How long should you wait between LinkedIn follow-ups?
Anything from a day to a month. Past that, you’re a stranger again.
Upscale Outreach ·
Anything from a day to four weeks. Compared within the same campaign and step, every gap in that range landed within 12% of the campaign’s usual reply rate. Wait more than a month and replies fell by 19%.
Outscale benchmarks, from 112,991 prospects reached in real campaigns.
A day or a month, much the same
Different campaigns use different gaps, so we compared each follow-up with the same campaign’s usual reply rate for that step. From one day to four weeks, no gap moved replies more than 12% either way, and there was no steady trend.
- 1 to 3 days−1%
- 4 to 6 days+6%
- 1 to 2 weeks−3%
- 2 to 4 weeks+12%
- Over a month−19%
The one gap that cost replies was the long one. Wait more than a month, and replies fell by 19%.
Only you are counting the days
Senders agonise over cadence. Two days feels pushy. Two weeks feels like you’ve forgotten them. So the delay gets debated, tested and changed.
The prospect has no idea. They answer when a message lands on a day they have a minute. What changes after a month is the thread itself: your earlier messages have scrolled out of sight, and the next one arrives from somebody they’ve forgotten.
What to do today
- Pick a rhythm and leave it. Anything from a couple of days to a few weeks does the job.
- Keep threads under a month apart. Past that, you’re starting again.
- Put the effort into what the next message says. And how many you send: more in how many follow-up messages should you send on LinkedIn.
More in messages and sequences
Is there a best time of year for LinkedIn outreach?
The holiday slump lives in the sender’s diary.
No. Across two years of real campaigns, messages sent in August got replies at 8.1%, the same as the average month, and December’s at 9.6%. Against each campaign’s own average, every month landed within 11%.
Read itHow long do LinkedIn prospects take to reply?
The no’s come fast. The maybes take their time.
Within hours: the median reply came 4 hours after our message, 72% within a day and 95% within a week. But the fastest are the most negative: 40% of replies inside the first hour were a plain no, against 24% of those that took over a week.
Read itWhat day and time get the most LinkedIn replies?
Whenever they’re awake. The day barely matters.
Barely any day or hour stands out. In the prospect’s own time and compared within the same campaigns, every weekday landed within 6% of the usual reply rate, Monday the slowest. The one time that cost replies was overnight: messages landing between midnight and 7am got 12% fewer.
Read itHow many follow-up messages should you send on LinkedIn?
More than feels polite.
Don’t stop before the fifth message. In real campaigns, 26% of replies came to message three, four or five, and they were as often worth answering as replies to the first. About one follow-up in 2,000 drew an annoyed reply.
Read it