LinkedIn Inbox Management: How to Properly Hack Your Inbox

LinkedIn Inbox Management: How to Properly Hack Your Inbox

written by Houston Golden
Founder & CEO, BAMF Media
February 23rd, 2021
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What’s one thing that makes a growth hacker’s day?

New messages!

But, what happens if that number is just way too high and you can’t seem to find important and mission-critical messages any longer?

What’s even worse, is if you manage to reply to everyone, but then lose track of who’s who and then mismanage your lead nurturing activities.

Ouch.

The good news is that there are ways to stop this from happening.

In today’s guide, let’s take a closer look at proper LinkedIn inbox management.

The Issue with LinkedIn Inbox

We love LinkedIn, but it isn’t perfect.

The major issue with LinkedIn inboxes is that they aren’t powerful enough.

Here’s why.

If you’re active on LinkedIn and get a lot of messages and connections requests often, it will simply arrange everything by time received and bury the messages that you might have to get to first.

This is bad, especially if you have a limited amount of time and you’re trying to go through your inbox on a busy day.

Don’t worry though.

There are a couple of solutions available to growth hackers out there.

What’s the Goal With LinkedIn Inbox Management?

Your goal is: INBOX ZERO.

What does that mean?

This means having zero messages in your LinkedIn inbox once you’re done with it during the day.

Realistically speaking hitting inbox zero is a pretty stark task, especially if you use LinkedIn for lead generation on a regular basis and you’ve got a lot of ongoing conversations because of your campaigns.

But, there are a lot of great benefits to hitting aiming for this goal.

First and foremost, it helps you stay organized.

Staying organized in the midst of multiple marketing campaigns is one of the secrets to effective digital marketing.

In lead generation and nurturing, timing can be everything. Failing to reply on time to a potential client can cause the prospect to look for another vendor, and missing out on lead nurturing timelines might lead to a loss in interest.

Secondly, it allows you to move a lot of the conversations that you have on different mediums creating a multichannel workflow.

If you want to find out more about creating multichannel LinkedIn workflows, check out our guide here.

Organized conversations on different mediums might be confusing, but it’s a great way to keep a prospect’s interest engaged while trying to close them.

Lastly, inbox zero is a good benchmark to check if you’ve done all your client work for the day.

Reaching inbox zero with my own inbox can get difficult on hectic days, but setting it as my standard has helped me achieve more with BAMF clients.

Archiving LinkedIn Messages

One way to minimize clutter in your inbox is to archive inactive messages that are in your inbox.

This is a great way to organize messages without losing a conversation should you have the need to get back to it or reference it in the future.

linkedin inbox, LinkedIn Inbox Management: How to Properly Hack Your Inbox

Aim to archive the following messages:

  • Clients who have already purchased from your organization and are now under the care of your sales or customer support team.
  • Cold leads – but make sure you keep them in a separate list! Cold leads make great lead generation ists in the future.
  • Old messages that are not relevant to the current campaign you’re running now.

Another problem with LinkedIn is that it doesn’t have a feature for you to organize messages into folders, but having the archive feature can easily thin out the messages in your LinkedIn inbox.

Deleting LinkedIn Messages

Don’t be afraid to delete messages on LinkedIn.

It’s perfectly normal.

Here are a couple of examples of messages that you could easily delete without hurting your campaign or your connections.

  • Spammy messages from people that you don’t know.
  • Special offers that are not applicable to your organization or to your personally.
  • Message requests that don’t resonate with you or from people that you do not want to deal with.
  • Messages from people that no longer have an active LinkedIn profile.

The list goes on.

The reason we pick these messages is because it results in no harm to you or your business when you delete them.

My simple rule is this: can my organization thrive without this message?

If the answer is “yes” then you know what to do.

Mark Messages Unread

Are you looking to bookmark messages on LinkedIn itself?

Then, mark the messages unread.

You’ll find the option right next to the archive feature on each message – or you could mark messages “unread” in bulk.

linkedin inbox, LinkedIn Inbox Management: How to Properly Hack Your Inbox

Here’s why I use this feature often.

It allows you to flag messages that you consider live so that you have a reminder to continue the conversation the next day.

You can use this feature even if you’ve already replied to the person.

Another use case scenario is to use it in your own email boxes.

Use LinkedIn Message Filters

I check my filters in the mornings, this way I have a good read on what’s going on in my inbox before I start my day.

linkedin inbox, LinkedIn Inbox Management: How to Properly Hack Your Inbox

There aren’t a lot of other features available with LinkedIn messages, but being able to maximize what you have is a great way to get things going for you.

Manage Your Email LinkedIn Updates

LinkedIn notifications can easily clog your own email so make sure you deal with this as well.

If you tend to receive a lot of emails from LinkedIn on a daily basis make sure that you switch out the email address that you use for your account.

You can use an alternate email – which I’m sure you have – solely for this purpose.

If you want to thin out your notifications you can go to Settings and Privacy and navigate to the segment called “Communications” on the sidebar and then click on “How to get your notifications”.

Now click on “Email”.

linkedin inbox, LinkedIn Inbox Management: How to Properly Hack Your Inbox

This will open up a new pane where you will have a lot of options to tweak the messages that you receive.

You even have the option to turn some notifications off if you want. However, I would strongly advise that you keep the “Conversations” notifications on. This will allow you to get alerts if ever you can’t access your LinkedIn account for some reason.

linkedin inbox, LinkedIn Inbox Management: How to Properly Hack Your Inbox

Network Updates

While you’re on “Communications settings” make sure you visit the “Network” section because there are a couple of things that you can tweak here.

I would recommend that you keep “Connection invitations accepted” on to get emails for each new contact that connects with you. This way you get an email reminder to message a person as soon as they become part of your contact list.

LinkedIn also has a nifty feature to group features via weekly or daily digests so that you don’t have too many notifications flooding your email address.

I highly suggest that you group some of the notifications that you’re getting so that you clog up your actual email.

linkedin inbox, LinkedIn Inbox Management: How to Properly Hack Your Inbox

And, here’s what.

Make sure you keep your group notifications in check.

One reason that people get bloated LinkedIn inboxes is because of group notifications that get in the way.

linkedin inbox, LinkedIn Inbox Management: How to Properly Hack Your Inbox
linkedin inbox, LinkedIn Inbox Management: How to Properly Hack Your Inbox

At the bottom of this list, there are many more options that come with a toggle switch where you can choose to remove particular notifications from coming through.

Remember, you don’t want to block notifications coming through your email, you want just enough notifications to keep you updated with a priority on incoming mail from your prospects.

There’s this option of turning off all notifications to your email, but we don’t want you to do that. You might miss out of if you’re not on the platform regularly.

Use a Tool

This is where it gets exciting.

If you really want proper LinkedIn inbox management, I highly suggest that you check out another third-party tool like Expandi.

Tools like Expandi allow you to manage your inboxes and create detailed profiles based on the clients that you are working with.

Think of it as a LinkedIn-centric CRM tool that allows you to organize your leads and ensures that you don’t miss out on prospects.

linkedin inbox, LinkedIn Inbox Management: How to Properly Hack Your Inbox

What we like most about a tool like Expandi is the smart LinkedIn inbox feature that it has. You can use it to create outreach campaigns that have multiple steps that automatically send out lead nurturing messages after a specific amount of time.

linkedin inbox, LinkedIn Inbox Management: How to Properly Hack Your Inbox

Instead of having to guess the status of the person that you’re currently engaged with – by marking messages unread on regular LinkedIn messaging – you can mark people based on your interactions with them.

But, that’s not all.

There’s also a feature for you to keep notes on a particular prospect and this is all within the app.

This way you don’t need to keep a spreadsheet open to keep track of who’s who in your connections.

And, remember, the lack of tagging functions apart from archiving messages on the LinkedIn inbox?

Expandi allows you to create custom tags.

Once you’re done with all your messaging tasks, you can take a step back and check out detailed insights that are automatically generated by the app.

linkedin inbox, LinkedIn Inbox Management: How to Properly Hack Your Inbox

I find this really useful when we’re running outreach campaigns because you can easily find out how the campaign progressed at any given time.

Not only do you get to keep your messages organized but you are also assured that you don’t miss out on those reminders for your prospects.

Now, it’s not only Expandi that brings this sort of functionality to the table, there are a lot of apps out there that offer the same services.

However, we can recommend the app because we’ve used it before and it’s been great in keeping things organized.

Takeaways

A full inbox isn’t always good news.

Sometimes, it’s a sign that it lacks organization.

Failing to clear up the clutter in your LinkedIn inbox is bad for your growth.

You lose out on hot prospects, get your mind mudded up with the people that you have to follow up with, and it’s easy to get distracted with non-critical messages.

The more you approach inbox zero, the easier it gets for you to stay focused.

And, the more focused you are, the more you grow.

Take it from me.

Inbox zero should always be a priority.

About the Author

The name's Houston Golden. I'm the Founder & CEO of BAMF — a company I've grown from $0 (yes, really) to well over $5M+ in revenue over a span of 5 years.

How did I do it? Well, it's quite simple, really. I've helped hundreds of business owners and executives get major traction (because when they win, we win), I tell all on this blog.

Growth hacking is a state of mind. Follow along as I explore and expose the unknown growth strategies and tactics that will change the way you think about marketing.
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