What are InMails and Open profiles?

InMail allows you to directly message another LinkedIn member that you're not connected to, which is a handy option for sellers to expand their reach out.

InMail messages can have up to 200 characters in the subject line and up to 2000 characters in the body. It’s important to keep in mind that your InMail signature is counted in the total number of available characters.

You’re allotted a specific number of InMail credits based on your subscription type. You can find the number of InMail credits you have from your Premium subscription page.

However, even if you don't have InMail credits available or you are on a free subscription, you can send InMails to those "Premium Profiles" (profiles with a gold LinkedIn badge on their page) who did not disabled the ability to receive free InMails from others. Such profiles are called "Open link" or "Open profile" and have a special hidden badge on their pages.

How to search for open profiles?

LinkedIn doesn't have any search filters for "Open profile" ("Open link") profiles neither in Basic plan nor in paid subscriptions like Recruiter or Sales Navigator, but there is a way how to workaround that with Linked Helper.

In Sales Navigator

Luckily for us, LinkedIn submits the "Open link" badge for the profiles in Sales Navigator search so you can get the profile's status right after collecting.

Note: when collecting profiles from Sales Navigator Leads list, Linked Helper cannot scrape 'Open link' status. In order to scrape it, profiles must be collected from Sales Navigator Search.

So, if you collect profiles from Sales Navigator search, then all you need to get a list of "Open link" profiles is to filter them in the Queue:

Here is the complete list of steps you need to do to have an InMail campaign ready to go:

Create a campaign from a template - How to send InMails to 2nd & 3rd connections in LinkedIn, Sales Navigator, or Recruiter (InMail sequence template).
Collect leads from a Sales Navigator search.
Open the "Lists" section of your campaign or your action queue:
Set the "Open Link" filter to "No":
Linked Helper 2 will show you everyone, who doesn't have an "Open profile". Select all contacts and press "Delete":
Remove the filter and after that, you will only have contacts who can receive free InMail messages:

In Basic and Premium LinkedIn

Unlike Sales Navigator platform, in the Basic and Premium platform of LinkedIn the "Open link" badge (do not confuse with "Premium") is disabled and Linked Helper is not able to get the "Open profile" ("Open link") during collecting from the Basic (free) and Premium LinkedIn search.

However, there are two workarounds for this case:

Filter profiles using Service categories filter in LinkedIn.
Filter Open link profiles after scraping profiles with Premium status.

Filter profiles using Service categories filter in LinkedIn.

Note: for some accounts, LinkedIn allows sending free InMails only to the 2nd-degree connections, hence you need to delete all 3rd-degree and Out of Network connections after collecting.

If a person indicated that he or she renders certain services, LinkedIn automatically enables 'Open link' profile status for that person, which means anyone can send a free InMail to that person. If you apply this filter in your search request, all the profiles in the results will be with 'Open link' status:

Here is the complete list of steps you need to do to have an InMail campaign ready to go:

Create a campaign from a template - How to send InMails to 2nd & 3rd connections in LinkedIn, Sales Navigator, or Recruiter (InMail sequence template).
Collect leads from a regular LinkedIn search with Service category and Relationship filter (set it to 2nd-degree connection) enabled.
You can also enable "Keep attempts to send InMails even if you're out of LinkedIn InMail credits" option in the action settings to avoid campaign pauses due to too many errors:
You're are ready to go!

Filter Open link profiles after scraping profiles with Premium status.

As it was explained in the beginning of the article, most likely the profile with the Premium badge is an "Open Link" profile (but that is not always the case).

Here are some statistics:

the amount of Open link profiles among non-premium users is about 0.2 - 2%;
the amount of Open link profiles among premium users is from 15% to 50% and more (naturally, there are lesser Open link profiles among CxOs than among Recruiters).

The problem that appears in this workaround is that if you are sending InMails to all profiles, then significant part of them will fail and Linked Helper will stop the action due to too many errors. To avoid that, you can extract profiles using Visit & Extract profiles action to scrape their "Open link" status.

Here is the complete list of steps:

Create a campaign for extracting profiles - Export your LinkedIn contacts to a CSV file (Visit & extract profiles template)
Collect profiles from a LinkedIn search.
Filter profiles by Premium filter set to No and delete the rest.
Extract Premium profiles.
Filter profiles by Open link filter set to No and delete the rest.
Create a campaign from a template - How to send InMails to 2nd & 3rd connections in LinkedIn, Sales Navigator, or Recruiter (InMail sequence template). You can also enable "Keep attempts to send InMails even if you're out of LinkedIn InMail credits" option in the action settings to avoid campaign pauses due to too many errors:
Move profiles to the extracting campaign to the InMail campaign.

This workaround allows you to filter out profiles for sending free InMails even though they are not rendering any services, but you have to sacrifice your time.

Limits to keep in mind

Linked Helper does not limit your ability to send free InMails, but LinkedIn does:

some LinkedIn accounts are not able to send free InMails to 3rd-degree or Out of Network profiles as LinkedIn offers to buy a Premium subscription; if your LinkedIn account is limited on sending free InMails to 3rd-degree connections, then you need to delete 3rd-degree and Out of network profiles from the Queue to continue messaging;
for most of LinkedIn accounts, the limit is 800 InMails per month (for both free and Sales Navigator subscription), but this limit is subject to change and may be lower (100 InMails per month) for some accounts:

If you want to evenly spread the free InMails over the month period, it could be a good idea to limit InMail to 2nd & 3rd contacts activity to 26 actions per day so that the other campaigns, if you have them activated, also got some action slots to process profiles: Limiting certain activity type

Thank you very much for your attention. We hope that these tips helped you! Here are some more useful articles from our blog:

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