If you want to use LinkedIn for prospecting and recruiting, you need to be able to message your leads and engage in conversation. In order to do so, you would need to get connected with them first (there are also some other options, such as InMails and Group Messages, but we’ll get to that in another post).
But how to get your leads into your connections? You need to get them interested by writing a good invite message. We’ll try to give you some tips on how to do that.
The first thing to know is that there’s a limit on how many characters you can use in your message.
LinkedIn has a limit of 300 characters for connection invite messages – so you need to keep your invitation message reasonably short. And even if there weren’t a limit, it would still make sense to keep it short anyway, because people might not have time to read a long message.
In addition, it will work better if you can get a response from your lead and then send a second message with more information – engaging your contact into conversation rather than just dumping your entire sales pitch on them from the start.
The more contacts you will connect, the easier it will get for your to connect even more – people will be more likely to accept your invitation, especially if you both have common connections.
Writing a good LinkedIn connection request
A good invitation message should be personal. You should try to include the contact name in it, as well as any personal details you can. Even better if you can mention how you know them – if you were referred by a shared connection, or met them at some event, or just discovered them somewhere else (e.g. through search) and found them to be interesting.
You probably have something you want to offer them, but instead of presenting that in the connection message, a better idea might be to warm them up first and then bringing your offer in a follow up message.
If you can be specific and mention how your offer can help them in their specific case, that would be ideal approach. But again – we’d recommend to connect with a lead first, and only then making an offer in one of the follow up messages – that way, it will much more likely get attention instead of being rejected after a quick glance.
Examples
Here are some examples to help you get started:
Example 1
Hi {FIRST_NAME},
It looks like you're also in the SaaS marketing - let's connect!
Example 2
Hey {FIRST_NAME}!
I see that you're in B2B sales, and though it would be good to connect.
Example 3
Hello {FIRST_NAME},
Would you be interested in automating your workflow and increasing your sales by 50%?
Just let me know and we can schedule a call if you'd like to to learn more.
When you want to cover a large group of contacts, it could make sense to create a template and then just replace placeholders, such as {FIRST_NAME}, {TITLE}, {COMPANY_NAME}, etc with the real details – to keep it quick & manageable, yet still personal.
We hope that this will give you some ideas for writing LinkedIn connection invite messages.
With the help of Webwalker – our web app – you can even automate this whole process. And personalize & send your invites and follow ups automatically, as well as warm up your leads with some other actions (such as viewing their profile and liking their posts, etc) via automated campaigns.
Check our main page to get more information – and good luck making new connections!