Cold LinkedIn versus cold email?

I think people are annoyed of hit ups on Linkedin.

Try email or Twitter!

I've analyzed all IndieHackers interviews and have some interesting data to share. Overall:

a) 42 founders mentioned'cold email outreach working for them
b) Only 9 mentioned LinkedIn

The nice thing about social media is that you can do other things than reaching out to get noticed. This is what I've seen working (especially with Twitter).

For example, if you like someone's Tweet (or re-tweet them) they're more likely to check you out of curiosity vs. DMing them (which may annoy them & Twitter has mechanisms in place to stop mass DMs). Same with other platforms.

So ask yourself: What action can I take so my username will pop on their 'Notifications' window & and they're likely to check me out?

Btw, you can't do this with cold email (Gmail doesn't have a 'notifications' window where they say things like: Hey, X people (this this and this) forwarded your emails). Email is optimized for sending. Social media (LinkedIn included) is optimized for engaging.

I've been spending a lot of time on LinkedIn lately because I've decided to focus on it as my platform for marketing/audience building. The feeling I get from most users on LinkedIn is that it's more of professional social media platform/environment, and users would really like to keep it that way. They don't want it to wind up like Facebook or even Twitter where trolling and overly personal/TMI (Too Much Information) posts are common.

Given that, you will most likely find far less engagement with cold reach outs on LinkedIn as opposed to Twitter or Facebook. Only after you have built a rapport or some credibility on LinkedIn will people respond to you. If you have been very active sharing helpful information, participating/commenting and engaging sincerely with other people, only then will people respond to you. And even then, the people that reply to you will be the people with whom you've already engaged with previously.

Marketing on LinkedIn is a long game. Plus, it will be a much more fruitful environment for you if you have properly identified your target market/ideal client very, very specifically.

Yep, I think about LinkedIn cold outreach in two ways:

1. If you are looking to explore a problem space for idea validation, don't mention your idea at all and just ask for an interview of how they currently do the things that your idea would help them solve. Check out The Mom Test for more in-depth examples of these types of questions, but they basically revolve around "how":

"How do you currently do X?"

"How does your team think about Y?"

2. If you have already explored you target customer space and have an offering that you think they'll love, you MAY be able to just directly reach out with a message like this:

Hey <name>,

I'm helping companies that have <problem x> or are looking to <improve y>. If that fits with you, let me know"

Short and sweet works better here than anything else.

That being said, something I've seen be much more effective is what some other commenters mention: doing some content marketing.

If you can share a post in a relevant circle that teaches people with problem x to improve y, and it's a good article, you can write a call-to-action at the bottom. It's hard to give a specific example of a CTA without knowing what stage you're at, but let's say that you are looking to drive pre-sales of a B2B CRM for a given niche. The article might have been about how to best setup your market's currently most popular CRM to be optimized for your niche. And at the bottom, you may write:

Looking for a CRM that already has all the things that you need to handle <niche-specific requirement>? Head to www.mySite.com to register as an Alpha member for the ultimate CRM for <niche>!

Once you have a post like this, you can even leverage it in your linkedin outreach:

Hey <name>,

I'm helping companies that have issues maximizing their CRM for <niche>. Here's an article I just released that helps you set up your CRM, which I know a ton of companies are having problems with.

Hope this helps!

All of this being said, LinkedIn or cold email is a TOUGH channel. It wouldn't be the first place I would explore with a new product, I would only fall to it if all my other experiments with channels had failed.

I mute any 'reach out' messages on LinkedIn. I do, however, read all emails.

I ignore 100% of my LinkedIn messages now, but I'm open to a targeted emails or Twitter DMs usually. I know some people love LinkedIn though and random hit-ups does work for some people - I guess it depends on your prospect.

What about face to face? This is the first and probably most difficult path to your customer, but it is so powerful.

Cold visit In person. That’s when I learn the most!

Any channel, providing you create a relevant, valuable message or content, should work.

LinkedIn is phenomenal for B2B outreach at scale, there simply is no better or easier channel to reach out to your ideal customer segment, based on incredibly accurate data.

Out of interest, what's your project? Have a website?

There is no right or wrong channel. You will need a lot of volume to book meetings, and relentless followup. LinkedIn, email and (if you can make them during business hours) phone calls should all be in the mix for B2B sales, which is what you're doing, even if you don't have a product yet.

Reach out to them, compliment them, let them know you're just trying to understand how they [your problem space] and what solutions they have tried to [whatever you think your product might do] and ask for a few minutes. Kiss their ass a bit. Talk about why you are reaching out to them specifically. Or don't. Either way, expect you'll need to reach out to 1000+ people to book 10-20 decent meetings.

Tools for getting prospect email addresses, sending out customized emails in bulk (mail merge style) and doing LinkedIn outreach automatically (bots like LinkedHelper or DuxSoup) will all help you execute your outreach, but if you're like many of the other people on this website who have never done sales before, expect that it will require a lot more work than you expect to book a meeting, even if you are solving a real problem.

One other word of advice: don't worry too much about being "annoying" or "pushy" when following up. Your goal is to get this person to get back to you, whether that's to say yes to a meeting or to tell you exactly where to stick it. It's common that it takes 5-7 messages across different channels before someone gets back to you. Think of email outreach as a sequence, not a single message. Many tools will allow you to automate sending followup messages until you get a reply.

You need to imagine yourself as a hustler on the street inviting people walking by to come eat at your boss's restaurant -- most are going to reject you, and you're going to get a lot of rude responses, but you only need a few yeses to make all that pain worthwhile.

I would say both ways are good as soon as you are doing it right:) I see a lot of messages in linkedin which are boring and without any value. The same with emails. Share your message so we could say if this good:)

With cold email, there is a deliverability issue (not all emails land in the inbox as you would like). LinkedIn has better deliverability, but since the user has to click to log into LinkedIn to read, this creates a friction that brings down the number of people who read your message.

Also, email is unlimited. But with LinkedIn, you can only send so many invitations in all.

I would use email as my first choice and use LinkedIn only for instances where the recipient is warm or more valuable.

As someone who uses LinkedIn messaging and cold emails a lot, I believe it depends on how the other person sees LinkedIn.

Some people don't even bother checking LinkedIn and be active on it only when they are on the lookout for a job. They just use it as a tool for job seeking.

In some cases they'd have been annoyed by too much hit ups on LinkedIn and they'd have decided to ditch it.

Some people actively use it and reply back to messages.

Email on the other hand has more chances of getting opened, maybe because it's a kind of a psychological thing associated with 'work'. I don't think LinkedIn has reached thta level of importance/stature in people's minds.

My advice would be to continue your efforts on both LinkedIn and email.

In an effort to add something new to this thread, I think it really has to do with the audience you're reaching out to. Context of the platform/medium matters. I.e. Sales and support folks are more receptive to cold emails than, say, IT managers.

I would try everything. Test, measure and iterate.

LinkedIn is the major lead channel for my firm. @jch

We invest pre-A to series A startups, and we work with syndicates like VC and accelerators as well.

It's been going well coz we can find all the connection we need on LinkedIn.

I also leverage LinkedIn for my personal network, growth and also distributing side projects. I post on LinkedIn regularly, hence there's a hype going through my profiel

I'm in a similar position to you right now.

Currently, I'm using LinkedIn because I can send more messages, faster. I'm not selling anything at the moment, so people don't mind responding when I ask them to answer a few questions about their work.

One difference I've found is that people respond more slowly on LinkedIn than via email.

Just so you know, I'm targeting a wider variety of people as I'm not as sure about who I should be speaking to just yet. It seems like you know exactly the type of person who has your problem, so for you it might be better to email them as you'd probably get a higher response rate.

Hope this helps :)

It's definitely a tricky thing to do. Both approaches are very salesy and people can smell someone trying to sell them something from a mile away.

You have to get very creative in pointing out the value you're offering to your target. The best way to do that is to give them an example of the value that they'll be getting with your product.

This is more likely to happen through a LI message, than a cold email.

Hi Jeff, how about also writing some articles, and/or posting something on Linkedin about the problem?

People might start conversations based on your post, discussing the problem. We never know.

As others said, I ignore Linkedin messages unless comes from people I know but I'm more open on Twitter. Not huge fan of cold emails as well if not targeted to me

hey @jch with makesales.io I say both! I still offer 2h consultations (you'd be my 25th IH member) to check the stuff you sued so far and use my experience to write your first sequence if you're interest, let me know, victor [at] makesales [dot] io !

"but I found it difficult to steer the conversation where I wanted it to go without betraying the pretense under which the person agreed to speak with me".

I like this sentence & it makes sense, right? You started a conversation with me about X, then I notice that really you wanted to talk about Y. Maybe I wouldn't like that. Maybe it depends on how smoth the segway is into Y.

It's always difficult to know if something is a real pain point unless you yourself have felt the pain and have sought solutions but come up dry. But you said you have had that expereince, so why do you need external validation?