LinkedIn™ Outreach Message Tip: Send Them To People Who Will See Them

So you are sending outreach messages and your response rate is abysmal. See if you do any of the following in order to improve your situation:

1. improve your message writing skills
2. change your call to action at the end
3. work on improving your subject lines
4. try sending your  messages at different times of the day 
5. and different days of the week
6. throw money at the problem

What you should be doing first: checking to make sure that the person you are trying to contact actually sees value in LinkedIn™ and uses it regularly. 

I see this often. Someone asks me to help them “get through” to an unresponsive prospect on LinkedIn™. On reviewing the prospect’s profile, what do I see? 

• They have something like 122 connections
• And no activity
• There’s no “meat” in their experience sections, just company, title and years worked there, in other words, the bare bones.

I can see that the person places little value in LinkedIn™ as a work tool, and that they likely come around every couple months…or less often than that. 

It’s not because your message is poor, it’s because you’re sending them to someone who  is unlikely to see them in the first place. 

Sounds silly doesn’t it? But this is the biggest single problem I see with using LinkedIn for outreach. As maybe 80% of LinkedIn users use LinkedIn less than once every couple weeks, 80% of your messages are going to people who either won’t see them, or yours is just one more message that has piled up since the last time they used LinkedIn.

So here you are with your abysmal 3% response rate. Well actually, seeing as eighty percent of your prospects are rarely here, your “real” response rate is three out of twenty or 15%. Your goal should be to find that unresponsive eighty percent and avoid sending them messages. For those people try introductions or referrals or email or Twitter for that matter. On LinkedIn™, I suggest you only want to send messages to people who will likely see them and give you a fair shake. 

Now let’s look at the characteristics of the 20% of users who use LinkedIn™  a lot. They have lots of connections and followers, usually well over a thousand. They use LinkedIn regularly – you can see it in their activity, posting and commenting on other people’s posts. Some of these people check in once a week, others use Linkedin almost every day. As these people see the value in using LinkedIn, they are also more open minded to receiving messages from people they don’t know. They are more open to the possibilities. 

Not hard to do. Doesn’t cost a pile of money. And will quintuple the number of responses you get. 

Now, let’s cover an even better indicator that you can use in your outreach…

The LinkedIn Green Light – A Very Useful Indicator 

What is the LinkedIn Green Light?

When on LinkedIn, we have all noticed the little green dot or green circle beside people’s avatars on LinkedIn. They look like this:  

Most people know that the solid green dot means the person is on LinkedIn and that the little green circle means…something, but they aren’t sure what. 

The full actual explanations are:

• The presence of a solid green circle next to someone’s name in LinkedIn means they’re currently on LinkedIn and will be instantly notified when you send them a message. 
• A hollowed out green circle indicates that someone is not actively using LinkedIn but has push notifications enabled on mobile. They’ll be notified instantly when you send them a message.

Your odds of getting a reply to a message just went through the roof. Or as I tell my clients, 

“Go when the light is green.”

The second is not as obvious but just as important. I see it in the following places: 

• Notifications
• Messaging
• Followers
• Group members

A couple of natural places where oddly, the green dot does not show up for me is in my feed or on actual profiles I visit.

As with many LinkedIn™ features, users can turn the green dot and circle off if they want to, but no one seems to realize this, so hardly anybody does.

This is another one of those tactics that is completely obvious when you think about it. The problem is, no one thinks about it.