LinkedIn Invitations: All You Need To Know

Well, you’ve successfully signed in on a LinkedIn, went through the onboarding, have filled several profile sections and now ready for the adventures. What’s next?

In this article, we’d like to highlight several important steps that will help you to get your invites accepted by other people on LinkedIn who even do not know who you are.

Step 1: Make sure that your profile is properly optimized

Firstly, make sure that you’ve filled all important fields on your profile, like name, photo, your current job title, short bio, university, last companies you’ve worked in. This simple step will help other people to understand that you’re a real person with a real and catchy background, worth to connect and communicate with.

It happens in any social network that a robot can try to reach out to you, send spam and be annoying, but sometimes even real people behave like robots, just because they don’t know how to behave like people.

Here’s the full guide on how to get your LinkedIn profile absolutely prepared for sending invites and messaging.

Step 2: Make sure that you’re targeting right

Correct targeting can bring you up to 80% of success. About 10 years ago it was pretty difficult to do segmentation and use the data-driven approach in digital marketing. Today it is not a problem anymore, so we strongly recommend you to investigate who is your buyer persona and what is the appropriate segmentation model for your cold outreach campaigns.

Thanks to the filters on LinkedIn it’s super easy to target people of whatever titles in whatever location and company domain.

For more info about data-driven marketing and the importance of segmentation try Jeffery Mark’s book “Data-Driven Marketing: The 15 Metrics Everyone in Marketing Should Know”.

Here are top tips on how to use filters on LinkedIn like a pro.

Step 3: Customize the invitation using personal note

According to various researches and our personal experience, using the personal note in your connection request could increase your acceptance rate in about x2. True, that it absolutely depends on the note content and people you’re targeting (target audience and it’s potential tendency to refuse your invite just because of the domain you work in).

The content of the note should be personalized and relevant, and the more it is personalized and relevant to the pain/interests of the person you’re interested in, the higher are the chances of your request to be accepted.

Besides, using personal notes may provoke initial conversation and can make a little ice-breaking for you. Thus, you can kill two birds with one stone: increasing the acceptance rate and the response rate by starting the conversation before the initial message is sent.

Step 4: Make personal note simple and short

Zen design rule could be applied here as well: make short and simple requests so the person you’re trying to connect would not be confused by the pile of text.

Do’s:

1. mention people you both know (if relevant);
2. mention how you’ve met (if you’ve met before, e.g. on a conference);
3. mention with no deep details your reason to connect (leave some space for the intrigue);
4. say that you’d love to connect;
5. say that a valuable connection never hurts.

Dont’s:

1. rough and long sales pitches;
2. no personalization;
3. lying about your reason to connect (it’s better to say something neutral or say nothing);
4. using cliches.

Fun fact: according to our experience neutral requests face a higher acceptance rate than the requests with the specified reason to connect. But it depends, we encourage you to make your own tests and share results :)

You also can set up multiple automated campaigns with One2Lead for the same audience and define the best template for your invite campaign.

Step 5 (optional): Refer to people you have in common

In order to warm up your contact a bit and in some cases to define the reason you’re reaching out, try mentioning people you have in common. Let it sound like “Hey, seems we both know/ are connected with Mike, how’d you get to know him? Btw, I really like your background, let’s connect!”.

Important: after that, be ready to explain how did you get to know ‘Mike’. In any scenario that occurs after, remember that ‘a valuable connection never hurts’, and that LinkedIn could be a perfect place to test the 6 handshakes rule (6 degrees of separation).

We wish you happy testing of your approaches for LinkedIn invitations and instant growing of your network!

p.s. Don’t forget to check out how to skyrocket your LinkedIn outreach with automation tools.