LinkedIn is an essential platform to grow your online business with ease. The platform has been growing since its launch. With over 106 million people accessing the platform on a monthly basis, it is clear that the platform can offer more and more.
Therefore, it makes sense to invest more time and effort when trying to grow your business on LinkedIn. However, thanks to LinkedIn bots, this procedure can be simplified, as they help automate the various functions that are there.
Bots, especially for LinkedIn, have made a huge impact on the platform, most of them making sure that normal LinkedIn activities and operations are automated. Operations like finding connections and generating more potential leads are now not a big concern. It is due to an emergence of amazing bots that have changed the entire marketing game.
Most bots work as a browser extension, allowing us to automate the following tasks:
- perform searches with given parameters
- access the searched LinkedIn results and profiles
- export those results in the form of a .CSV file
- publishing, interacting, sending invitations to other people
- etc.
Functionalities required by HelloMrLead for its workflow in outbound campaigns:
- Import of .CSV files (the prepared DBs) into the tool.
- LinkedIn profile import
- Incorporate Blacklist – the list of prospects that the client for some reason does not want to impact (either because they are direct competitors, current customers or something else).
- Flexibility and possibility to serve different clients and email accounts. As an agency HelloMrLead has several clients and it is inevitable that sometimes sectors and positions cross, so we can’t use the same account for all of them. We don’t work with direct competitors, but, for example, there are many solutions many vendors interested in contacting CEOs of eCommerce brands.
- Send automated connection and follow-up messages. Having dozens of campaigns running it is impossible for us to send messages manually in each case.
- Allow 1st degree campaigns – these are campaigns designed to impact personal contacts that the person already has on their LinkedIn.
- Have different tags (snippets) for message personalization. For the issue of mass mailing we try to use tags such as “name”, “company”, “sector” and others to personalize the message and not look like spam.
- Reasonable cost
- Exportable campaign statistics in the form of a Dashboard to keep the client informed of the progress of the campaigns.
It is important to mention that the previous scraping is always done with Sales Navigator. Then we export the file and apply our own formulas and filters to clean up the acquired database, since there are errors in position, sector and other crucial parameters. It is also important to cross-reference the document with the Blacklist to avoid impacting unwanted contacts. And once done, IMPORT the file to the tool.
We have analyzed the tools available in the market and have reached the conclusions shown in a more graphic and understandable way in the table below:
Let’s take a closer look at these (and other) functionalities, as it is not as easy to evaluate tools as it seems.
Dux-Soup :
It’s a particularly powerful bot you can use with LinkedIn that actually gained fame for one feature in particular: its ability to generate leads. Of course, finding and interacting with potential leads is one of the most important parts of being on LinkedIn, period, and Dux-Soup can help make this task easy.
Dux-Soup has currently helped over 45,000 people with their LinkedIn connections, which we think is pretty impressive.
Just like LinkedHelper, its setup is very basic and simple, here are the most important features.
Find prospects: As you can see in the image, these are functionalities clearly related to support, when it mentions previously downloaded .CSVs, they are profiles already visited… we will have to keep an eye on it because we already know the weaknesses of Sales Navigator in the search area.
All of these features of Auto-Engage are available in Linked Helper for half the price.
Dux-Soup can also help you with lead management through notes and tags on profiles you’ve already viewed so you can connect with them later if you wish. This is a great way to keep you organized. One of the best features that Dux-Soup has to offer is its top-notch customer support, always just minutes away from being able to help the user.
These filters we have not seen them useful in the flow and daily activity of HelloMrLead, the first google filter we can solve with a simple scrapping; and the profiles already visited are not of interest, one because we will already be in contact with them and two because they are probably not interested, it is not the person who makes the decision, is no longer in that company or in that position etc..
The topic of tags, profile notes and lists are functionalities that Sales Navigator already offers.
Additional functionalities provided by the Turbo Plan
There are a number of integration actions with Zapier and/or Hubspot, such as, for example, receiving messages, notifications, viewing profile visits. But they do not seem relevant to us, since we have no need to hire a Zapier/Hubspot additionally, all leads that enter our current CRM are qualified leads.
Dux Soup Follow Up
The list in the image might be the only reason to consider Dux-Soup Turbo for HelloMrLead, however Zopto offers it in the basic plan, along with other more extensive functionality.
Zopto:
This cloud-based software comes with full automation for a LinkedIn profile. This means they can help you market and advertise on your LinkedIn at full speed without having to pay too much.
This bot can help you by filtering out the best customers for your brand so you can spend time focusing only on them and not wasting it on those who wouldn’t be interested. With Zopto, you can easily view other people’s profiles, connect to new users directly, set up automatic sequential sending campaigns, perform A/B testing.
The advantages of Zopto:
One main thing for HelloMrLead is, as we mentioned above, to be able to import our already cleaned, verified and sorted DB to decrease the error rate, increase the accuracy of campaigns, segment them by roles, sectors, company sizes, etc.
Source: Zopto
Zopto even has three easy-to-understand and navigate price points, starting at $215 and going up to $895. While this tool is one of the most expensive, it allows for advanced campaign analytics, complete statistics in dashboard form.
Zopto dashboard
The latter proves its usefulness when it comes to sending reports (monthly or biweekly) to the client, as the information presented in graphical form is digestible and easy to analyze. Moreover, it is the only tool that offers statistics as such.
A consequence of this is the possibility of developing A/B testing, which allows you to segment campaigns, compare results and analyze the actions taken.
Additionally, it offers high conversion templates and self-explanatory tutorials. Finally, it should be mentioned that support and customer service is a strong side of Zopto, for example, we asked to increase the amount of custom tags (snippets) to meet the needs of prospecting that we have from HelloMrLead.
Cloud access. For internal organizational reasons it is extremely convenient that several people can access the solution from different locations and also have the possibility to manage accounts without losing information. Solutions operating in the form of a browser extension can store some (or all) of the information on the same computer. In this case it is impossible to divide the tasks between the parts of the team working remotely.
LinkedHelper
To complete our analysis of tools, let’s talk about LinkedHelper. It is a Chrome extension and is very useful for the purposes of prospecting, lead generation and offers the same functionalities as Dux-Soup for the lowest price on the market – $15/month. It has been included in the analysis to demonstrate its obvious cost advantage over other LinkedIn automation tools analyzed. But as we have already seen, they are not sufficient for the outbound campaigns we set up in HelloMrLead, as it does not offer follow-up messages or the possibility to import our own database.
However, there is one feature that LinkedHelper has and other tools don’t: endorsements. Your contacts will receive them constantly and often, which will possibly persuade them to respond their favor and leave high evaluations to your business.
Conclusions
With LinkedIn’s automation tools, you can spend your time and effort on the right prospects without spamming the wrong ones. Managing 2-3 leads manually is totally normal, but when the number of leads increases, reaching out to each of them can be a complex task. In such cases, LinkedIn automation tools come in handy. Most of them allow you to connect with the right leads in the LinkedIn sales navigator. In addition, you can extract their emails to get more diversity in your communication with leads.
These tools work non-invasively and save time and effort. They are empowering companies to do things in innovative ways that were not thought of before.
Our recommendation:
Manage LinkedIn as you treat your domain and your email account: with care, regular cleanups, without exposing it to attacks and data leaks.
- Always work with Metrics
- Use secure tools, avoid Chrome extensions
- Always do A/B tests
- Create cadences, not just sequences
- Be omnichannel, manage blacklists and use a CRM in the prospecting process to visualize how you are doing the different Touch Points with the potential customer.
…And for all of this, we definitely recommend Zopto.com.
