Email vs LinkedIn Message : Quelle méthode est la plus efficace

When sales teams and agencies try to reach out to new B2B prospects, two popular methods stand out: cold emailing and LinkedIn outreach, most times using fully automated flows in each channel and even combining them sometimes. But which one wins / is most effective generating leads or conversions? We will delve into the strengths and weaknesses of each approach to help you determine the best strategy for your needs.

What is Cold Emailing?

Cold emailing involves sending unsolicited e-mails to people or companies with whom the sender has never had a relationship or contact. The primary objective of cold emailing is to initiate a conversation, establish a connection that can then be nurtured to turn a contact into a qualified sales lead, usually done in mass sends, making it a “numbers game” waiting that at least a small percentage of the lists will react. Given the typical low cost of these campaigns, companies don’t mind if the effectiveness and actual conversions are lower than 1 or 2%, as a handful of responses is all that’s needed.

Effective cold emails are generally personalized with dynamic data, concise and relevant to the recipient, with a clear call to action on what is expected for the recipient to do, usually involving a simple “reply to this email” or “book a time on my calendar” type of CTA..

Advantages of Cold Emailing

• Scalability: Cold emailing allows you to reach a vast number of prospects quickly and efficiently. Automated tools enable sending thousands of emails at once, making it an excellent option for scaling outreach efforts,
• Low Cost: Compared to other marketing channels, and depending on how the lists were generated (or acquired) and the email tool used, Email can be one of the cheapest ways to reach thousands of qualified contacts.
• Personalization: With the right tool and a good database, your cold emails can look highly personalized, using not only personal details of each contact (name, company, etc) but also addressing specific pain points of the recipient, increasing this way the chances of engagement,
• Measurable Results: Cold email campaigns can be easily and thoroughly tracked and analyzed through metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, and response rates, allowing for continuous data-driven adjustments and improvements.
• Testing: Alongside with easy tracking, most email tools these days also allow marketers to develop multivariate tests and trying different approaches, allowing to, in a small period of time, identify what messages work the best and which ones don't
• Direct Communication: Email is a direct channel that lands in the recipient’s inbox, offering a high level of visibility and the potential for immediate response, assuring more visibility than other channels such as paid ads..

Disadvantages of Cold Emailing

• Spam Filters: Cold emails risk being flagged as spam, reducing their effectiveness. Ensuring deliverability and avoiding spam filters can be challenging,
• Low Response/Open Rates: Without a prior relationship, recipients may be less inclined to respond, leading to lower engagement rates,
• Limited Information: Without prior interaction, it can be challenging to gather enough information about the recipient to create highly relevant and personalized messages. Also, it is never sure that the details available in the database are 100% accurate and correct.,
• Regulatory Compliance: Various laws, such as GDPR and CAN-SPAM, require careful adherence to avoid legal repercussions and cold email campaigns more often than not fall into some “grey zone” working around the regulations but not always being fully respectful of people’s data privacy.
• Limited Engagement: Cold emails typically do not allow for real-time interaction, making it harder to engage recipients in a dynamic conversation compared to other outreach methods like phone calls or social media, with emails requiring usually a lot more persistence and waiting periods
• Brand Damage: More and more people are used to cold emailing campaigns and have less patience for those, immediately generating a bad impression and reputation of the person or company sending it.

What is LinkedIn Outreach?

Prospecting or Outreach on LinkedIn is the process of leveraging the LinkedIn platform to establish contacts and relationships with professionals, potential customers, partners or collaborators. Typically used for Lead Generation or Recruiting efforts, It involves sending connection requests, messages or personalized InMails to people or companies with the aim of networking, generating leads, recruiting or seeking out business opportunities.

To be effective, LinkedIn outreach usually involves researching the target person's profile, writing a personalized and relevant message, and providing a clear value proposition or call to action.

Nowadays, more often than not, all LinkedIn Outreach efforts are automated, via tools like Kanbox, which provide all the features for extremely effective campaigns, finding, scraping and targeting entire lists of highly qualified contacts, with easy management and follow-up on all replies.

Advantages of LinkedIn Outreach

• Targeted Networking: LinkedIn allows you to precisely target specific industries, companies, and professionals, based on dozens of characteristics from their business profiles, allowing companies to create extremely narrow and specific lists that match their ideal prospect, increasing the likelihood of reaching relevant contacts,
• Professional Platform: LinkedIn users are generally more open to business communications compared to other social media platforms, which are typically more associated with entertainment.
• Enhanced Credibility: A well-optimized LinkedIn profile and the ability to view mutual connections and endorsements can build trust and credibility with potential contacts,
• Rich User Data: LinkedIn provides extensive information about users' professional backgrounds, making it easier to find the “perfect” profiles we want to target and personalize outreach and tailor messages to specific interests and needs, Relationship Building: Beyond initial contact, LinkedIn offers opportunities to engage with content, join groups, and participate in discussions, fostering deeper relationships over time, more real and direct
• Lead Generation: By connecting with potential clients and partners, and using the search and filtering features available, LinkedIn outreach can generate high-quality leads for business development,
• Cost-Effective: Compared to traditional marketing and lead generation methods, LinkedIn outreach can be more cost-effective, it is mostly down to the time spent crafting the messages and engaging with prospects.
• Analytics and Insights: LinkedIn provides analytics on profile views, post engagements, and message interactions, helping refine and improve outreach strategies, knowing easily what works what not,
• Scalability: Outreach efforts can be scaled up or down based on needs, allowing for flexible and dynamic marketing and networking campaigns, particularly when using automation tools, with smart features to allow you easy lead management.,
• Access to Decision-Makers: With the search and filtering capabilities to narrow people by specific details of the companies and job roles, LinkedIn often provides direct access to key decision-makers and influencers within organizations, streamlining the communication process.

Disadvantages of LinkedIn Outreach

• Limited Reach: LinkedIn's reach is limited to its user base, which, while extensive, may not encompass all potential prospects. Using LinkedIn Premium Business or LinkedIn Recruiter based on your needs can be a solution but at a certain cost.
• Time-Consuming: Building relationships on LinkedIn can be more time-consuming compared to cold emailing, as it often requires engaging with content and nurturing connections before direct outreach, specially if done fully manually and without a prospecting tool.
• Platform Restrictions: LinkedIn has specific rules and guidelines about outreach and messaging, limiting to only a certain number of invites and direct messages per day, and violating these can result in account restrictions or bans,
• Overcrowding: Many professionals use LinkedIn for outreach, leading to a saturated environment where your message may struggle to stand out among numerous similar attempts,
• Dependence on Platform: Relying heavily on LinkedIn for outreach means that any changes in the platform’s policies, algorithms, or user base can impact your strategy’s effectiveness.

Cold Emailing vs LinkedIn Outreach: Head-to-Head Comparison

Understanding the nuances of cold emailing and LinkedIn prospecting is essential for your business and your lead generation to allow you to decide wisely which channel is best or if maybe you can combine both.

Effectiveness

Cold emailing involves sending unsolicited emails to potential customers who have not yet expressed an interest in your services. This method allows for a degree of scalability and detailed personalization, making it a powerful tool for reaching a wide audience with tailored messages. However, deliverability can be a challenge, with emails often landing in spam folders if they are not written correctly. Compliance with regulations such as GDPR and CAN-SPAM is also essential to avoid legal pitfalls that can forever damage your brand reputation.

In contrast, LinkedIn outreach leverages the professional networking platform to connect with potential clients. By utilizing LinkedIn's advanced search and filter features, you can target individuals based on specific professional criteria, enhancing the precision of your outreach efforts. LinkedIn outreach adds a layer of credibility and trust, as connections are made within a professional context. However, the approach is constrained by platform limits on connection requests and messages, and it requires reliance on LinkedIn's evolving algorithms and policies.

Key Takeaways

• Cold emailing: Highly effective for large-scale prospecting, cold emailing offers the potential to achieve significant results when emails are meticulously crafted and precisely targeted. This method enables you to reach a wide audience effectively, making it a powerful tool for generating leads and encouraging conversions,
• Prospecting on LinkedIn: This approach is ideal for developing quality relationships and engaging with professionals in a more organic, relationship-based way. This approach builds credibility and trust, facilitating meaningful interactions that can lead to long-term professional relationships and high-value opportunities.

Cost

Several factors come into play when comparing the cost of sending cold emails with that of prospecting on LinkedIn. Cold Emailing generally entails costs associated with email marketing tools and subscriptions to software that facilitates large-scale email campaigns, such as SendInBlue or MailChimp. These tools often include functions for tracking open rates, click-through rates and responses, providing valuable analytical data for fine-tuning future campaigns. Despite these expenses, cold emailing can be a cost-effective method due to its scalability and relatively low cost per e-mail sent.

On the other hand, prospecting on LinkedIn involves different cost structures. While sending connection requests and individual messages on LinkedIn is free, more advanced prospecting efforts often require a premium subscription to LinkedIn, such as LinkedIn Sales Navigator. This subscription offers enhanced search capabilities, InMail credits for sending messages to people outside your network, and other features designed to make prospecting more effective and efficient.

The cost of these subscriptions can be significant, particularly for small businesses or sole practitioners. However, investment in LinkedIn's premium services can be justified by the platform's ability to facilitate high-quality, targeted engagements with professionals who are more likely to be interested in your services.

Key Takeaways - Points clés

• Cold emailing: This generally involves costs associated with email marketing tools, software subscriptions and, possibly, the purchase of targeted email lists. Despite these expenses, this method remains profitable due to its scalability and the low cost per email sent,
• LinkedIn Outreach: This method often requires a premium subscription to LinkedIn to benefit from advanced features, which can represent a significant investment. However, the cost can be justified by the platform's ability to facilitate high-quality targeted engagement.

Personalization and Engagement

Cold emailing and LinkedIn prospecting offer distinct approaches to personalization and engagement, each with unique benefits. Cold emailing allows a high degree of personalization through the use of sophisticated email marketing tools. These tools allow you to tailor messages based on specific recipient data, such as name, company, role and previous interactions as well as any pain points or relevant achievements you identify on the company’s or contact’s profile.

This level of personalization can significantly increase the relevance and impact of your emails, fostering a stronger bond with potential customers. However, engagement through cold emailing is usually limited to email interactions, such as replies and follow-up messages, and may require additional effort to maintain ongoing communication.

LinkedIn, on the other hand, offers plenty of scope for personalization and engagement as part of a professional network. LinkedIn's platform allows you to personalize connection requests and messages by referring to mutual connections, shared interests or recent activities.

This personalized approach can make your contact more compelling and relevant. You can interact with potential customers in many ways, even before trying to engage in any business conversation, such as by liking, commenting and sharing their posts, participating in relevant group discussions and endorsing their skills, all contributing to building a multi-dimensional relationship, with different touch points to reinforce trust.

Key Takeaways

• Cold Emailing: high degree of personalization thanks to the tools available, enabling tailor-made messages, sent in mass,that can increase relevance and impact when done well. Engagement, on the other hand, is mainly limited to email interactions and requires effort to maintain ongoing communication,
• LinkedIn Outreach: Enables advanced personalization by leveraging mutual connections and shared interests as well as personal profile data. Engagement goes beyond messaging and includes interactions with messages, group discussions and endorsements.

Which One Wins?

The choice between sending cold emails and prospecting on LinkedIn depends on your objectives, your sector of activity and your resources. For companies looking for rapid development and direct communication, sending cold emails may be the best choice as it’s fairly fast and easy to deploy without that much prior experience. Conversely, for those looking to establish meaningful professional relationships with a targeted audience, prospecting on LinkedIn may prove more effective as it is a more real interaction, more personal.

The main differences between the two methods lie in the platforms and audience selection mechanisms. Cold emailing uses email lists compiled from a variety of sources, whereas LinkedIn prospecting takes advantage of the platform's robust search capabilities and verified emails. Engagement through cold emailing is primarily limited to email interactions, whereas the LinkedIn approach offers multi-faceted engagement opportunities, including profile visits, endorsements and public interactions.

Both strategies require a professional and personalized approach to deliver results, depending on your needs and the budget your company wishes to allocate to them. For cold emailing, it's essential to write bespoke messages that take into account the specific context of the recipient and include clear calls to action, avoiding being too pushy while building trust and ensuring compliance with email marketing regulations. When it comes to LinkedIn contacts, it's essential to maintain a professional and up-to-date LinkedIn profile, and to actively engage with content in your network to strengthen relationships which will also help when contacting people who don’t know you yet.

The choice between cold emailing and LinkedIn prospecting depends of course on your specific objectives, your target audience and the availability of your resources, with a balanced approach often producing the best results, being even seen as a best practice to combine both channels in the same campaign..

Best Practices for Cold Emailing - Les meilleures pratiques pour vos cold Emails

Subject Line: The subject Line is the first impression, it’s important to make sure that it’s intriguing and relevant enough to increase the open rate. Avoid “spam”-type wording to prevent your email from being labeled as “junk” and also avoid any “click-bait” techniques as it can immediately generate frustration once the email is open.

Body: The body of your email needs to be relevant, straight to the point and personalized with a professional tone or at least the tone of your company. Usually, this emails will be completely plain, no template or design of any kind, trying to resemble a normal email typed from someone’s inbox, in order to increase trust.

Social Proof: You can include testimonials, case studies or any reference to add credibility and to build trust with your audience as well as link to pdfs or other types of content you believe can trigger your contacts to engage..

Optimization: Avoid using too many images or large attachments but also words that can be triggered to spam. Your email should comply with regulations such as GDPR and CAN-SPAM by putting an “unsubscribe” button and your contact information always visible. It’s also crucial that you adopt database cleansing practices to guarantee that your contacts are valid and increase your deliverability rates.

Select the right tool: There are thousands of email marketing tools available and each of them will have its differences. Before picking a tool, make sure you test a few and analyze all the features that you will need as it can be extremely frustrating and complex to manage if you ever need to change to a different tool in the future.

Best Practices for LinkedIn Outreach

Personalize connection requests: Include a personalized note when you send connection requests. You can mention mutual connections, shared interests, recent activities, company updates or specific reasons why you want to connect to make your request more relevant and compelling.

Add value in your messages: When sending messages to new contacts, focus on adding value rather than just presenting your services. Share useful resources, offer insights or ask thoughtful questions to build trust. A salesy approach to start with will typically not deliver great results.

Optimize your LinkedIn Profile: Make sure to have a professional but also an attractive LinkedIn profile, which builds trust from the first impression. The people you come into contact with must be able to understand who you are, what you or your company does and why it is in their interest to connect and respond to you.

How Kanbox can impact your LinkedIn Outreach Strategy?

• Enhanced Personalization: Kanbox can provide features and integrations that enhance the personalization of your LinkedIn outreach efforts.It could automate the process of finding relevant information about your prospects, always up to date, as well as enrich it with email data, and suggest personalized messaging with Messages Templates feature or simply allowing you to add any contact details directly to the messages you send.
• Prospecting efficiency: By automating most of the tasks related to prospecting on LinkedIn, Kanbox can streamline the process of sending connection requests, messages and follow-ups, as well as easily manage and nurture all those conversations in one screen. This efficiency can save you time and allow you to focus more on building relationships and engaging with your network with LinkedIn Automation function.
• Data Management & Analysis: Kanbox can provide data management and analysis tools for your LinkedIn connections and outreach campaigns. It could provide analytics on your outreach pipeline and the performance of your messages using A/B Testing, engagement levels of your connections and trends in your network activity, helping you to refine your strategy over time and continuously improve without the need for additional tools.
• Integration with CRM Systems: If Kanbox integrates with the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems or other tools you use, leveraging features like the Automated CRM Pipelines, it can ensure seamless synchronization of data and provide an overview of progress that can be beneficial for the whole of your team or organization.
• Compliance and best practice: Kanbox can also help you make sure you comply with LinkedIn's approach policies and best practice, which not always happens with other tools. It includes features that prevent you from exceeding connection request limits and make sure the data you collect is valid and safe to use, with our LinkedIn Scraper, to help you find and connect to the right people,and help you engage and nurture valuable conversations using our Smart Inbox.

Conclusion

Cold emailing and prospecting on LinkedIn, either automated or manually, are both interesting strategies for contacting potential clients, generating business opportunities, recruiting and expanding your professional network, each with their own advantages and challenges.

Cold emailing excels in terms of scalability and detailed personalization, allowing you to effectively reach a wide audience with targeted, well-crafted messages at a low cost when compared to other tools. However, particular attention needs to be paid to deliverability, legal compliance and maintaining ongoing engagement.

On the other hand, the LinkedIn approach leverages the power of a professional networking platform to facilitate high-quality, relationship-driven interactions, in a more direct and human way. By optimizing your profile, personalizing connection requests and engaging with content, LinkedIn outreach enables ongoing, multi-dimensional engagement, building credibility and trust over time. Although it involves different cost structures and platform dependencies, investment in LinkedIn's premium services and advanced automation tools like Kanbox can be justified by the quality of connections and professional opportunities it fosters, allowing to do more, with more quality, more results and less effort.

The choice between cold emailing and prospecting on LinkedIn (or both combined!) should be guided by your specific objectives, target audience and available resources as no recipe works for every business. It’s also important you allow yourself to test, collect data, and learn, before fully committing to one particular channel.

Remember that platforms keep evolving and what is working today might not work that well tomorrow, so make sure to keep researching and adapting to your market, as well as experimenting with advanced automation tools like Kanbox.