Outreach marketing is a crucial component of any successful business. It involves reaching out to potential customers or clients to generate leads and drive sales.
In this post, we will compare two popular methods of reaching out to potential clients or customers: LinkedIn and email. Both approaches have unique benefits and drawbacks, and we will discuss the best option for your business.
But before we explain the differences, let’s understand what Linkedin and email outreach are.
What is Linkedin Outreach Marketing?
An outreach marketing strategy means using goal-oriented tactics to reach LinkedIn professionals and pitch specific benefits of a product, a piece of content, or even collaborations.
Outreach campaigns allow you to expand the reach of your marketing efforts with the help of other industry experts that share your target audience.
Just as with email, there are plenty of outreach tools for LinkedIn that help you do it quickly and efficiently.
What Is Email Outreach Marketing?
Email outreach marketing is a marketing strategy that involves sending emails to potential customers, clients, or partners to promote a product, service, or idea.
Email outreach aims to establish a relationship with the recipient and ultimately encourage them to take a desired action, such as making a purchase, signing up for a service, or visiting a website.
Email outreach can be an effective way to reach a large audience quickly and inexpensively. However, it is essential to use email outreach in a targeted and strategic way, as it can be easy to come across as spammy or impersonal if not done correctly.
LinkedIn vs. Email Outreach Marketing
Should you perform an outreach campaign via email or LinkedIn?
The short answer is that for any outreach campaign, you can perform by email and adapt to LinkedIn.
The differences between the two don't lie within the strategy but rather within how each platform operates and the limitations they enforce.
Key Differentiators Between Linkedin and Email Outreach Marketing
Audience: LinkedIn is a social media platform primarily used for professional networking, while email outreach can be used to reach a wider variety of audiences.
Personalization: LinkedIn allows you to send personalized messages to individuals or groups, while email outreach typically involves sending a mass email to a list of recipients.
Format: LinkedIn messages are typically shorter and more informal than emails, allowing for more flexibility in tone and content. On the other hand, emails tend to be more formal and structured, with a clear subject line, introduction, body, and conclusion.
Customization: LinkedIn offers a range of customization options, such as adding images and formatting to messages, while email outreach is typically limited to text and basic formatting.
Reach: LinkedIn has a smaller user base than email, but it is specifically targeted toward professionals, which can make it a more effective channel for reaching certain types of audiences. Email outreach, on the other hand, allows you to get a larger audience more quickly and inexpensively.
Sending Limits
Outreach is a numbers game, but both platforms have certain limits regarding the number of emails/messages you can send.
However, with emails, the limits are much higher, and you could easily send hundreds of messages within a single campaign.
The exact number of emails you're allowed to send typically depends on your email provider, the pricing plan you purchased, or the outreach tools you've chosen for your campaigns.
With LinkedIn, there is a 100 invite limit per week and a 50 InMail limit per month when using Sales Navigator. You can also accumulate InMail credits for every InMail message that receives a response within 90 days of the send date.
Once you've warmed up your LinkedIn account by gradually increasing the number of invitations sent out per day and have received a decent response rate, your limit can increase.
Additionally, you can split the outreach campaign between you and your teammates and double the number of messages you're sending out as a team.
With a bit of planning, you can still deliver many messages on LinkedIn as well.
Advantages
When it comes to email outreach, sending more emails in one round is a clear advantage.
Another advantage is that a wide array of tools can help with prospecting, email gathering, and bulk deliveries, which speed up the process significantly.
At the same time, tools can help you manage and organize your campaigns and responses.
The most significant advantage of LinkedIn outreach is the high reply rates compared to email response rates. Despite sending out fewer messages, the results are better, with less effort involved.
Similarly, a few outreach tools designed for LinkedIn automate the manual parts of the outreach process while keeping your account safe from being restricted by LinkedIn.
By automating your outreach, you circumvent the tedious work and save hours of your time.
You'll keep track of your responses, manage your follow-ups more easily, and have a clear overview of the prospects that reply and are interested in your offer.
Icereach helps identify your prospects from LinkedIn searches and automatically builds a prospecting list with contact details. You can split your prospects into different campaigns, send highly personalized messages to each contact, and track your campaign results.
Disadvantages
With email outreach, sending too many emails without a warm-up process, not authenticating your emails, or using spammy subject lines, links, and attachments can highly damage your domain's reputation and deliverability.
Building your reputation back up is extremely laborious and time-consuming and may not even be possible in some cases. Although limits are looser, you still risk going too far.
With LinkedIn outreach, going above their very strict limits will result in a warning that you might be using automation. In this case, we strongly recommend stopping your outreach from that profile. If you wish to continue, you can do so from another profile with no harm done.
Ignoring the warning will end in a restriction or a swift ban of your LinkedIn account, which leaves you with only a few options.
While a temporary restriction will be ultimately lifted, to recover a banned account, you'll need to contact LinkedIn Support or LinkedIn Help and try to appeal it.
To avoid this, use cloud-based outreach tools that combine several security measures to comply with LinkedIn rules and ensure a 0% ban rate. Some of these include automatic account warm-up, time-zone settings, and access to a unique IP address from your region.
Pro Tip: Regardless of the platform you choose for outreach, remember to warm up your account by sending fewer messages, and slowly increasing the number with time.
Wrapping Up
More and more marketers are shifting their focus to LinkedIn as a primary platform.
When using LinkedIn, marketers see up to double the conversion rates and up to triple the lift in brand attributes when advertising on LinkedIn, the platform shows.
And the response is the same when you focus on outreach, with InMails getting significantly more responses than emails.
Slowly but surely, email strategies for promotion and lead generation started being backed by LinkedIn strategies.
