You may not know this, but Linkedin generates up to 80% of leads in B2B markets on average . This makes it the most effective social media for generating qualified contacts for companies that sell to other companies.
We have already explained to you that to do this you absolutely must use Linkedin Ads and possibly automate some activities with Linkedin Bots .
But today let's talk about something else, and that is, I want to bring you some interesting statistics to help you optimize your contact generation activity through data deriving from the analysis of the performance of millions of messages and connection requests sent.
I have in fact translated this article (added some of my considerations and experiences) which answers these questions:
Profile Title and Implications
The profile title is one of the elements that should include the keyword (i.e. what you know and can do) for which you want to be found .
However, many prefer more "classic" titles, and the most used ones have been studied to see the implication between the professional title and the three key metrics to measure your lead generation activity.
Connection acceptance rate
the following with the percentage of acceptance of the connection request next to it:
CEO 35.99%
Consultant 35.74%
Founder 34.91%
Business Developer 34.85%
Member 34.10%
Director 33.47%
Seller 30.39%
Among these, the "CEOs" statistically have the highest number of accepted connections, but what is the average response rate to messages? (The profile title has an impact because it appears immediately after the name in some notifications, as well as characterizing the authority of the profile itself in "social" terms).
Message response rate
Here are the response rates of profiles depending on the title (in the Anglo-Saxon context):
Seller 22.95%
Consultant 22.47%
Member 21.87%
CEO 20.71%
Founder 19.73%
Business Developer 19.53%
Director 19.26%
In general, the average acceptance rate of the connection request is 34.03% (the ratio between the number of requests sent and those accepted: this statistic must be calculated manually or visible in the Bot reports).
The average response rate for all job titles is 21.62%
Response rate in the connection + message scenario
This is the most common scenario: you ask someone to connect and then send a getting to know each other message (God willing, not a commercial one and not immediately after confirmation!).
To calculate it, multiply the connection acceptance rate by the response rate to messages from those who accepted it.
And here are the statistics by profile title:
Consultant 8.03%
Member 7.44%
CEO 7.37%
Seller 6.97%
Business Developer 6.81%
Founder 6.89%
Director 6.45%
The conclusions that could be drawn are the following:
If you want to increase your number of connections then you can use a profile title that increases the likelihood of your connection request being accepted (e.g. CEO).
If you want to send messages to your contacts and maximize the response rate you can consider the title "salesperson" (or sales, or sales manager in short).
If you want to connect and then send messages to new connections, to increase the response rate you can use for example the title "consultant"
Obviously the correlation is not coincidence, as you can see in my profile for example I wrote "Marketing Expert" and for me this title works well. You have to think based on how you have optimized your profile .
Length of the message sent
Is it better to send long and detailed messages or write a short paragraph with the hope of arousing curiosity? The article I took inspiration from also mentions a test that analyzed 6 million messages sent, separating them into 4 categories.
Below you will find each "length" category with the average response rate next to it:
Messages less than 300 characters: 29.35% response rate
Messages between 300 and 500 characters: response rate 21.08%
Messages between 500 and 1000 characters: response rate 18.97%
Messages over 1000 characters: Response rate 16.79%
To maximize the response to your messages (and therefore the performance of your lead generation activities) you should write messages under 300 characters.
Number of reminder messages
This is a much debated aspect with our customers.
When we propose lead generation funnels that involve sending multiple messages to the same person, the answer is always the same:
"I don't want to be too pushy"
It is good to evaluate the number of follow-up messages not with "the gut", but with numbers in hand. After how many reminder messages do you get a response? Here are the data:
1 message: 62.35%
2 messages: 89.64%
3 messages: 97.02%
4 messages: 99.07%
5 messages or more: 99.78%
But what does this mean? The more follow-up messages you send, the more likely people are to respond. Best practices, however, suggest that you should not exceed 1 or 2 follow-up messages .
Otherwise, the risk is to be reported and to see your Linkedin profile suspended (yes, it happened to me 😭)
Sending a connection request that is empty or contains a message
To have a higher number of accepted connections, what is better? Write a message, maybe personalized, or send the empty request?
Here too, a study based on the analysis of 20 million connection requests sent comes to our aid.
And the answer is...:
Connection acceptance rate without a message: 36.99%
Connection acceptance rate with a message: 33.36%
The analysis of the data could be that if you receive a message (sometimes markedly commercial) you avoid accepting the connection because you are afraid of being a victim of commercial activity.
It is also true that in the case of a message, if we anticipate the reason for the connection, the people who accept are potentially more interested in listening to what we want to tell them.
By the way, we also did some internal tests on this topic that confirmed the data reported above with one exception. The use of a connection message that creates empathy, like this:
"Hi, I noticed your profile and would like to connect."
...which has yielded connection acceptance rates of over 40% and started a lot of conversations, because people ask what sparked their curiosity.
Contribute to the discussion
What is your experience? What response rates do you have? Write it down in the comments below to contribute to the discussion 👇🏼.
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