LinkedIn InMail: price, performance, example and best practices
LinkedIn is a social network full of resources. Among them is InMail.
InMail, as its name suggests, is an email sent and received via the LinkedIn platform, the world’s largest professional social network. Provided for a long time on the social network through the Premium LinkedIn subscriptions , InMail is also part of LinkedIn Ads, the LinkedIn advertising tool that you can use to create and deliver your advertising campaigns. The great advantage of InMail for your advertising? Personalization! In this article, let’s find out everything there is to know about LinkedIn InMail.
What is LinkedIn InMail?
You wish to contact a person that corresponds to your target customers, but you do not have their contact details messaging or his phone number, and his profile on LinkedIn taunts you by appearing regularly in your interface? Use InMail!
Sent on your behalf via your own LinkedIn user profile, InMail is the guarantee of a contact perceived not as vulgar spam appearing in the inbox of an email box, but rather as an authentic communication between two people. InMail is customizable and can easily be adapted to the people for whom it is intended. With LinkedIn’s InMail, you can get in touch with people who are outside your network and include your contacts as part of your outreach process. Social Selling LinkedIn , essential to stand out and conquer new opportunities.
InMails: how to benefit from it?
InMails are one of the many features reserved for LinkedIn Premium Subscriptions . Each subscription has a dedicated number of InMails available per month, which can be increased (except for LinkedIn Sales Navigator ). On the other hand, you will not be able to send InMails if you have a basic account on the social network.
While a certain number of InMails are provided in each of LinkedIn’s Premium subscriptions, it is also possible to access InMails with LinkedIn Ads, the creator of advertisements on LinkedIn. For this, you will have to go to LinkedIn Ads and create an advertising campaign in order to achieve your goals and send messages with quality content to your prospects rigorously selected according to defined criteria.
InMails: what is their price?
An InMail costs around € 1.50.
Before investing in this service, you will need to carry out some preliminary research. Are your target customers on LinkedIn? What is the budget that you can allocate to this form of prospecting, mainly focused on BtoB? What use do you want to make of it? Is it for the occasional sending of InMails for some prospects specific, or for a more massive advertising campaign?
You have to ask yourself this kind of questions to define whether or not the subscription to a Premium account or investment in an advertising operation with LinkedIn Ads will be solutions for you and for your goals.
How does InMail work?
As part of your campaign advertising or sending a particular InMail, all you need to do is indicate a subject (preferably clear and concise), write a text that will become the body of your InMail, and integrate a call-to-action button to prompt the recipient to click. You can also insert links to your site, to an appointment scheduling interface … With InMail, possibilities are endless: you can direct it to the LinkedIn page of your company, on the link of an event, an investigation, etc. He is also possible to add, to the right of the InMail content, a banner to engage the prospect to better visualize who you are, what you offer and above all: how you can help him . Don’t hesitate to include in your InMail a small image, to gain in interactivity, in colors and modernity.
If your prospect responds to your InMail, positively or negatively, LinkedIn will credit it to you again. This encourages users of the service to carry out qualitative, relevant and intelligent advertising campaigns or contacts.
How do I buy LinkedIn InMails?
If you have any of the 4 LinkedIn Premium subscriptions , you have a number of InMails that you can use. For the Recruiter subscription, for example, you have 30 InMails per month, which are carried over to the next month if you have not used them (within the limit of three months).
It is possible to purchase additional InMails if you need them. Please note that this option is not available for a Premium LinkedIn Sales Navigator subscription, for which the number of InMails available initially cannot be increased.
If you have a basic account, you cannot will not be able to send InMails, this service being reserved for Premium members of the social network LinkedIn. You will need to take out a paid subscription for be able to benefit from it.
You can also go through the LinkedIn Ads feature to create an InMails sending campaign in choosing several selection criteria and the amount of money you want to devote to it. Pay close attention to the Proinfluent blog , soon you will find a complete file on the use of LinkedIn Ads…
InMail VS email: the match
The big favorite of the BtoB prospecting is the electronic message, preferred to the campaign of telephone calls, trying and ineffective. Simple and familiar to all, email is a classic in prospecting and making contact.
So you have decided to launch a mailing campaign to promote your services and / or products. However, you do not yet know if you are going to use the so-called method. classic mailing with your list of email addresses to send your message, or if you will choose to send InMails with LinkedIn. Let’s put in InMail competition with classic email over four events:
Price: InMail 0 email 1
It is very difficult to do less expensive than free, when it comes to financial means. Send emails or email reminders the classic route costs you nothing. InMail therefore wins this first match. Note, however, that if the initial InMail has a purchase price, each time someone replies to your InMail it is credited to you again. In short, for every positive InMail, you “earn” another.
In both cases do not forget that it It is important to personalize your messages as much as possible.
Deliverability: InMail 1 email 0
With InMail, you can be sure that you are reaching the right person! Indeed, who has never known sending an email to an address like this info@company.com , with virtual certainty that it would never be sent to the right department, let alone the right person? Sometimes, even, your sources are wrong and the email addresses you have in your possession are wrong, or no longer valid. And even stronger still, the email is the right one, but the service provider does not address it for obscure reasons … By reducing the number of participants and the vagaries of office automation, InMail is the guarantee of a message well delivered by LinkedIn.
Tracking: InMail 0 email 1
With a CRM and automation tool, easy to follow the sending of your emails and their opening! It’s also easy to define the right moment to get in touch with your prospects, since your tool analyzes the “movements” of your customers. leads ! You can collect very important data with this kind of tool, and analyze how your mailings are experienced by those who receive them. This is not as extensive with InMail … The only certainty is that it has been sent.
Social Selling: InMail 1 email 1
Unlike your classic email address, with InMail you are not just a domain name, you are a real profile, with a photo, experiences, content, etc. The quality of the information contained in the profiles of LinkedIn also allows you to be able to personalize the message of your InMail as much as possible. Right in the heart of a strategy of Social Selling BtoB , InMail can pride itself on making personalization a real strength.
Result: equality! Sure, since in life as in business, nothing is ever neither all black nor all White. In fact, it is necessary to clearly define your priorities and objectives in terms of prospecting in order to be able to choose the most adapted to your situation.
To read : LinkedIn ™ and social selling: 7 tips to go further.
Method for writing a quality InMail
Here is the methodology in four points so that your InMail is as optimal as possible, and that its conversion is close to perfection!
- For the subject of your InMail, use one or two words to keep it short and precise . If you contact someone to tell them about your new service, write for example: “Useful Info”.
- Write a personalized body of text as much as possible thanks to the research you have previously carried out. Has the person recruited a new employee in their team? Praise him and relate this information to yours.
- Do your best so that your InMail does not look like yet another spam. Focus your writing on sharing information, as if you were having a conversation , rather than providing a long list of features for your new service like rolling out a sales catalog.
- Conclude with a relevant, striking, engaging call-to-action, but… not very aggressive! Nothing could be more unpleasant for those who receive an InMail to feel compelled to click on a button that flashes in all directions and in all colors. If you’ve followed the next three steps, don’t ruin everything by concluding your InMail with an overly commercial, flashy call-to-action.
Example of an effective InMail
Subject: Useful Info
Hello Mr X,
I am writing to you on the recommendation of Mrs Y, who worked with you last year and told me that you are particularly invested professionally, but also personally, in training within companies.
Recently I had access to LinkedIn Learning, and an overview of what will most likely be the “du future ”: digital and interactive.
After some research, I wrote an article about the mutation that takes place in the middle of training, and I would like to share it with you.
Here is the link :
Wishing you a nice day,
Yours,
Mr Z
Contact details to be contacted
InMail: mistakes not to make
- Overly commercial speech: Always think that the people you contact are themselves contacted by people who contact them for the same purpose as yours. We have used the word “contact” too much and you are tired of it? It’s the same for the too commercial discourse, we quickly get fed up!
- No customization: make the person you’re writing to feel like you’ve actually learned about them. It is gratifying for her, and the human being being rather egocentric by nature, her attention will be immediately engaged..
- A self-centered discourse: do people who use the “Me I” in every way take you out by the eyes? You are not the only one in this case, and there is a good chance that the same will be the case for your recipient. An open discourse on the other, that is the key!
- Generic and unoriginal content: without being spectacular, because after all you are on LinkedIn for professional reasons, going off the beaten track is always a little more to stand out from all those who will also write an InMail to your target …
- Too long an InMail: be impactful, sharpen the curiosity of your recipient. Don’t overdo it.
- Too short an InMail: conversely, say enough!
- Spelling mistakes: we can’t say it enough, but spelling, grammar, style and some basic typography are essential when communicating with others. Guarantee of seriousness, efficiency and allowing to harmonize all of your message, the good behavior of the form enhances the substance!
LinkedIn InMail: to conclude
To conclude, InMails are the opportunity to quickly get in touch with the interlocutors by paying for the features of LinkedIn via LinkedIn Premium or through LinkedIn Ads advertising. They are an excellent way to establish a direct approach to your target that you have previously identified to hit the mark, at the perfect right time.
Even if InMail is better delivered than a traditional email and you are sure to reach the right person’s mailbox, the target is told that you have paid to reach them. This will not necessarily harm the results you will obtain, which will depend on the quality of your targeting and the relevance of your message, but your recipients will be informed, and this is not to be neglected, since they will know that you necessarily have “an idea behind your head”.
Either way, InMails are efficient, profitable and still relevant. I still have a preference for Intelligent Prospecting ©, an approach that I invented and which contains an element of automation to contact your target, but in a human and personalized way … Thus allowing you to have the possibility of ” allocate the saved time to exchanging high added value content with your most interested (and interesting!) prospects.
To talk about it, make an appointment in my agenda here .
