How to filter profiles via Sales Navigator and send them free messages as group members?
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 1st connections | 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 1st connections | Group members’ action. Let’s take a closer look.
- Create your messaging and extraction campaign.
This is the primary step for any campaign, and in this case, we will be using two main actions: ‘Visit & Extract profiles’ and ‘Message to 1st connections | Group members’.
In the campaign menu click the list of campaigns — Choose ‘Create new’ — In the pop-up window give your campaign a name, choose the type of campaign, choose the needed template ‘Messaging sequence’ and click ‘Create’.
Additionally, we would need to add the ‘Visit & Extract profiles’ action to the workflow right before the ‘Message to 1st connections | Group members’. The reason is, ‘Message to 1st connections | Group members’ won’t let you collect and message group members from the Sales Navigator search as they are out of your 1st circle. While ‘Visit & Extract profiles’ can extract profiles of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd-degree connections so we can use them later on. Note, that in case you’d like Linked Helper to collect only 2nd and 3rd-degree connections, you can use the ‘Invite 2nd and 3rd level contacts’ action instead of ‘Visit & Extract profiles’.
To do that, open your campaign workflow and click on the rounded plus button above the ‘Message to 1st connections | Group members’ action, choose ‘Visit & Extract profiles’/‘Invite 2nd and 3rd level contacts’. As a result, your workflow would look like the second screenshot down below:
Note that the campaign from this template consists of three follow-up messages, i.e. three pairs of ‘Message to 1st connections | Group members’ and ‘Check for Replies’ actions in the workflow. The latter one is used to check for replies and keep profiles in the queue for a certain period of time. You can simply delete unneeded actions. Also, they are used to scrape message history.
2. Collect profiles from Sales Navigator search.
Click on the ‘Queue’ button right above your first action, which is either ‘Visit & Extract profiles’ or ‘Invite 2nd and 3rd level contacts’. Next, click on the ‘Add contacts' button.
As we are collecting profiles from Sales Navigator, choose SN Search as your source for collecting.
As you know, Sales Navigator has a larger number of profiles to choose from, thanks to its advanced filtering, so make sure you utilize this on 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. It can be found at the bottom of the filtering menu, by clicking on ‘View all filters’.
Don’t forget to copy Group ID, which can be found in the URL. We will need it later on:
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:
3. Move profiles to the messaging action and set up the group ID and platform.
Once profiles were collected through the ‘Visit & Extract profiles’/‘Invite 2nd and 3rd level contacts’ you would need to move them to the next action, which is in our case ‘Message to 1st connections | Group members’. Simply click on the queue with the collected profiles, select them all, click on ‘Move to the next action’:
Now that we have all the profiles in the queue of the right action, Linked Helper would still try to process them and send usual messages via Sales Navigator, and as a result, all of them would be marked as failed. To fix that, we need to:
- Change the platform for processing to LinkedIn;
- Set the group ID so that Linked Helper would mark them as members of a certain group.
Here is how to do that:
- Switch to advanced UI — Where can I change Linked Helper Interface?;
2. Open your ‘Message to 1st connections | Group members’ action queue (located above the action itself);
3. Select profiles;
4. Click ‘More’;
5. Click ‘Change platform’;
6. Paste the LinkedIn group ID into the group ID field;
7. Make sure Platform is set to LinkedIn as in the screenshot below;
8. Click ‘Save’.
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:
- Navigate to the queue once again;
2. Select all profiles;
3. Click ‘More’, then click ‘Tag’;
4. 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_#2046019’
Now both you and Linked Helper know what group current profiles are participants of so you can add new ones from another group:
- Collect profiles from another group into the queue;
2. Filter newly collected profiles in the queue by the ‘group_set’/‘group_#2046019’ tag in the ‘hasn’t tags’ field like in the screenshot below. Only newly collected profiles who didn’t get group ID will be shown:
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.
4. Review profiles and 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!
