toujours possible d’exporter des contacts LinkedIn, il est important de savoir deux choses :
- Only the Internet users who have authorized the visibility of their email address on the LinkedIn platform will be able to be part of the export
- Internet users having indicated a personal email address (such as gmail.com) will not be able to be part of your prospecting list.
We will come back to this later in this article, in full.
So, how do you export your LinkedIn contacts? Let’s detail together the two methods that can be used.
A. Export your LinkedIn contacts… with LinkedIn!
From the LinkedIn platform, it is possible to download data of your contacts. Here are the steps to do so:
- On the LinkedIn home page, once you are logged in to your LinkedIn account , click on the photo of your LinkedIn profile picture in the top bar, then on “Preferences and confidentiality”:
- You will land on your LinkedIn account settings management page. Then click on “How LinkedIn uses your data”, on the left of the page:
- Once you have been directed to the topic of data usage management, click on “Upload your data”.
- It is in this section that you will be able to export your LinkedIn contacts. All you have to do is click on “Your choice”, then check “My connections” in the menu that follows. Be vigilant and do not click on “All”, at the risk of seeing yourself waiting hours and hours to access data which, ultimately, does not interest you, since you only want that of your contacts:
- You just have to click on the blue button “Request archives”.
- For security reasons, you will be asked for your LinkedIn password:
Then wait until the file is downloadable. In principle, you will only have to wait about ten minutes. Note: do not leave the page, you will have to come back to it later to retrieve your file.
You have passed the first phase of data recovery.
- LinkedIn will notify you, with an e-mail, of the successful completion of your process by telling you, after the ten-minute wait, that your file is ready to be downloaded. You just have to go back to the download page and click on “Download archives”.
If despite the email, the page does not display the button: then refresh it. Now let’s move on to the second phase of exporting your data.
- You have downloaded your file, and you are now the proud owner of a poorly readable .csv file.
- To make it easier to read and extract the data you want, first click on the letter of the first column to select all of it.
- In the “Data” tab of Excel, on the top toolbar, click “Convert”.
- In the menu that opens, check “Delimited”> “Next”
- Check “Comma” in the “Separators” section: this will air your file by classifying each category by column.
- Click “Next”, then “Done”.
That’s it ! You have a clean, readable and ventilated. With it you can clearly read the first and last names of your contacts, but also other information, and add them to your database. prospecting. But… wait a minute! You have noticed ? The column supposed to contain the email addresses of your contacts is empty, at except a few cells? This is normal, and I will explain to you Why.
LinkedIn recently provided its users with the possibility whether or not to display their e-mail address, in order to better align with the legislation concerning personal data (we will come back to this). Through default, the data is therefore no longer in a “public” mode, and the Internet users must go to modify in their account settings viewing and sharing this data.
Well, it seems that this method is not very effective for expand your prospecting list by e-mailing. So let’s move on to the second method…
B. Export emails from LinkedIn contacts by completing by hand
If you have few contacts to export or want to complete the export made with LinkedIn, you can do this manually. To do this, go directly to the LinkedIn profile of the contacts to export and in the coordinated section, copy the email address of your contact.
By doing so, you will collect more email than when exporting LinkedIn because a good number of users enter their email address on their profile (almost all). You just have to enter this in your document Excel.
C. Export emails from LinkedIn contacts with specific tools or extensions
To export your LinkedIn contacts, or more clearly find the e-mail contact details of members of your network, there are tools available on the internet or in the form of extensions to your browser to find and collect email addresses. These different tools require a little downstream work, since it is manually that you will be able to “collect” the addresses of your contacts. Let’s see the tools at your disposal to carry out your research!
Find the email addresses of your LinkedIn contacts with Hunter.io
Hunter.io est un outil qui permet, grâce à un nom de domaine, de trouver la composition des adresses mails de vos contacts. Le principe est simple : vous entrez le nom de l’entreprise dans lequel votre contact travaille, et le site vous indique les résultats de la recherche.
For example, if you type proinfluent in the search bar, the results that will appear will be:
Vous pourrez alors en déduire la formation des adresses mails de Proinfluent : prenom@proinfluent.com. Si Proinfluent était une structure comportant de nombreux salariés, et que vous cherchiez à envoyer un e-mail professionnel à, par exemple, Valérie, vous n’auriez qu’à envoyer cet e-mail à l’adresse valerie@proinfluent.com.
You can use Hunter for free up to the limit of 150 monthly searches. Beyond that, you will have to put your hand in your pocket. Yes you have very little research to do, i.e. less than 150 addresses per month, Hunter is a very good tool. But if you are looking to generate more extensive prospecting mailing lists, you will need to to pay :
- 49 € per month for 1,000 searches
- € 99 per month for 5,000 searches
- € 199 per month for 20,000 searches
- € 399 per month for 50,000 searches
Depending on your objectives and the volume of addresses you are planning to collect, Hunter can be very useful, and is quite effective for what he is asked to do.
Note: Hunter is also available as an extension to install directly on your main browser!
Find the email addresses of your LinkedIn contacts with Skrapp
Skrapp is an extension that works directly and works on the same principle than Hunter. The advantage of Skrapp over Hunter? You can synchronize your LinkedIn to the extension, which will take care of collecting email addresses of your contacts!
Just like Hunter, an account on Skrapp is free up to 150 contacts per month.
But Skrapp has other strings to his bow. Indeed, if it works with LinkedIn, it also offers the possibility of collecting data directly by browsing a website, or directly by name of domain. For example, if you want to contact a decision maker within of a specific company, you can search for the person by entering a keyword concerning his position, and the name of his company.
On the interface of the extension, you can also record lists according to your preferences, to find your contacts more easily.
Find the email addresses of your LinkedIn contacts with GetEmail
Also functioning as an extension to be installed on your browser, GetEmail is a powerful tool established on the same principle as Hunter and Skrapp.
More expensive than its competitors, the GetEmail application prides itself to be efficient, reliable and displayed on its presentation site to work with the biggest companies.
There are other similar tools to find addresses emails from your LinkedIn contacts. It’s up to you to see which method is most closely matches your goals and that will satisfy you.
3. Export your LinkedIn contacts: what about the GDPR and consent in general?
As we know, the law has become more severe with regard to collection of personal data. However, the email address is considered as a personal data. Do a prospecting with a massive mailing of addresses collected without the explicit consent of their owners is liable penalties. Let’s take stock of what the law says.
A. Use of data in France: what the CNIL says
In France, the CNIL is clear on this subject , here’s what she says:
Email prospecting for individuals (BtoC): what the CNIL says
” The principle : no commercial message without the recipient’s prior consent
Advertising by e-mail is possible provided that people have explicitly given their consent to be canvassed at the time of collection their email address.
Two exceptions to this principle :
- if the person prospected is already a client of the company and if the prospecting concerns products or services similar to those already provided by the company.
- if prospecting is not of a commercial nature (charitable for example)
In these two cases, the person must, at the time of collecting his e-mail address
- to be informed that his e-mail address will be used for the purposes of prospecting,
- to be able to oppose this use in a simple and free way. “
Email prospecting for professionals (BtoB): what the CNIL says
“The principle: prior information and the right to object
The person must, at the time of collecting his address from messaging
- be informed that his email address will be used for prospecting purposes,
- to be able to oppose this use in a simple and free way.
The subject of the solicitation must be related to the profession of the person contacted (example: message presenting the merits of a software paul.toto@companyname.com, IT director.) ”
Generic professional addresses of the type (info@nomsociete.fr, contact@nomsociete.fr, commande@nomsociete.fr) are contact details of Moral people. They are not subject to the principles of consent and the right of opposition. “
B. Exporting your LinkedIn & GDPR contacts: a reminder
Acronym of the General Data Protection Regulation, the GDPR is a regulation adopted by the countries of the European Union in May 2018 concerning the processing of the personal data of Internet users. Warning, let us clarify: you are subject to it if you process personal data in Europe even if you are in the Bahamas!
The idea is to protect internet users by allowing them better control and secure access to the data they provide knowingly (or not, sometimes) to the sites they visit. Among these data, all what can allow the identification of an individual is concerned: name, first name, email address, postal address, location, phone number, etc. Does that mean anything to you? It’s normal. Everyone has already filled out a form on the internet which included all this information. If before he was very complicated to have access to the rectification of these data, or to inquire about the use that is made of it, with the GDPR things have changed.
Companies have an obligation to secure the data they collect by strengthening their storage systems. What’s more, the company who collects the data must expressly and clearly mean the use and possible reuse of these same data to the person who provided them. Finally, the company must be able to give the proof of the person’s consent.
With the GDPR, finished the box “I accept the reuse of my personal data for commercial purposes »already checked! Now, companies must present their visitors with a choice limpid: to accept, or not to accept.
In short, the GDPR offers any natural person who has provided data concerning him the right to take them back, to know what was fact, and the certainty of having acted with full knowledge of the facts.
C. GDPR and recovery of email addresses from LinkedIn contacts
The subject is rather vague for LinkedIn. In principle, the GDPR does not does not apply to professional email addresses … with regard to the consent (we talk about prior information and right to object) ! In on the other hand, the user of the collected addresses should inform the recipient that this address could be used. We will not digressing the rationale for GDPR, but focus on LinkedIn. As as a professional who collects the professional addresses of others professionals on a professional social network (more clearly, I cannot not!), you might consider that Internet users are aware of being prime targets for prospecting.
This is only valid for professional data . Be careful, if in the export of your LinkedIn contacts with the first method explained in this article, email addresses personal files slip into your file! There is little chance for that the address column is filled in, but check all the same and exclude systematically email addresses such as gmail.com, orange.fr or yahoo.fr. You do not will not be able to provide the consent of those contacted, which means you will not be in good standing with the GDPR.
We have therefore seen that professional email addresses are not affected by the regulations, but use common sense. Are you going to use all of these contact details to send compulsive direct mail? Or will you use this valuable information to start a process of social selling LinkedIn to build a real relationship with people and engage them in a respectful sales funnel?
If you are present here, it is because you prefer the second option, and I congratulate you on that, because it is the future of prospecting and achievement of your goals. Use LinkedIn to connect with others is a smart way to surf digital advancements and adapt your professional behavior 12
Exporting your contacts to LinkedIn: in summary
- You have the possibility to export your LinkedIn contacts directly from the network social to retrieve the (few) emails that users have accepted to give, or through external extensions (but without their consent).
- Export your LinkedIn contacts will allow you to obtain contact details or information concerning your prospects, to broaden your field of action and carry out campaign (which will have to respect the law).
- If the GDPR does not do not condemn the use of your personal data LinkedIn contacts professionals (only) , still avoid compulsive sending of e-mails that might classify you as a spammer and prefer to opt for a less aggressive gait, while leaving the right to object to receiving your emails.
Vous avez des contacts qui sont dans l’ambigüité BtoC vs BtoB ? Et si vous leur envoyiez des messages privés (puisqu’ils ont accepté d’être dans vos relations) ou un InMail ? Pas de casse-tête RGPG dans ce cas… Pour en savoir plus, lisez le guide de L’InMail marketing de LinkedIn.
