Prepping For Your September Outbound Campaign: Cleanup, Copy, & Sending

With September just around the corner, it's time to put the finishing touches on your outbound campaign so you can begin sending emails and connection requests after Labour Day. We covered Steps 1-3 in our last post, see the article here for reference, so now it’s time to make sure your LinkedIn and website are ready, draft your copy, and start sending. Then of course you also have to plan for how you’ll handle leads as they come in and optimize your campaign. 

Let’s jump into it….

Update Your LinkedIn and Website

Before you start reaching out, make sure your LinkedIn profile and website are geared towards the target audience you’ll be reaching. Update your case studies and testimonials to show you can actually deliver on what you’re offering, and align the language you use with the audience you’re targeting. 

When it comes to your LinkedIn profile, remember that you're not looking for a job, you're looking to make a sale. Far too many business owners, and salespeople use their LinkedIn to focus on themselves, instead of how they can help a potential lead. For context, check out one of our LinkedIn profiles

For your website, ensure the offer/info it presents is congruent with your outreach. As an example, if your website is focused on consulting services but you're reaching out about a new training product that has no information on your website, there's a misalignment between your outreach and website 

Craft Your Messages

Start drafting the copy you’ll use to engage prospects.

• We generally do a 4-part LinkedIn sequence: Connection, Thanks for Connecting, Value Bump, and a Final Attempt

  • Remember that connection request messages are capped at 300 characters with a premium version of LinkedIn or 200 with the free version (and the free version limits you to just 10 customized connections a month).

• And then we write a 4-part email sequence: Intro, Social Proof, New Value Angle, and a Final Attempt. 

Focus on how you help the prospect, not on yourself. Remember, you're starting a conversation, not trying to close a deal in the first message.

Start Sending

It’s time to begin your outreach. Get your email software setup and sending–we like Woodpecker and Smartlead–and start dripping out connection requests on LinkedIn. If your LinkedIn account is in good standing and you've upgraded to LinkedIn Sales Navigator, you should be able to send up to 200 connections a week before hitting LinkedIn’s limits. On the email side of things, we generally recommend beginning at 5 to 10 emails a day per account and then ramping up slowly assuming there are no deliverability issues.

Plan for Follow-Up and Optimization

Launching a campaign is just the start. Plan now for how you'll follow up with interested prospects, track your results, and optimize as you go. The reality is you don’t know until you test, and you should always be tweaking your campaigns and improving them based on what the data tells you.

For tracking and keeping on top of your leads, we recommend using a CRM. Our preferred CRM is Pipedrive, but Hubspot has a good free plan to start out with. 

For optimizing your outreach, the first things you should be looking at are your connection acceptance rate on LinkedIn and your open rates for email. On their own, these are vanity metrics, but if you're not getting enough connections accepted or enough emails opened, it doesn't matter if you've written the best messaging ever. After that you can start optimizing for replies.

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That should be enough to keep you busy for the rest of August. If you hit any snags or have any questions, just reach out and ask.