If you want to reach out to someone using a mutual connection on LinkedIn, then we’ve got you covered with some expert guidance on how to do this.
This article covers different scenarios for using a mutual connection as part of your LinkedIn outreach strategy, including how to reach out, with messaging templates to help you on your way.
We’ll cover manual LinkedIn outreach methods, and also introduce automation to start scaling your outreach for more results with less effort. Pretty cool, huh?
So let’s get started.
Using mutual connections to grow your network
When trying to engage with a prospect on LinkedIn, your first objective should be to connect with them, so they become a 1st-degree connection. Once a prospect is in your network, you open up lots of potential to engage:
- You can message a 1st-degree connection via LinkedIn as often as you like, for free. LinkedIn messages have 100% deliverability (compared to email, LinkedIn messages have a much higher chance of being read). But a quick warning here - be careful not to abuse this liberty as a prospect can easily remove you as a connection, destroying your chance of building a future relationship with them
- Your LinkedIn activity will appear in your prospect’s feed, giving you ongoing brand awareness without using pushy sales tactics
Because getting a prospect to accept your connection invitation on LinkedIn is essential to your outreach strategy, let’s start by showing you how to use mutual connections in your connection invitations.
What makes a good connection strategy?
If you measure your connection acceptance rate, where does it sit? 20%? 40%? 60%? Or 80%?
If it’s under 40%, then you should review your connection message. If you’re above 50% you’re doing well. But did you know that some people get an acceptance rate as high as 80%?
These are the people who follow some simple rules when it comes to their connection strategy:
- Have a good reason to connect
- Personalize your connection message, and make it relevant
- Have a strong LinkedIn profile
Acknowledging a mutual connection in your invitation gives you a more credible reason to reach out and connect with a prospect. This strategy alone can gain high acceptance rates.
When combined with personalization, topic relevancy, and a strong LinkedIn profile, you’re moving into the higher realms of success.
Let’s look at how you can use a mutual connection to introduce yourself and invite someone into your network.
How to use a mutual connection when sending connection invitations
Step 1: Research your prospect
When viewing a prospect’s LinkedIn profile, you can see whether they are a 1st, 2nd or 3rd+ degree connection (look next to their name). Look for profiles that are 2nd-degree connections, which means that you share a mutual connection.
Quite often LinkedIn will also show you who that mutual connection is. You can leverage this information to personalize your connection message.
Note: LinkedIn doesn’t always show you who your mutual connection is, so don’t be surprised if you can’t see it. Just move on to another profile.
Step 2: Invite the prospect to connect
Now we want to invite Kath to connect using Nico Prins as our mutual connection. We have a few options here:
If we have directly spoken to Nico about Kath, then we can make our invitation message more relevant:
You could even go a step further to suggest a topic that you’d like to discuss, or have discussed, with your mutual connection, e.g.
“Hi Kath, I was discussing x,y,z with Nico Prins (a mutual connection of ours) and he suggested you may be a good person to talk to. It would be great to connect.”
Or, if we don’t know Nico very well, and haven’t had a direct conversation about a prospect, then you can try the following message:
You may want to carry out some further research on your prospect, their activity, or their company to add some more personalized content to your invitation, for example:
“Hi Kath,
A mutual connection, Nico Prins, mentioned you as a fellow professional in _IN_. I just read your article on Business Intelligence which I found highly thought-provoking. It’d be great to connect.
Eve”
We mentioned above the 3 rules people follow who have great acceptance rates. A relevant, personalized message, coupled with a strong profile will help you to achieve those higher connection invitation acceptance results, so keep this at the forefront of your mind.
See more tips on writing LinkedIn connection messages.
Using LinkedIn automation tools
The above approaches involve manually researching each prospect and writing your connection request, personalizing each one individually as you go.
Whilst this technique delivers a great acceptance rate, there are ways you can streamline and scale the process using LinkedIn automation tools like Dux-Soup.
Dux-Soup saves up to 80% of the time spent manually reaching out on LinkedIn, and you can grow your network by up to 250 prospects a week if you have a well-established LinkedIn Premium Plan. For most users, it takes less than 1 hour of your time to send 250 connection invitations a week using Dux-Soup.
Due to LinkedIn’s weekly invitation limits, you have a basic (free) LinkedIn account, you are probably only able to send 100 connection invitations a week. But regardless of how many your LinkedIn plan lets you send, automating the process will save you lots of time.
Get a free Dux-Soup trial now to try out this process and follow along with the next steps. (No credit card is required, this genuinely is a free trial without strings attached).
Automating your LinkedIn connection invitations
To automate your connection invitations while using a mutual connection as an introduction, you can follow this strategy:
Step 1: Run a LinkedIn search to find a list of 2nd-degree connections.
Here, I’m using the free LinkedIn to search for marketing directors. By typing ‘marketing director’ in the search box, clicking on ‘people’ and then ‘2nd’. I get a list of 2nd-degree connections.
Our search resulted in 194,000 prospects, which is too many to target in a personalized manner. So let’s narrow this down further by using LinkedIn’s filters like sector, size of company etc.
Step 2: Create your connection message
Next, we can create a personalized connection message in the campaigns section of Dux-Soup.
To do this, go to your Dux-Dash and head to ‘Drip Campaigns’.
Create a new campaign with 1 personalized connection message, as follows.
You can refer to our tutorial video on creating drip campaigns for more help with this.
Remember to use the personalization tags. Here our message is as follows:
Hi _FN_,
We have mutual connections in _IN_, and we’re both in _LO_. I’m sure we will continue to cross paths. It would be great to connect and discuss business.
Eve
This message contains a personalized name, industry and location tag, so you’ll need to filter your list by these filters to ensure these options match yours, and the message makes sense.
But you could make your message more generic with something like this:
Hi _FN_,
I came across your profile as we have mutual connections. I’d love to have you in my network.
Eve
Now we just need to send the invitations out.
Step 3: Sending your connection invitations
To do this, we simply enroll your list from Step 1 into the campaign. Go back to your LinkedIn list, and from the Dux-Soup extension click ‘enroll’. Choose the campaign that you created and confirm your selection, and that’s it! You can define how many profiles you want to enroll and send connection invitations too.
Dux-Soup will personalize each message by substituting the relevant text into the placeholder as it sends it.
You can watch our tutorial video on ‘How to enroll prospects into campaigns.’
Now we have our connection strategy in place, let’s look at ways of reaching out to our 1st-degree connections using a mutual connection on LinkedIn.
Outreach to your 1st-degree connections using mutual connections
LinkedIn as a platform offers huge potential to run outreach campaigns to prospects, whether to invite them to events, convert them to customers, or fulfill a specific objective. Let’s look at how you can craft your outreach to suit different scenarios.
Using a mutual connection in your outreach message is a great way to improve response rates and ramp up engagement.
Reaching out to invite someone to an event
Events or webinars can be used to encourage a prospect to interact without a hard sell. Why not offer value to a prospect over LinkedIn by inviting them to attend an event that could be of use?
And the best thing is, you don’t even have to invite them to events that you are hosting. You can use third-party events to form relationships with your prospects. By doing this, you’ll have more time at the event to build a relationship with your prospect.
Here’s an example of an outreach message you may use here:
Hi _FN_,
I was talking to a mutual connection [connection’s name] about an upcoming event [name of event] on [date]. He mentioned that it could be of interest to you as it covers the topic of x,y,z.
I saw of your content around the subject on LinkedIn, and thought this seminar may be interesting [link to seminar]. If you’re interested, can I buy you a coffee beforehand? It would be great to introduce myself.
Eve
If you like the idea of using events in your outreach strategy, here are some techniques on how to use events to secure sales appointments.
Reaching out to generate leads
Whilst it isn’t best practice to overtly sell your services over LinkedIn, many Dux-Soup users are seeing huge success when it comes to generating leads with direct outreach.
A mutual connection will help to soften your outreach approach, allowing you to gently introduce your services and see if you can pique an interest. This is possible if your common connection is a client, as in this example:
Hi _FN_,
I am currently working with [connection name] and your name came up in conversation. We are helping them to improve their revenue growth by implementing new lead generation strategies, which have seen them double their leads over the past 6 months.
[Connection name] thought that this could be beneficial for you too, and so I wondered whether you’d like to explore the work we’re doing together? We can jump on a quick call so I can run through some highlights and see if this is something of interest?
You can book a 30 min call in my calendar at [link]
Eve
By citing a common connection, a strong overview of results that were delivered, and offering a short call without too much commitment, we have seen users generate over 100 sales meetings a month.
Reaching out to gather market intelligence
You may be looking to gather intelligence from your target market to develop a product, launch new content, or understand market trends. LinkedIn outreach can be a great platform for gathering intelligence, and using a mutual connection can help here too. Here’s an example message:
Hi _FN_,
I am putting together a report on market trends in _IN_, and [mutual connection] suggested that you may be able to help me out. I’m hoping you may be able to answer a few quick questions on marketing automation, it will take less than 5 minutes to complete.
We’re finding that people in the _IN_ sector are moving away from integrating multiple automation systems, towards more enterprise end-to-end systems, but we want to confirm our findings, so your input would be really valuable in helping us to see what the landscape is.
As a thank you, I’d be more than happy to share the resulting report with you. Here’s the link to a few questions if you wouldn’t mind sharing your situation with us. [link]
Many thanks,
Eve
Automating your outreach to 1st-degree connections
So we’ve covered a few examples of using a mutual connection in your outreach to achieve different objectives. Running this manually can be labor-intensive, but by automating the outreach activity you can achieve the same results much more efficiently.
With Dux-Soup, you can create a campaign with a single message, or series of messages to achieve the same goals. Let’s take the example of inviting someone to an event.
Step1: Create your list
In this instance, to create a good list, a Sales Navigator plan will greatly help you to build a list that identifies mutual connections.
Let’s target 1st degree connections, and then enter a ‘connection of’ in the search field to filter the list, as seen here:
Step 2:Create your Dux-Soup campaign
Our campaign in Dux-Soup will look like this, with a single connection request and a single follow-up message.:
Let's select Sales Navigator for our target platform for this campaign so that all replies stay in our Sales Nav inbox.
We can leave the connection invitation blank, Dux-Soup will omit this step for 1st-degree connections.
We are then going to send them the following message:
Hi _FN_,
I was talking to a mutual connection, Dave Hughes, about an upcoming event, the B2B Marketing Expo on the 27th & 28th of November. He mentioned that our session on 'Unlocking LinkedIn: Advanced strategies for automated B2B lead generation' may be of interest to you.
I have seen some of your content around the subject on LinkedIn automation, and just wanted to invite you to the event/seminar and to buy you a coffee beforehand? It would be great to introduce myself. Let me know if can make it and if you'd like me to register you.
Eve
We can add more follow-up messages to the campaign, create campaigns with different messaging to A/B test results, and automate as many campaigns as you like with Dux-Soup.
Step 3: Enroll
Hit the 'Enroll' button from your extension and you're all done.
So now you know how easy it is, you can go ahead and give it a go for yourself.
Summary
Acknowledging a mutual connection is a great way of introducing yourself to your LinkedIn prospects. By using connections in the right way, you can grow your network faster and engage with your ideal potential customers.
It’s a smart tactic for business growth. So what are you waiting for?
