The Open InMail campaign is used to contact people who have an Open Profile and are not your 1st-degree connections on LinkedIn. If the lead you wish to outreach has an open profile and you have not interacted with them on LinkedIn before, you are able to contact them using an Open InMail Campaign.
Keep in mind that Expandi does not support paid InMails on LinkedIn.
There are 2 types of InMails on LinkedIn - paid “InMails” and free “Open InMails” that can be sent exclusively to open accounts. Currently, Expandi provides automation of the second option only “Open InMails”
All LinkedIn members can see the full profiles of Premium members who have enabled "Open Profile". To be an Open Profile member, you must have a Premium subscription.
Users have a limit set by LinkedIn of 800 Open InMails allowed to be sent in 1 month. We recommend starting low and warming up your Open InMail outreach to a max of 25 open InMails per day.
You will not be able to send leads an Open InMail if you have already contacted them in another way. This means if you have already contacted someone using a connection request, it is not possible to outreach them using an Open InMail message, and they will be paused in the campaign.
Search types that can be added to this campaign: Basic search, Company Follower search, Sales Navigator search, Recruiter search, Post Engagement search, Group search, Event search, 'People you may know' search.
Search types that cannot be added to this campaign: CSV search.
Table of contents:
How to create an Open InMail campaign and activate it?
Click on the Campaigns->My campaigns menu option on the sidebar menu on Expandi, and select the button Add new campaign
A pop-up window will appear where you can enter/select your campaign goal. You can set the goal up now or click on the Skip goal button and do it later in the Campaign overview page or the Settings tab of the campaign.
Add your campaign goal. An example of this could be - you have an end goal of targeting developers, to whom you'd like to offer a new job opportunity and the goal of this campaign would be to schedule more interviews with candidates. Please see how this would look below
Once the goal is added, click on the Next button
The first thing you are going to see is our marketplace templates, please learn more about them and how to use them here. If you do not wish to use our marketplace template, click on the Build my own button
Select an Open InMail campaign from the list by clicking on it and then click on the Create blank campaign button
Once it's done you'll be taken to the Steps section of the campaign. Here you have to write the subject of your Open InMail, your Open InMail message and you are able to add follow-up message as well by clicking on the Add follow-up button. Once messages are added, click on the Save messages button to save the changes.
When the steps are saved, click on the Settings tab in the campaign in order to adjust campaign settings and set the limits for it
Under the 'Settings' tab, you'll find the fields described below:
Campaign name - here you can change the name of your campaign by simply clicking on the field with the current name and writing in a new name instead.
Campaign goal - in this section, you can set a goal for your campaign. Please learn more about this here. You can edit the goal by clicking on the 'Edit' button.
Sentiment analyses - this feature can only be activated/turned on in one campaign at a time. If you wish to use it in a different campaign, you'd have to turn it off in the current campaign where it's enabled. When this feature is on the system using AI determines the interest rate of the lead (depending on their reply message in the campaign). Please learn more about it here.
Campaign limits - here you are able to see two lines with adjustable limits. The top one is to set the number of Open InMails sent from this campaign daily. The second toggle is for the daily number of follow-up messages sent (they will only be sent if the Open InMail is accepted) from this campaign:
Keep in mind that all your active campaigns will follow the general limits set in the LinkedIn settings of your LinkedIn account on Expandi. If in the campaign settings, you see a warning message of exceeding the limits, it means that the general limits (numbers set in profile settings) were not divided correctly between all active campaigns in campaign settings; therefore, they are exceeded. Please learn more about it and how it works here.
Campaign priority - in this section, you are able to set the priority for your campaign. The priority options are: low, medium, and high. Please learn more about the campaign priority and how it works here.
Schedule campaign - if you wish to schedule a date for when your campaign will be activated, you can do it in this section by turning off the "start immediately" toggle, and setting the time and date for when the campaign will start sending (be activated).
Prospects - this feature is useful if you have (or manage) more than 1 LinkedIn account under the same company on Expandi. If this setting is on in your campaign and under another LinkedIn account's campaign settings as well, it will allow outreach to the same people on LinkedIn. Please learn more about it and how it works here.
Campaign status - here you are able to activate or deactivate your campaign by clicking on the toggle next to the word "inactive", once you click on the toggle, it will change to "active". Keep in mind that if no people are added to the campaign, you won't be able to activate it. Once you add people to it, you'll be able to click on this button and activate the campaign. When the campaign is activated and the account is in active times, it will take around 45 minutes for it to start sending.
Delete campaign - here you are able to delete your campaign by clicking on the Delete campaign button.
When all the settings are adjusted, click on the Save button to save the changes
How to add people to the campaign?
Adding people to the campaign with the search created in the 'Search' page - filtering on leads who have an open account on LinkedIn.
When adding people to the Open InMail campaign, we recommend creating a search not directly in the campaign but in the 'Search' section on the left sidebar menu on Expandi:
This is recommended because Open InMails can only be sent to people who have open accounts on LinkedIn. By creating a search in the 'Search' section, not directly in the campaign, you'll be able to filter the leads in the search on the ones who have open accounts on LinkedIn and assign (add) only those people to your open InMail campaign. This would guarantee a smooth performance of the campaign and wouldn't lead to open inmails failing because some leads do not have open accounts on LinkedIn, or the status of the account, if it's opened or not, is unknown.
This would look like:
A new search is created in the 'Search' section on Expandi. You can create a new search by clicking on the button 'Add new search'
Click on the newly created search to select it and then click on the 'Open InMail availability' filter and select the option 'Available'
Once the filter is applied click on the button 'Assign filtered to campaign' to add people with open accounts to your open InMail campaign
Select your campaign and assign the leads there. All steps on how to assign people to the campaign can be found here.
Once leads are added to the campaign, we would suggest going to the campaign's People tab and removing any first-degree connections (contacts, new contacts) from the list, since you can't send an open InMail to your first-degree connections on LinkedIn. The steps on how to remove selected or filtered people from the campaign can be found here.
Adding people directly to the campaign by selecting an existing search or creating a new one.
This option is not recommended for the Open InMail campaign since it doesn't give you the option to filter the leads in a search on the ones with open accounts available on LinkedIn. So all leads, regardless of their account status (open, not open, or unknown) will be added to the campaign. Which would lead to many failed open InMails. Also, we would not advise using a CSV search for this campaign, since the system cannot detect the account status (open or not) if leads are imported. Unless the leads in that CSV file originally came from a search retrieved from LinkedIn. Which was added to Expandi before, and you exported that search from Expandi to a CSV file.
In the People's tab, you can select if you wish to create a new search, use an existing one, or a CSV file (not recommended):
Keep in mind that you will not be able to duplicate leads between multiple campaigns on Expandi, so one search should only be assigned to a particular campaign. If later on, you would like to use it in another campaign, you should delete the leads from the previous campaign first, and then you will be able to add the same leads to a new one.
Activate the campaign
The last step would be to make sure that the campaign is active so the system can start scheduling tasks. Once all the steps are completed and the campaign is activated, you will see that all the steps to set up a campaign are marked in green and you are ready to start your outreach!
Additional information:
If you have any more questions, please contact customer support!
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