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How to filter profiles via Sales Navigator and send them free messages as group members?

Nick
Updated

Did you know that Sales Navigator search page has a special filter - "Group", which allows you to find people who belong to a specific group on LinkedIn? Using a simple one-action workflow in Linked Helper you can send them a message via group members page without inviting them. Read on to learn how to do it and how to fix the most common errors in the process.

Note: for some LinkedIn accounts, the limit of messages to group members is lower compared to the other LinkedIn accounts.



This video will demonstrate how to filter profiles in Sales Navigator by 'group', collect, and message them from a group members page:

It is no secret that LinkedIn groups are the best place to find and reach out to new potential customers and find new business connections. We know that viewing hundreds and even thousands of profiles hoping to find new leads can be quite bothering. And even then, in most cases, you won’t be able to message filtered 2nd and 3rd-level profiles directly without inviting.

Some of you may be already aware that Linked Helper allows you to message group members directly using ‘Message to Group members’ action. A classic approach would be to collect users from a group into the Linked Helper campaign queue and set up your message template. That way you can even filter out members by their headline, which makes filtering just a bit more precise, but you would still have a lot of irrelevant profiles.

We are offering a new way to precisely and accurately filter out profiles via Sales Navigator search, and then send them messages using the ‘Message to Group members’ action. This option fits well for those who are actively marketing on LinkedIn - Linked Helper for Marketers. 

 

Let’s take a closer look.

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Create your messaging campaign

  • In the Campaign menu, click plus button to create a new campaign, choose "Message sequence via group" template, click Create and follow the steps to create a needed amount of messages that will be sent to group members:

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  •  Set up your initial message:

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  • Set up reply detector behavior in the 'Check for replies' Action. Initial message via group is placed by LinkedIn in the Incoming requests inbox rather than Message inbox. When a message is read and accepted by a recipient, LinkedIn moves it into Message inbox and shows "Message request accepted" technical notification for both participants in the chat, indicating that the request was accepted. It is possible to treat this notification as a reply. In two words, Linked Helper can detect "Message request accepted" technical notification as a reply even if the profile hasn't replied but only accepted incoming message request via group:

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  • In the next step you can add another follow-up to those, who received your initial message request and accepted it:

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  • You can specify minimum time delay between the two messages. Please note that by default Linked Helper does not send a follow-up message unless initial message request is accepted:

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  • There is a possibility to send unlimited number of follow-up messages, but we recommend sending less than 3 messages in order not to be too pushy. When you've added all follow-ups you need, click Finish button:

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Filter and collect profiles from Sales Navigator search

Once campaign is created, Linked Helper offers you to add leads to the newly created campaign.

Note: Linked Helper doesn't have its own filters for collecting from LinkedIn it uses those of LinkedIn search, hence you need to finely filter profiles in LinkedIn search to get most qualified leads - How to filter and collect profiles via Linked Helper

  • Click Continue button:

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  • Choose LinkedIn website => Sales Navigator => Search page:

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  • You will be redirected to Sales Navigator search page after clicking the "Load page" button:

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  • As you know, Sales Navigator has a larger number of profiles to choose from, thanks to its advanced filtering, so make sure you utilize filters to their maximum and precisely filter out profiles you wish to send messages to. One important aspect would be to set up a group filter from where you wish to collect profiles:

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  • Don’t forget to copy Group ID, which can be found in the URL. We will need it later on:

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  • After choosing all the required filters, including your chosen group, begin collecting by clicking ‘Collect’ in the left menu and choosing the ’from current page’ option:

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Set up the group ID

Once profiles were collected, we need to set the group ID so that Linked Helper would mark profiles as members of a certain group.

Here is how to do that:

  1. Install Override platform plug-in from the Plug-in store menu;
  2. Click Campaigns menu, navigate to the Workflow tab and open Queue of the 1st ‘Message to group members’ action:                                                   mceclip17.png

  3. Select All profiles and click ‘Change platform’ button:mceclip18.png

  4. Switch 'Collect scope type' to Group ID

  5. Paste the LinkedIn group ID into the 'Collect scope ID' field and click ‘Save’                     mceclip19.png

  6. Group ID is assigned and you're ready to go!mceclip20.png

 

Review campaign

Review leads

You can check the collected contacts in the Queue list:

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There you can:

Check this article for more info: Managing profiles in Linked Helper 2

 

 

Review Actions settings

Let's overview the campaign workflow and Actions' settings. For that you need to click Campaign menu and navigate to the Workflow tab:

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In the Workflow tab you will see several Actions depending on the number of follow-ups you've set up:

  • Message to group members - sends the initial message request.
  • Check for replies - monitors replies to the messages sent via the previous messaging Action.
    Note:
    - Linked Helper won't send a follow-up to those who haven't accepted your message request. As it was already mentioned earlier, initial message via event is placed by LinkedIn in the Incoming requests inbox rather than Message inbox. When a message is read and accepted by a recipient, LinkedIn moves it into Message inbox and shows "Message request accepted" technical notification for both participants in the chat, indicating that the request was accepted. By default, a follow-up is sent only when message request is accepted. It is technically possible to send a follow-up even if initial message request was not accepted. For that you need to switch off the 'Keep in queue permanently if request is not accepted' as replies' setting in the Message analyzer tab of the Action:mceclip1.png
  • Message to group members  sends a follow-up only to those who have accepted your initial message. 
    Note:
    - By default, it does not send the follow-up to those who replied anything after previous message or who received a manual message from you before. You can change this behaviour in the Message analyzer tab of the Action.
    - It's possible to send those who replied to external CRM using Send replied to Webhook plug-in.
  • Check for replies - monitors replies to the messages sent via the previous messaging Action.
    Note:
    - If this is the last step in the Workflow, then by default, the "never" setting is activated which means the Action continues checking for replies for contacts in the Queue and never moves them to the Successful list. If you add another Action below, then the "never" option is uncheck automatically and the delay is set to 1 day.
  • Etc.

Every action can be enhanced with plug-ins providing extra functionality - Plug-in Store.

 

Run the campaign

This is the last and the most enjoyable part. Double-check that you collected all the right profiles, check your message template, and run the campaign. Let’s hope that you won’t wait for the response for too long!

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Still, something may go wrong in setting up the whole workflow. In this 2-min video find some quick fixes to most common errors:

 

Extra: How to collect profiles from several groups?

If you wish to collect profiles from multiple groups and not lose track of which profile is from which group, we suggest you use tags for that matter. To do that, once you collected profiles from the first group and changed their platform, and set group ID, you need to:

  1. Install Tagging system plug-in;
  2. Navigate to the Queue once again;
  3. Select all profiles;
  4. Click click ‘Tag’ button:mceclip24.png
  5. Add a tag, for example, ‘group_set’, press ‘Enter’ key and click ‘Save’; if you want to know what group they were collected from, you can add a separate tag containing group name or ID, e.g. ‘group_62352’.

Now both you and Linked Helper know what group current profiles are participants of so you can add new ones from another group:

  1. Collect profiles from another group into the queue;
  2. Filter newly collected profiles in the queue by the ‘group_set’/‘group_62352’ tag in the ‘Without tags’ field like in the screenshot below. Only newly collected profiles who didn’t get group ID will be shown:
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  3. Set the group ID and change the platform for newly added profiles as per the instruction above;

  4. Tag these newly added profiles with ‘group_set’ tag, and ‘group_name’ tag if the latter is needed;

  5. Repeat those actions every time you process another group in order to avoid any confusion.

 

Extra: how to message filtered profiles via other LinkedIn accounts without a Sales Navigator subscription?

Many of our clients, who manage several LinkedIn accounts, use one LinkedIn account with Sales Navigator subscription to collect a big amount of leads they are not able to collect on free accounts, share those leads among multiple LinkedIn accounts and then change the platform to be able to process such profiles via accounts without Sales Navigator and increase the speed of market expansion hence reducing the costs.

Using a similar approach, you can filter and collect profiles from a Group using one LinkedIn accounts with Sales Navigator, but send messages via other free LinkedIn accounts.

Let's imagine you have 11 LinkedIn accounts, one of them has a Sales Navigator subscription, the other 10 accounts don't have it, all 11 are the participants of the Finance Club group.

You want to collect all CXOs in a certain location from this large group and send them a message via group from several LinkedIn accounts without Sales Navigator subscription. Here is what you can do:

 

Here are some more useful links to our blog and Help Center:

 

You can try the software for free during 14 days - download it and activate a free trial.

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