LinkedIn Connection Message – Juicy Templates

We’ve all fallen victim to the incredibly impersonal and … lazy LinkedIn connection messages that jump right into shoving product placement in your face. And we’re so sick of it! A connection message like that gets swiped away and forgotten about, since it’s so obviously a low-effort sales connection attempt. But your messages surely don’t have to get lost in the void of repetitive, formulaic connection requests with no personality or a human touch.

That’s why in this article we’re going to share some best-performing LinkedIn connection message templates for any type of connection or goal that have that attention-grabbing spice in them! Learn what you should include in your message to engage prospects and make them feel personally addressed to maximize acceptance rates.

Before you craft your LinkedIn connection message…

What is a LinkedIn connection message? It’s simply a note added to your connection request, right?

Wrong! Well thought-out connection messages that are highly personalized (we will explain further what we mean by that, leaving behind the generalized buzzy definition) are capable of making miracles, so they’re really magic wands. In particular, they can target the whole groups of prospects, lining them up in front of your inbox, warm and ready to work with.

First things first

A LinkedIn connection message is only effective if you have the appropriate LinkedIn account that acts as an informative about-you page, highlighting your USP, that lets people know the benefits they can reap once they accept your request. It’s crucial to optimize your profile before you launch your outreach campaigns.

Components of Account Optimization

It’s important that you’ve worked out your headline that is aligned with your overall brand identity, created a nice, professionally looking picture for your profile photo and acquired at least a few dozens connections before proceeding to creating a campaign itself.

Profile Picture and Banner

Your LinkedIn profile and banner photos are naturally the first thing that catches people’s eyes once they click on your profile. And they will do that after having your LinkedIn connection message landed in their inboxes. Your profile is a great opportunity to showcase your unique skills, professionalism and benefits or products that you offer. It’s best to create a customer banner photo or get one designed for you on sites like Fiverr for cheap – this makes your proposal recognizable and lets your page take on a pleasing, visually complete appearance.

Tagline

This is essentially your pitch – what exactly do you offer? There’s this neat guideline that can help you come up with your unique offer: the Who + Struggle + Solution formula.

Who benefits from your services? In what way? Distill it in a few words and you’ll get the perfect catchy headline!

Summary

Tell a bit more about yourself and your expertise. Think of this section as a bio. Don’t drag it out for too long – state your qualifications, experience and maybe some achievements in your field. This should conclude everything a prospect would need to know about you before they connect.

Consider stating in a few sentences real value that your solution or product brings and frame them into bullet points.

Great! Your account is all set. But that’s not all the prep work that has to be done prior to you hitting send.

Ask yourself this: have you worked out criteria of your target audience umbrella? LinkedIn has some tools to help you out with targeting prospects super-specifically.

LinkedIn has 3 types of connections:

1^st Degree: People who you’ve already made a connection with.

2^nd Degree: People who have your 1^st Degree connections as their connections (mutual connections)

3^rd Degree: People who have your 2^nd Degree connections as their connections (1 to 0 mutual connections).

With this information, head over to LinkedIn Sales Navigator to filter in all variables you’d like to specify about your prospects, including the aforementioned connection type, geography, industry, keywords, title and more.

This is a great helping hand in defining your target audience more clearly and optimizing your campaign for best driven acceptance rates.

Is there anything else you should know about targeting?

You bet!

Targeting is key

Reaching as many people as you can defines your success, however, tweaking audiences is also helpful. Always try out new places where you can find leads.

One of the ways to approach creating a powerful LinkedIn connection message and outreach strategy in general is to form the portrait of your customer first, that is also known as ICP (ideal customer profile).

When you know who exactly you target, you can build rapport easier. Just mention that you too work in a particular geographic area or that you’re also a content manager.

A connection message can be general for all, – it’s what follows that matters. However, it never hurts to change the connection message and analyse acceptance rates.

Below are some general rules of creating a powerful LinkedIn connection message, followed by our best-performing sequences.

Some basic rules of creating a solid LinkedIn connection message

Basic rules of how to use your LinkedIn connection message to your advantage:

• Personalization stemmed from right targeting. This is a huge part of your connection request’s success. Prospects should feel a personal touch from your message that specifically appeals to them. Targeting people within the same field, mutual LinkedIn group, of a particular job title, or people that you have common interests is what you should go after.

• Ease Into It. Don’t start off by advertising your products/offers right off the bat – this a big outreach no-no (for LinkedIn). First build the needed rapport. Explain how your services/products will be of value to the prospect (Mention how your solution addresses a problem relevant to the recipient and why it’s ideal, how the prospect will benefit from connecting with you) instead.

• Make Your Pitch Hit Hard. Outline your offer and convince the prospect with sharp, straight-to-the-point wording that lets them know all the perks of accepting your request. Reel in your potential connection with appealing perks

Variables for better personalization of your LinkedIn connection messages

Use the following personalization tags when running your LinkedIn campaign to add that individual touch to your message:

• {first_name}
• {last_name}
• {job_title}
• {company_name}

You can get all the necessary info to fill these slots from the prospect’s LinkedIn profile page.The listed variables are the basic ones, however, in automation tools like Closely you’re able to add your own variables for better personalization.

Since every LinkedIn connection message must have a touch of personalization in it, most automation tools incorporate such variables into a tool’s functionality, that enables you to create a single message that will be personalized for every recipient automatically.

Finally we’re ready to move it on to the templates themselves.

☀️ Templates ☀️

No more pushbacks, it’s just template heaven from here on out – we’ll share our tested LinkedIn connection message templates and the structure of our follow-up messages.

Simple connection messages

You can always start like this.

You can leave your connection request message empty – sometimes it works even better. 😀

Here are some more templates:

Mention a common group

Mention a common event

Mention posts they engaged with

1) Find a relatively big LinkedIn creator within your niche

2) Look for a post of theirs with lots of likes and comments

3) Read the post

4) Scrape all the people who engaged with the post. Closely lets you upload the link to a post and send messages to commenters.

Mention common tools that you both use

Those who commented your post

Sales Navigator Feature – ‘View similar’

LinkedIn Sales Navigator has a powerful filter option – the ‘view similar’ tab.

All you’ll have to do to get access to a list of prospects similar to your existing clients is to go to the search bar, find your clients, and click on any person. This will grant you the possibility to view hundreds of leads similar to your paying customers.

Final Word

A LinkedIn connection message is a passage to conversions. Being the primary thing that establishes the tone of your future communication, it’s really there to either make it or break it for you.

To succeed in LinkedIn sales, you should be willing to not just dip your toes there but to constantly pick up new trends, putting them to experiments.

We hope this article has given you a thorough understanding of the most important things that ought to be considered before you launch your first outreach campaign. Listed below are our answers to frequently asked questions about LinkedIn connection messages.

Want to know more about hyper-targeted outreach and how to start crafting brilliant messages? Subscribe to our channel for more content and join our Facebook community.

FAQs