Lead Generation, sales and customer service is about one thing.

Making the person that you are speaking to feel valued, listened to, made to feel special and that all of your energy and attention is just on them.

I understand there are many automation haters who will say that automation is spam, it is just mass messaging without any thought. For some people this is true, they don't put in enough energy into who they are targeting or what they are saying.

We have all received this type of message before:

"Hi, I would like you to be part of my professional network, let's connect"

or even worse, the aggressive selling message right from the start:

and the worst type where you see your network invitations looking like this with no messages at all:

How to create a LinkedIn connection message

When I am training teams on LinkedIn lead generation the first thing I ask them is:

"What is the first thing you said to your current partner when you first met?"

I get a lot of strange looks at first, but then most of the answers are similar to:

"I can't remember, I just said hi and started talking to introduce myself" - and this is the point!

They did not go up to a stranger at a bar and said:

"Hi I'm Pat, want to get married?"

The person you are speaking to would think you are crazy. So why when you use LinkedIn to speak to a stranger for the first time, you try to sell straight away?

The only goal of a connection message is to get the person to click 'accept" not for the person to want to buy your product!

Without the contact clicking accept, you cannot continue the relationship and the conversation is over.

Is it better to send LinkedIn connections manually or automate them?

Sales people like to over think, over analyse, do everything they can to get an understanding of the person they connect with.

They somehow feel like they have this extra sense where they can look at a LinkedIn profile and know exactly what that person is thinking, and how you could really sell your product to them.

Bull****!

The problem with this is that what they think is going to be a very personalised connection message, turns into a highly aggressive sales messages trying to show all the reasons why you should connect, why you can help them, why they need your product.

Instead, consider a more general message that introduces yourself and shows you want to get to know the person:

This message is likeable, friendly, gives a context of why you can help someone, but ultimately the context of the messages is "let's get to know each other".

For this type of message we get 50% connecting rate which we are very happy with:

So for all of the haters of automation, when it comes to a connection messages less is more and a more generic automated message will actually get your a higher connection rate.

How to make an automated message more personalised

One of the worries that so many people have about automation is that everybody sends the same message with the same type of content.

You can personalise messages with {first_name},{company_name} or {job_title}) placeholders, but there is more you can do to really make the messages seem manual and personalised.

With Prospect Labs there is an extra feature called 'Dynamic Placeholders'

Dynamic Placeholders allows you to upload any data you want into Prospect Labs and then use this data as placeholders in the message.

Imagine you find a list of 300 people in LinkedIn that are your perfect target audience. You use the search function, add the url and pull in all of the contacts information (you could also import all the contacts from csv):

Normally most people would then add all of these results to a campaign and go live, but there is another step you can do to make the data even more personal.

Go to 'Placeholders'

and then choose 'edit placeholders' names:

Here you can create a new placeholder to be used as personalisation in your messages. For example those 300 perfect leads, you could manually research blog posts that they have written:

Now you can go through all the 300 leads you have found and manually add a link to their blog post as a customer placeholder

Now go back to your campaign and in the messages you can use a dynamic placeholder. Just click on 'dynamic placeholder' in the placeholders next to your messages

Then choose your dynamic placeholder from the dropdown, in this example 'blog post':

The final step is to copy the format for blog post: {Blog post} and add this to your messages:

Now in your messages you can use {Blog post} to make your messages more personalised:

Remember what I said at the start of the blog? Make people feel special and valued. By mentioned the blog post that you have read it builds a connection and the lead will not feel like it is an automated message.

Using Hyperise for LinkedIn lead generation

Improving the text of what you send is highly important to generate more leads and the more personalised the better in terms of placeholders. But what about if you could do something so unique that nobody else is doing to stand out from the crowd?

I am so happy to announce that Prospect Labs have integrated with Hyperise to help you create personalised images in the messages.

How do use images in your LinkedIn messages:

Create a trial account in Hyperise and use a discount code that Prospect Labs will give you (get in touch via live chat to ask for it).

Once you have signed up to Hyperise go to your settings to get your API Code.

Then create an image that you want to use in your LinkedIn message. Some of our examples are:

and our most popular image is:

Then login to Prospect Labs, go to Profile Setting and paste the API code here:

Now you have synced Hyperise and in Prospect labs you will see a new option underneath your campaign messages.

Just go to your campaigns, go to the steps and underneath your messages you will see an option to sync with Hyperise:

Sync your account and then from the dropdown you can choose which images you want to use from Hyperise in your LinkedIn campaign.

These are some examples of how I have been using this to generate leads for Prospect Labs:

To learn more on how to set up your Hyperise integration with Prospect Labs check out this knowledge base resource:

👉 Getting set up with Hyperise

If you need help setting up your campaign, getting a discount code or need some inspiration on what images to use for your campaigns, just get in touch.