Mastering LinkedIn messaging with next-level templates

LinkedIn emerged long ago as the platform for sales people and teams to focus their outreach and some argue it exceeds even email when we look at metrics such as reply rate, meetings booked, and deals closed. However, the challenge of standing out in the crowded inboxes of prospects is a common challenge faced by many. Generic messages often get lost in the shuffle or are dismissed at a glance.

Surfe has been working to bridge this gap by integrating LinkedIn with your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. Not only streamlining your workflow, Surfe enhances the impact of your outreach with Message Templates for LinkedIn. One such feature that has been a game-changer for many sales professionals is Messaging Templates. It’s designed to bring a blend of personalization and scalability to your LinkedIn messaging strategy, thereby increasing your response rates manifold.

But using Message Templates for LinkedIn is only half of the solution. It’s a tool in your repertoire but it’s how you use this tool that matters. Using Message Templates for LinkedIn in the wrong way can backfire if your templates are lacking context or personality. It’s all about crafting the right templates and using them at the right time. Generic messages often fall on deaf ears. They are easy to spot and easier to ignore. A message that reads like a mass-produced script sends a signal that the sender might not have a genuine interest or understanding of the recipient’s profile or needs. This lack of personal touch can result in low response rates, making your outreach efforts futile. It can also damage your future outreach opportunities. Once your brand is associated with aggressive sales tactics that sweep across a large group of people with little effort hoping to scoop up a few deals, your prospects recognize that and they’ll remember.

So personalized messaging is not merely a modern-day best practice, but a necessity for those looking to create meaningful interactions on LinkedIn. To succeed in cold outreach on LinkedIn, you should make it the cornerstone of an effective LinkedIn outreach strategy, ensuring that your messages rise above the noise and reach the eyes and ears of the individuals you aim to connect with.

Impact on Response Rates

A personalized message, tailored to address the recipient’s interests, industry or recent activities, often garners more attention and engagement compared to a generic outreach message. It reflects a level of care and understanding, demonstrating that the sender has taken the time to know the recipient before reaching out. This not only increases the likelihood of a response but also sets a positive tone for the ensuing conversation.

Let’s take the following. This is a genuine cold message I received on LinkedIn, which clearly uses a template in the wrong way. How likely are you to respond to this?

Hi there.

I hope this message finds you well. I came across your company on LinkedIn and was intrigued by the fantastic work you’re doing. I would love to connect and explore potential collaboration opportunities between our organizations. Please book a slot in my calendar and I’d be happy to give you a demo of the tools we offer.

Thanks,

What do you think? Are you replying? Well with the amount of messages I receive like this each week, I certainly ignored it. They didn’t greet me by name and didn’t mention where I work. When they say ‘intrigued by the fantastic work you’re doing’, I think it would be a safe bet to say they haven’t spent even a minute looking at the work we’re doing at Surfe. In fact, if they had, they’d have seen that their tool is for businesses working in a different industry, is not relevant to Surfe, and even if it were, that it is for people working in different departments to me. Besides, it takes just one click on Surfe’s LinkedIn profile to see a list of our employees and to find out that I wouldn’t be the relevant contact or decision maker either. So I’m not replying.

Now, let’s say for a minute that the tool they were selling is relevant and I am the right contact within the business to be outreaching to. Well, I still wouldn’t be replying to a message like that, but at least there’s ways it could be improved to evoke a response. 

With Surfe’s Free Plan, you have access to message templates, meaning you can create and craft a unique message template to send on these occasions that uses variables to personalize the message. Let’s take a look at some examples.

How to use Surfe’s Message Templates for intro messages

How’s it going, {first_name}? How’s life at {company_name}? I saw you’re working as a {current_position} and I was curious how that looks for you at {company_name}. I actually worked as a {current_position} for a couple of years (in a past life) and loved it. I was wondering what your workflow and tech stack looks like at {company_name}. Are you using any enrichment tools? What kind of data are you enriching? Anyway, great to connect!

The reason this intro message works better than the previous example is because it sounds just like an intro message, not a sales message. It’s personal, has a bit of humor, and it shows interest in the recipient. It doesn’t just start talking about my product straight away and it’s not jumping the gun and asking for a meeting immediately before I’ve qualified the lead or even introduced them to my solution.

If I was working as a sales rep at Surfe, this message would set me up to find out about the prospect’s workflow, what it’s missing, and what their pain points are. I’m sure a message like this would have a super high response rate because it’s so personal that you’d almost feel rude not responding.

And then I’d know whether you are using enrichment tools or not. You are? Great! Is it one you can integrate with Surfe? Yes? Great! No? Well have you thought about how much more efficient your enrichment tools would be if they were integrated with LinkedIn? And if they’re not using enrichment tools then what does their current workflow look like? In almost every possible response scenario, there is a pain point I’d be able to address which would position Surfe nicely as a solution.

And the magic is that message templates like this can be used in almost every industry for almost every scenario. You need to message a few hundred people with an event invite? Just set up a template specifically for the event. Now you can send way more messages each day and they’re all personalized so they’re getting higher response rates. And it hasn’t cost you a penny because with Surfe you can use a message template on the Free Plan. Test it for a while and when you see that your response rates increase you’ll be telling your whole team about it in no time.

Speaking of response rates, one of the benefits of using Message Templates is that with Surfe you can compete your templates against each other, see analytics on the top performing ones, and then improve them over time. Your response rate is only going up from here. So you have two different intro messages. One is shorter and more informal. The other is a bit longer, a bit more descriptive, and has a more formal tone. After you’ve sent each message to a few hundred prospects, you’ll have some really solid insight. Let’s say the shorter message was getting a 40% response rate and the longer was getting 70%. Well of course you stop using the shorter template and now only use longer intro messages. But now you can start having one long intro message that has a more formal and informative tone and one that is more informal and more inquisitive. Again, after a few weeks you see that the informal one is actually getting an 80% response rate. So in the space of just a few weeks you’ve gone from less than half of your contacts responding to almost all of them.

It’s not rocket science. I guess it’s sales science. And the top sales teams around the world are already using Surfe – Uber, Google, AWS… so if it doesn’t cost you to test, why don’t you give it a go and see how it works for you?

There’s no set up involved and you’re good to go in less than a minute. Just add the Surfe Chrome Extension, log in to your CRM, and start crafting your message templates.