With more 400 million users, LinkedIn is becoming one of the most powerful professional social networks for companies, wanting to sell their products or services. It has 4 million business pages, out of which 81% of them belong to the B2B market.
It is true that this platform is very popular now a days, but can it replace the email? Here are some reflections about it.
LinkedIn’s InMail service
Through tools like the Sales Navigator sellers have the opportunity to approach potential customers. One of the main features that it offers is the InMail service, which is similar to e-mails but works in a different way. Among its benefits, it can provide you with automated lead suggestions. Also, every time you run a search it will show you around 700 results.
The most important characteristic about InMail is that in order to connect with people outside your network you have to buy credits that can be recovered to be re-used for the same purpose, in case you do not get a response or if your message gets marked as “not interested”.
Despite paying for this premium service you will not get the necessary insights to easily convert the initial contacts into leads.
Using email as a sales tool
On the other hand, emails are still a great way to develop your whole sales process. Also, thanks to our recently launched tool on http://bant.io, you can now find out the email of pretty much everyone just by entering their name and domain. You will know in less than a minute the email of the person you are trying to contact.
According to VentureBeat, email was the channel generating the highest ROI for marketers in 2015 as well.
However an integrated approach must be taken with any new email marketing campaign, to make sure you always send the right message to the right audience but also at the right time as the segmentation is something that you have to do either by yourself or hire a specialized lead generation company.
Final thoughts
As you have seen, LinkedIn is a very good tool when it comes to establishing contact with possible consumers; however it is limited in the way that it only notifies you if the message is marked as “not interested” or gives your credits back if you do not receive a reply within 90 days. Plus, you are also limited to the audience present on LinkedIn and also the filtering that LinkedIn provides, which is usually very basic.
Fortunately the e-mail gives you access to a wide variety of plugins that will offer you the scalability for transforming prospects into actual and profitable deals but also the filtering options that LinkedIn can only dream of. I’m referring to sometime crucial criteria like technology that the company uses, keywords on their website, companies with a physical presence, revenue or even predictive analysis.
Dane
Dane Cobain is a published author, freelance writer, book blogger, poet and (occasional) musician from High Wycombe, UK. Before going freelance, he worked as a social media marker, now specialising in writing about publishing, technology and marketing.