Struggling to turn LinkedIn into a consistent lead generation tool? Closely offers a solution by combining LinkedIn automation with email outreach, creating a multi-channel strategy that increases engagement by 287% and boosts response rates by 35%. SaaS companies can save time, improve personalization, and generate more pipeline opportunities with AI-driven tools.
Key Takeaways:
- Multi-Channel Outreach Works: Pairing LinkedIn with email increases reply rates by up to 10x.
- Automation Saves Time: Closely automates tasks like connection requests and follow-ups, saving up to 10 hours per week.
- Personalization at Scale: AI-powered tools craft tailored messages for each prospect.
- Safe Automation: Built-in safeguards protect LinkedIn accounts during automated campaigns.
- Unified Inbox: Manage LinkedIn and email replies in one place for seamless communication.
Closely simplifies LinkedIn prospecting, allowing SaaS teams to focus on closing deals rather than manual outreach tasks.
Multi-Channel Outreach for SaaS Companies
What is Multi-Channel Outreach?
Multi-channel outreach involves reaching prospects through multiple platforms – like email, phone, and LinkedIn – instead of relying on just one. LinkedIn helps establish credibility, while email allows for more detailed and formal follow-ups. By using multiple touchpoints, you can reinforce your message and stand out in today’s crowded digital landscape. This approach lays the groundwork for why combining LinkedIn and email is especially effective for SaaS sales teams.
Why LinkedIn and Email Work for SaaS Sales Teams
For SaaS companies targeting B2B customers, LinkedIn and email work hand-in-hand to create a scalable and effective outreach strategy. LinkedIn, with over 300 million professionals active daily, is a go-to platform for connecting with decision-makers and generating high-quality leads – particularly for SaaS startups focused on enterprise clients [2].
When paired with email, the results can be impressive. Combining LinkedIn prospecting with email outreach has been shown to increase reply rates by up to 10x [2]. While LinkedIn is great for initiating connections and building rapport, email provides a space for more detailed, formal communication. With over 4.3 billion email users worldwide in 2023 [4], email remains a cornerstone of any outreach strategy.
Take Innocode, for example. They leveraged this dual-channel approach to generate over 100 leads and book 35 calls, advancing their projects in public sector and sustainability initiatives [3]. By using insights gained from LinkedIn interactions to personalize email messages, SaaS teams can build trust faster and improve conversion rates. However, scaling this strategy comes with its own set of challenges.
Common Outreach Scaling Problems for SaaS Companies
Scaling outreach efforts isn’t without its hurdles, especially when the messaging across channels lacks cohesion. One major issue is sending disjointed or unconnected messages.
"One common mistake is when the steps of an outreach sequence aren’t connected to each other. Salespeople tend to build omni-channel sequences separately for each channel – email, LinkedIn, etc. – but when they try to put it all together, the whole thing simply doesn’t match." [5]
Another frequent misstep is treating all channels the same way.
"A common mistake in multi-channel prospecting is using each channel the same way, sending identical messages across platforms. If a prospect doesn’t reply to a ‘just following up’ email, they’ll often get the same ‘just following up’ message on LinkedIn – as if that somehow adds value. It doesn’t." [5]
Other challenges include relying too heavily on automation before perfecting manual outreach strategies and struggling to maintain personalization at scale. Misaligned sales and marketing efforts can also lead to conflicting messages and missed opportunities. To succeed, SaaS companies need to align their outreach strategies and adapt their messaging to fit the unique strengths of each channel. This tailored approach is key to scaling effectively while maintaining meaningful connections.
Set Up Closely for LinkedIn Automation
How to Set Up Your Closely Account
Closely offers a 1:1 onboarding call to help you hit the ground running. This session is designed to align your setup with your growth goals, making it easier for SaaS teams to get the most out of LinkedIn automation from the start.
Getting started is simple. Begin by linking your LinkedIn profile to the Closely platform. This connection enables essential LinkedIn automations while prioritizing your account’s security. You can then configure lead extraction from various sources, including LinkedIn Search, Sales Navigator, Recruiter, Posts, Groups, or even CSV files.
Closely also takes the hassle out of manual research by automatically enriching your leads with over 30 real-time data points. These include details like job titles, industries, company size, and tech stacks, giving your sales team the insights they need for tailored outreach. The best part? This enrichment happens seamlessly in the background.
"Closely is a powerful tool for anyone looking to enhance their sales engagement. The platform is user-friendly and easy to navigate, making it accessible even for those who are not tech-savvy." – Antonio D., Digital Strategist & Coach [6][1]
Once your account is all set up, you can dive into Closely’s automation features to optimize your LinkedIn engagement.
LinkedIn Automation Features Overview
After setup, Closely’s automation tools take over to help you expand your LinkedIn reach efficiently. The platform automates tasks like profile visits, connection requests, follow-ups, post likes, and even uses AI sales agents to send personalized messages. These AI agents tailor outreach based on a prospect’s role, company, and recent updates, ensuring your communication feels relevant and timely.
The benefits are clear: users typically experience a 52% boost in LinkedIn engagement rates and save around 15 hours per week by automating manual outreach tasks [6]. For SaaS teams targeting qualified decision-makers, this can lead to 3x more connections with the right prospects [6].
Closely also simplifies multi-channel communication with its unified inbox, which consolidates replies from LinkedIn and email campaigns. This feature ensures you can manage conversations across platforms seamlessly, preventing any potential leads from slipping through the cracks.
Keep Your Account Safe During Automation
When it comes to LinkedIn automation, keeping your account safe is non-negotiable. Closely has built-in safety measures to protect your profile, starting with its warm-up mode. This feature gradually increases your account activity, creating natural behavior patterns before scaling up your automation efforts.
LinkedIn actively monitors for unusual activity, so Closely incorporates researched daily caps and delays that mimic human interaction. The platform also uses dedicated proxies and smart safety limits to ensure your account stays within LinkedIn’s acceptable usage boundaries. This is critical because LinkedIn prohibits automation and monitors accounts through velocity analysis and behavior tracking.
To establish a baseline for safe automation, start by manually warming up your account. Spend a week sending 5-10 connection requests daily, posting 2-3 times, and engaging with 5-10 posts. This helps LinkedIn recognize your natural activity patterns.
"LinkedIn’s algorithm learns your natural behavior over time. The more established this pattern is before automation, the more leeway you’ll have later." – Guillaume Portalier, Automation Expert [7]
Keep a close eye on your engagement metrics as you automate. If your connection acceptance rates drop below 15-20% or message response rates fall under 5-10%, pause automation and reevaluate your strategy. Closely’s analytics dashboard makes tracking these metrics straightforward, allowing you to adjust as needed.
The secret to safe automation is to scale gradually. Increase automated actions by no more than 20-30% each week, monitoring engagement as you go. With Closely’s safety features and this measured approach, you can protect your LinkedIn account while achieving effective outreach.
Build and Manage Multi-Channel Campaigns with Closely
How to Create Multi-Channel Campaigns
Setting up a multi-channel campaign in Closely is simple and designed to make your outreach as effective as possible. The platform lets you seamlessly combine LinkedIn and email interactions into one coordinated sequence.
To begin, head over to the Campaigns tab and select New Campaign. Give your campaign a clear name that reflects either your target audience or the campaign’s goal. If you’re including email steps, make sure to connect both your LinkedIn and email accounts. This integration is key, as 79% of customers expect a consistent experience across all touchpoints [8].
The real magic happens when you design your campaign sequence. Closely provides a variety of action options, like connection requests, follow-up messages, emails, profile visits, post likes, and skill endorsements. You can also set time delays between actions, with a minimum gap of one hour, allowing you to create natural outreach patterns that won’t overwhelm your audience.
For instance, you could start with a LinkedIn profile visit, follow it up with a connection request two days later, send an email three days after that, and then follow up with a LinkedIn message a week later. This kind of multi-channel approach not only improves brand visibility but also shortens sales cycles and enhances customer retention [8].
Consistency across platforms is critical. Companies that align their messaging across multiple channels can see a 23% boost in revenue [8]. While your LinkedIn and email messages should maintain a unified theme, be sure to adapt the tone to fit each platform’s style.
Use Closely’s Lead Finder and Data Tools
Once your campaign structure is ready, it’s time to refine your target audience using Closely’s data tools. The Lead Finder feature automates prospect research, saving you countless hours. It can pull leads from various LinkedIn sources, including search results, Sales Navigator, Recruiter, posts, groups, or even CSV files you’ve prepared elsewhere.
What makes Closely stand out is its ability to enrich leads automatically with over 30 real-time data points. When you upload a list of prospects, the platform instantly gathers additional details like job titles, company size, industry, and even technology stacks. By the time you’re ready to launch, you’ll have detailed profiles for each prospect.
This enriched data is especially useful for SaaS companies, as it can uncover technology usage trends and signs of company growth. You can use these insights to segment your audience more effectively. For example, you might create separate campaigns for startups and enterprise businesses or tailor messaging based on the specific tools a company already uses.
The Lead Finder integrates directly with the campaign creation process. Once you’ve identified your ideal prospects, you can import them straight into a new campaign without juggling multiple tools. To ensure your leads convert, the next step is to optimize email deliverability.
Improve Email Deliverability with Email Validator
Email deliverability is critical, especially when email marketing offers an impressive ROI of 42:1 [8]. Closely’s Email Validator helps protect your sender reputation by verifying email addresses and flagging potential spam risks.
This tool checks each address for validity and deliverability, identifying emails that are likely to bounce. It also flags risky domains and suspicious patterns, which is particularly valuable when targeting enterprise prospects with stricter email security protocols.
The validator works automatically as part of your campaign workflow. Whether you’re importing leads or using Closely’s lead enrichment features, email validation happens in real time. This ensures you’re starting your campaign with verified, deliverable addresses.
To keep your campaigns running smoothly, it’s important to monitor email metrics like open rates and bounce rates. If you see a drop in performance, pause the campaign and re-validate your email list to identify any issues.
Use AI-Powered Personalization for Scalable Outreach
AI-Powered Personalization in LinkedIn and Email
Closely’s AI takes the guesswork out of outreach by analyzing data from LinkedIn profiles, company websites, and updates to create personalized messages. By examining details like a prospect’s role, company size, industry, and recent activity, the platform generates messages that feel thoughtful and relevant.
For instance, if a prospect recently shared a post about expanding their team, Closely’s AI might reference challenges related to growth in the opening line. Or, when reaching out to technical decision-makers at startups, it might adopt a tone that resonates with their specific needs. These tailored messages lay the foundation for automated smart sequences, making outreach both efficient and engaging.
"Outreach works best when it doesn’t feel like outreach. Relevance beats volume every time." – Jenny Romanchuk, Sales Expert and AI Outreach Advocate [9]
This personalized approach has been shown to increase response rates by 35% [1]. What’s more, it eliminates the need for time-consuming manual effort, allowing you to send messages that feel personal – even when reaching hundreds of prospects at once [1].
The AI also adapts its tone to suit each platform: concise and direct for LinkedIn, while more detailed for email. This ensures your outreach feels natural and aligned with the expectations of each channel, all while maintaining consistent messaging.
Smart Outbound Sequences and AI Agents
Closely’s AI agents do the heavy lifting, freeing up your sales team to focus on closing deals rather than drafting messages. These agents dive into lead research, analyzing company websites, recent news, and social media activity to uncover relevant insights. They then craft messages that sound human and are tailored to the prospect’s role, company, and recent updates [6].
As new prospects enter your campaigns, the AI continuously works in the background, updating its research and refining messages. This automation not only saves your team valuable time – up to 10 hours a week [1] – but also ensures your outreach stays fresh and relevant.
The AI doesn’t stop there. It learns from campaign performance, identifying which message variations perform best and using that data to improve future outreach. Users have reported a 52% increase in LinkedIn engagement [6], while saving 15 hours weekly by automating manual tasks [6].
Smart sequences take it a step further, spanning multiple touchpoints over weeks or even months. The AI adjusts messaging based on a prospect’s behavior. For example, if someone views your LinkedIn profile but doesn’t respond to a connection request, the AI might follow up with an email referencing shared connections or mutual interests.
Segment Audiences for Better Targeting
Personalized messaging is only as effective as the audience it targets, which is why precise segmentation is key. Closely simplifies this process by using enriched data to create highly targeted groups. Prospects can be segmented by factors like company size, industry, technology stack, job function, and engagement patterns.
Companies using AI-driven segmentation have seen 40% higher conversion rates compared to traditional methods [11]. For example, you could create a segment for companies using specific software tools or focus on businesses currently in growth phases. Decision-makers who frequently engage with industry content can also be grouped for targeted outreach.
This segmentation goes hand-in-hand with tailored messaging strategies. In fact, 75% of consumers say they are more likely to engage with personalized content [10], making this approach essential for SaaS companies navigating competitive markets.
Closely’s AI continuously refines these segments based on performance data. If a particular segment shows higher engagement rates, the platform can automatically identify and include similar prospects, ensuring your targeting improves over time. Additionally, it maintains consistency across channels, so a high-priority lead receives coordinated messaging on LinkedIn and email. This cohesive strategy has helped users achieve three times more connections with qualified decision-makers [6].
Major players like Airbnb and Instacart have already tapped into AI-powered segmentation to build highly targeted campaigns. By analyzing real-time behavioral data, they’ve enhanced customer engagement and delivered personalized messages at just the right moment [10]. For SaaS companies, this kind of precise targeting is a game-changer, ensuring every message resonates with its intended audience.
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Track Performance and Optimize Campaigns
Use Closely’s Analytics Dashboard
Closely’s Analytics Dashboard is your go-to tool for keeping tabs on all the important LinkedIn and email performance metrics. It brings everything together in one place – email open rates, click-through rates, LinkedIn connection acceptance rates, reply rates, and even bounce data. Plus, it offers real-time reporting, so you can spot trends and make adjustments on the fly without wasting time switching between tools.
These real-time insights are available at both individual and team levels, helping you quickly identify patterns and fine-tune your approach. Sales managers can oversee multiple team members and campaigns, pinpoint strategies that generate the most qualified responses, and ensure your automation stays effective and secure.
Identify High-Performing Strategies
Closely’s analytics help you uncover what’s working in your campaigns. With features like A/B testing for subject lines, message openings, and call-to-action phrases, you can compare performance across different campaign types, audience segments, and message variations. For example, data shows that increasing follow-up frequency can significantly boost reply rates [12], giving you the insights needed to optimize sequence length and timing.
Don’t just stop at connection acceptance rates – dig deeper into metrics that directly impact revenue. This approach helps you identify which messages and audience segments are actually driving business results. With these insights, you can fine-tune your messaging and campaign structure to focus on what truly works.
Make Data-Driven Campaign Improvements
Use the performance insights you gather to regularly review and refine your strategies. A structured review schedule – weekly for quick fixes, monthly for strategic updates, and quarterly for overall funnel optimization – ensures your outreach stays aligned with your goals [12].
Personalized outreach is a game-changer, boosting response rates by up to 45% [12]. Companies with well-executed outreach strategies are 80% more likely to see a rise in conversions [13], making these regular reviews a must.
Successful SaaS companies know the power of analytics in refining their targeting. If certain job titles or company sizes consistently deliver better results, expand your outreach to include similar profiles. Segmented campaigns tailored to specific audiences can lead to a 760% increase in revenue [13]. Closely’s insights help you zero in on your top-performing segments and create targeted campaigns with messaging that resonates, ensuring your LinkedIn outreach drives results while remaining scalable.
Closely Review (LTD BACK) – LinkedIn Outreach Automation Tool 2025
Conclusion: Scale LinkedIn Outreach Success with Closely
Boost your LinkedIn outreach efforts without sacrificing personalization or getting bogged down in manual tasks. By using Closely’s platform, SaaS companies can achieve impressive results, such as 40–50% connection acceptance rates and reply rates exceeding 20% – key metrics for successful LinkedIn campaigns [14].
Closely takes a unified approach to outreach, designing campaigns that adapt intelligently to how prospects engage. For example, if someone accepts your LinkedIn connection but doesn’t respond, an automated email sequence steps in with perfectly timed follow-ups.
The platform’s success hinges on three core elements: smart automation, data-driven insights, and AI-powered personalization. Features like the Lead Finder simplify prospecting by identifying the right people to target, while the Email Validator ensures your messages land in the inbox of decision-makers. Meanwhile, AI tools scale personalization, making every message feel tailored to the recipient.
Tracking your campaign’s performance is seamless with Closely’s analytics dashboard. It provides clear insights into what works – whether it’s the subject lines that get the most opens, follow-up sequences that drive responses, or audience segments that convert the best. This data helps you refine and scale effective strategies while eliminating what doesn’t work.
For SaaS companies aiming to grow, Closely eliminates many of the challenges that come with traditional outreach. It allows you to maintain a personal touch while reaching hundreds of prospects efficiently. The result? More qualified leads, shorter sales cycles, and steady revenue growth – freeing your sales team to focus on closing deals.
With its multi-channel capabilities, Closely creates a reliable, scalable system for generating leads and driving consistent results.
FAQs
How does Closely protect my LinkedIn account during automated outreach?
Closely puts the safety of your LinkedIn account front and center by employing automation techniques designed to imitate natural human behavior. This means setting smart activity limits, adding realistic pauses between actions, and steering clear of excessive activity that might alert LinkedIn’s security systems.
By sticking to LinkedIn’s rules and emphasizing responsible outreach methods, Closely keeps your account secure and compliant while helping you get the most out of your campaigns.
Why is multi-channel outreach more effective for SaaS companies than focusing on a single channel?
Multi-channel outreach gives SaaS companies the ability to connect with potential customers on a variety of platforms, boosting their presence and opportunities for interaction. By engaging with audiences on their preferred platforms – whether that’s LinkedIn, email, or others – it allows for a more tailored and interactive communication strategy.
This method doesn’t just increase engagement; it also opens up more conversion opportunities by offering multiple ways to connect and minimizing the chances of missing prospects. For SaaS teams, leveraging multi-channel campaigns is an effective way to expand outreach efforts and optimize lead generation.
How does Closely use AI to personalize LinkedIn and email outreach for better results?
By using AI-driven personalization, you can create messages that truly connect with your audience. It works by analyzing data and insights to ensure your outreach feels both relevant and engaging. The result? Higher response rates and more meaningful connections, whether on LinkedIn or through email.
This method not only helps SaaS sales teams save time but also keeps the personal touch intact, letting you concentrate on building relationships and achieving results.