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email vs linkedin inmail

LinkedIn InMail vs. Email for Recruiting and Staffing

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Since we’ve been working with email marketing, especially in the recruiting and staffing space, we’ve heard a number of people say they use LinkedInⓇ InMail to find new candidates. And some of those that are recruiting/staffing companies also use LinkedInⓇ InMail to find new clients.

We also hear their complaints about LinkedInⓇ, and their lack of results. Frankly, it makes sense to us that they aren’t getting the results they want on LinkedInⓇ. And I say this as someone LinkedInⓇ has endorsed and who wrote a book on LinkedInⓇ for business development. I’ve tested LinkedInⓇ extensively against other platforms and strategies. More surprising to me are the people who sound happy with LinkedInⓇ, but their results are not that impressive.

What is LinkedIn InMail?

InMail is a service from LinkedInⓇ where you can directly contact other LinkedInⓇ members. If you have a free account, you can only contact those you are connected to. With a premium account, you can use InMail to contact any LinkedInⓇ member, as long as their preferences are set to receive InMail.

LinkedInⓇ InMail has some serious obstacles and deficiencies that make it hard for you to succeed.

The biggest problems with LinkedInⓇ are…

LinkedIn InMail vs email
  1. People don’t read InMail… because it is so spammed up by business development people. Most of the messages are low-quality cold messages with no personalization. If you are in certain job functions or are in leadership, you probably get a ton of this InMail spam. Because of that, your message doesn’t get seen by the people you’re sending to, and they feel no compunction to respond.
  2. People who DO read InMail may not check it for days. And when they do check it, your message is buried in an avalanche of amateur cold spam InMails. So, InMail doesn’t result in quick responses, and possibly no response if people “turn off” to it because of all the spam.
  3. People do read email, many times per day. Spam has less effect here, because it’s usually filtered automatically by the servers. But if you can get into their inbox with your cold email, your message is received and read.
  4. InMail is one at a time, very slow and time-consuming. Email can be sent to thousands of potential clients and candidates at once, or in just a few days.
  5. LinkedIn™ Recruiter Tools can be cheap, but you get what you pay for.
  6. LinkedIn™ Recruiter doesn’t give you emails or phone numbers. You’re stuck in the limited LinkedIn ecosystem.
  7. You need valid up-to-date contacts with emails and phone numbers to have a chance to be seen and get responses from more clients and candidates.

You can see why, done right, outgoing sales emails can have a greater impact on your results than LinkedInⓇ InMail. If you’re not doing it, I highly recommend you look into it!

Here’s Why Your Sales Emails and LinkedIn Messages Aren’t Working

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Your sales emails and LinkedIn messages suck.

They’re annoying.

They make me want to mark you as spam, not talk to you.

You probably think it’s a numbers game.

And you’re right: as long as you think it’s a numbers game, that gives you an excuse to suck at it, and your numbers will be super low.

And if you treat everyone you email or message the same, and if you don’t get interested in how to get a better response from people:

  • Your numbers will continue to suck.
  • You will give yourself and your company a bad name.
  • You will feel like you’re doing something positive by taking action, but you’re actually having a negative effect.

If you have a PR department or branding people that are trying to give your company a good image, they probably hate that you’re giving your company a bad image with these spammy emails.

If you’re a salesperson, you may think marketing is stupid. That’s just something that lame, introverted, nerdy people do, right?

That attitude shows in spammy emails, because they lack any marketing sense at all.

The first thing a marketer does is give a crap about the audience.

“Hmm, what does the recipient care about?”

This is clearly not your concern when you write spammy emails and InMails.

All you care about is getting a phone call or demo scheduled.

That’s what YOU want.

BUT the prospects you’re writing don’t care what YOU want.

Prospects care about what THEY want.

You aren’t helping them care by writing in a compelling way.

And that’s why they’re marking you as spam and ignoring you.

They’re saying bad things about your company and your entire profession sucking and you don’t even know it.

They wish you cared, because they probably have problems you could solve.

But they aren’t understanding that you could really help, because you aren’t talking to them in a compelling way.

You only care about your numbers and your numbers game, and you’re not communicating well.

You would still do cold calls if they worked. But they don’t work. Do YOU like robocalls? Probably not. They don’t work.

Neither does this spammy, selfish email approach.

Stop bothering people, and start caring about them, and you’ll get a better response.

If this did penetrate your skull at all, then what you need to do next is read 5 or 10 books on copywriting.

Copywriting is the more than 90 year old marketing discipline of figuring out how to write in a way that get people to take action- actions like saying yes to a phone call or demo.

Your emails are copywriting, whether you realize it or not.

It’s just that you are not a trained copywriter, so your emails suck.

Get some training.

You will learn some fundamental mindset shifts.

You will learn to think about your writing from the reader’s perspective.

And people will start responding.

You will get more appointments and sales.

And fewer people will think you suck.

Do it.

Oh, and if you’re not a spammy salesperson, but you agree with this article, share it with those annoying salespeople that bother you. Send it to the next salesperson who spams you via email or LinkedIn. It just might help them out- and prevent the next victim from getting spammed, too!

UPDATE: Some readers asked me, “So which copywriting books do you recommend?”

I first studied copywriting 14 years ago, so I’m sure there are a lot of great new copywriting books beyond what I read… If I were starting now I would go to amazon, search for copywriting, and check out the reviews. The ones I recall liking the most were Scientific Advertising, Confessions of an Advertising Man, Tested Advertising Methods, Words That Sell, Phrases That Sell. Some of those are older (like 1930’s or 1960’s or 1980’s older) so you may need to ignore or update some of their phrases.

But my best source these days for continuing to learn copywriting is applying my own system, plus the feedback I get from the advertising and landing page metrics.

This blog post describes some of the copywriting principles I’ve developed…

and this is a mega blog post of copywriting formulas you might find helpful.

Why B2B Facebook Ads Beat LinkedIn Ads Every Time

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Some people have it wrong. You- savvy reader- probably already know this, though, right? :-)

“Facebook doesn’t work for B2B. It’s for B2C,” people say. “Users aren’t on there for work.”

Correct, they are on there to be distracted. “I’m bored,” they say. “Show me something awesome!”

If that awesome thing you show them happens to help with their work, they’ll click on it. That’s what the data tells us about B2B Facebook advertising.

 Why FB works for B2B: FB users want distraction. Show them something awesome that helps their work and they’ll click on it. <– click to tweet

Besides, we live in an era where the line between home and work has blurred.

Here are some of our B2B Facebook advertising case studies over the last 12 months:

  1. An attorney got a case worth $100,000 from Facebook after spending just a few hundred dollars on Facebook advertising.
  2. A cloud hosting company got new business leads from Facebook advertising and a whitepaper for $59 each. The most affordable ads brought in leads at just $29 apiece. The most expensive ones targeted CIO’s and cost $74.08 each.
  3. A new B2B financial industry business discovered their offering wasn’t needed or wanted by the target audience- they discovered this (via extraordinarily low clickthrough rates) with an investment of just a few hundred dollars in Facebook advertising. They saved tens of thousands of dollars by not going further down that dead-end path.
  4. A financial industry event generated 305 registrations at $71.34 each while ads reached 1.5 million people and generated clicks from 18,125 people.
  5. A marketing agency generated new client leads for $29.26 apiece.
  6. An SaaS company used a whitepaper to generate 504 leads and 92 new demo signups for $26 per demo signup. Notable here was that the target was people who worked at Fortune 1000 companies.

Based on our experience above, people do click and opt in for B2B offers while they’re on Facebook.

The 4 advantages that Facebook ads have over AdWords and LinkedIn ads are:

  • Facebook has the largest audience.
    • Google is almost as big, but you can only target people looking for what you have. Facebook lets you target people based on job title, company, etc.
    • LinkedIn is much smaller than the other two.
  • Facebook ads are prominent enough for a lot of people to click.
    • Google also does a good job with this.
    • LinkedIn’s self-serve ads… what’s the last one you remember seeing? Exactly. Unless you spend $10k per month, you can’t use their more prominent “enhanced” ads. So the biggest problem is that your LinkedIn self serve ads don’t get seen and therefore don’t get many clicks.
  • Facebook has the lowest cost per click.
    Facebook clicks are usually below $0.75 and often as low as $0.10.

    • Google ads average over $2.50 per click and can go up to $25.00.
    • LinkedIn ads average over $3.00 per click and often are as high as $6.00.
    • Twitter ads are usually $1.00 – 1.50 each.
  • Facebook ads reward you for trying more ads and targets.
    You can lower Facebook ad costs by 50% or more when you create ads that get higher click through rates.

    • Google ad cost per click doesn’t vary much no matter how you optimizes- less than 10%.
    • LinkedIn ad cost per click doesn’t vary much either.
    • The same is true for Twitter ads.
  • BONUS: Facebook ads can target people by job title, company, seniority, what they majored in at college, net worth, income and nichey jargon. All of these can be used to hit your exact B2B prospect.

So, Facebook ads reach more people, grabs more attention, cost less, and cost a lot less if you work at it.

Now that you know Facebook ads are so effective for B2B, why aren’t you using them for lead gen?