How to find your best LinkedIn audience in campaigns you’ve already run
Your best audience was in every campaign. A few replies at a time.
Upscale Outreach ·
Pool every campaign you’ve already run and compare audiences across all of them, because one campaign is too small to show a winner. Founders matched or beat chief executives on replies campaign after campaign, usually by a handful of replies, and only together did it read 23% against 9%.
Outscale benchmarks, from 112,149 prospects reached in real campaigns.
The clue was in every campaign
Across real campaigns, 23% of founders replied once messaged. Chief executives: 9%. That’s two and a half times the replies, and it’s the headline of our job titles benchmark. Now look at it campaign by campaign.
Founders Chief executives
- Campaign 15 of 396 of 48
- Campaign 28 of 484 of 41
- Campaign 36 of 273 of 36
- Campaign 49 of 363 of 33
- Campaign 518 of 605 of 53
- Campaign 615 of 490 of 10
- Every campaign together23%9%
Founders matched or beat chief executives in every campaign that messaged ten or more of each. But look at the size of it. One campaign: 8 founder replies against 4. Another: 6 against 3. In most campaigns, the whole story was a handful of replies.
Why nobody spots it
A campaign gets judged as one number. Did it work? Yes or no, then on to the next list.
Split by job title, a typical campaign is 59 small audiences. Even the biggest of them got about 28 messages, so a single reply moves its rate by 3.6 points.
A gap of a few replies looks like luck. Nobody wants to rebuild their targeting on luck, so they shrug it off. That’s the sensible call in every single campaign. Added up, it’s the wrong one.
And the clues never meet. Each campaign lives in its own export, and what sticks in the memory is a story: the chief executive who booked the big deal. Meanwhile founders keep doing what founders do. They read their own inbox, and they’re curious about anything that might help.
What to do today
- Judge a campaign on its own. Judge an audience on all of them. One campaign tells you whether that campaign worked. Who to target next takes everything you’ve sent.
- Count before you conclude. Before you drop an audience, count the replies behind the verdict. If it’s a handful, it’s a hunch.
- Ask your old campaigns first. Before you build the next list, pool everything you’ve already run. Your best audience is already in there, a few replies at a time.
More in targeting
Which job titles accept LinkedIn connection requests?
The people who sign the cheques accept the least.
Board members and partners accept the most, at 59% and 56%. Chief executives, presidents and finance chiefs accept the least, at 35% to 37%.
Read itDoes company size change LinkedIn reply rates?
Small companies talk. Big ones go quiet.
Yes. 24% of people at companies of 1 to 10 replied once messaged, about one and a half times the 15% at companies of over 1,000. Both accepted connection requests at much the same rate.
Read itLinkedIn acceptance rates by country
America and Ireland have heard every pitch before.
Italy, South Africa and Spain are among the warmest for LinkedIn connection requests, at 56% to 67%. The United States and Ireland sit near the bottom, at 26% and 31%.
Read it