With LinkedIn, connection acceptance rates form a huge part of the success of your lead generation campaigns.
Why is this? Because, if a prospect doesn’t accept your connection, then you’re missing an opportunity to be able to send them direct messages on LinkedIn for free.
You can only send direct LinkedIn messages to your 1st-degree connections, which is why gaining connections is perhaps the most important step to optimize in your lead generation workflow.
Plus, with a LinkedIn automation tool like Dux-Soup, you can automate LinkedIn messages, allowing you to promote your brand or content to hundreds of prospects each week with very little effort.
If, on the other hand, a prospect doesn’t accept your connection, then you’ll only be able to communicate with them on LinkedIn via InMail. And whilst you can automatically send InMails with Dux-Soup, it will cost you an InMail credit each time you send one, which can get expensive, quickly.
What is a good LinkedIn connection acceptance rate?
At Dux-Soup, we’ve seen our users achieve acceptance rates as high as 80%. Whilst this is exceptionally high (the message is likely to be highly relevant to the target audience, or offering a strong hook), a 40%-50% connection acceptance rate is a good target to set yourself to start with.
If you’re running cold outreach campaigns and your acceptance rates are falling below 20% then you should be looking to change your connection invitation approach.
Measuring connection invitation success
Thanks to the insights that the Funnel Flow in the Dux-Dash gives you into connection acceptance rates whilst managing LinkedIn campaigns, you can test and compare different connection messages to see which ones work best for you.
Also, by trying different target audiences with the same message you’ll begin to notice the audiences that are more responsive to your invitation. It’s a great way to uncover new markets.
How do I do this?
In your Drip Campaigns area of the Dux-Dash, set up a different campaign for each audience, and a different campaign for each connection message you want to try.
Then you just need to monitor the ‘Accepted’ column of your Funnel Flow. You’ve got instant data to help you make your decisions.
Does sample size matter?
Not really. Once you get above a certain number then the statistics don’t tend to change so you can make decisions on your data pretty quickly. We recommend a minimum sample size of 250 to be sure your statistics are accurate.
What makes a good connection message?
Unfortunately, we can’t recommend a single connection invitation message that will achieve an 80% acceptance rate for everyone. This is because the best connection messages are the ones that are personalized and relevant to the recipient.
What we can do is show you some ways to make your connection messages relevant:
1. Invite people who like your content
Inviting someone to connect with you who has already engaged with your content demonstrates that they have similar interests.
An example message here would be:
“Thanks for liking my post, I really appreciate it. It would be great to connect so I can engage with your content in return.”
Here’s how to contact people who like your content on LinkedIn, along with some automation tricks to speed up this process.
2. Invite fellow LinkedIn group members
Fellow group members are a great place to start when building your network. You can demonstrate a shared interest, and a genuine reason to connect.
Approaching a fellow group member with a message like: “I saw you in the IT Sales & Marketing Group and think we share similar challenges. It would be great to connect and share some inspiration!” works well here.
You can read more on how to get the most from LinkedIn groups from finding the best groups to join to outreach tips and tricks that will get you better results.
3. Invite people who have changed jobs recently
If you have a LinkedIn Premium Plan, you may be able to harness Sales Navigator’s additional search filters. A neat trick here is to find people in your target audience and whittle this list down to people who have recently moved jobs.
You can then start your message by congratulating them on their new role. For example: “Congratulations on your new role, how are you finding it at [company]? I’m also in the [industry] sector and it would be great to have you in my network. I hope you’ll accept."
There are many different ways to connect with your audience, you can gain more inspiration from our article ‘How to write LinkedIn connection messages that get results’.
Automating your connection invitations
Once you’ve got a connection invitation that’s steadily getting a 40%+ acceptance rate, you can look at automating your invitation process. Dux-Soup offers a free trial, allowing you to try LinkedIn automation for free - without even a credit card.
It’s pretty easy, can save you up to 75% of your time and grow your connections much faster than if you were to do this manually.
