How I Emailed 100 LinkedIn Influencers and What I Learned

In my latest adventure, I decided to email 100 top LinkedIn influencers, asking each one for a piece of life advice to carry through my career. You might wonder how I managed to get the emails of these high-flying A-list celebrities. Well, that's the point of this blog. I'm going to show you how to scrape their emails from LinkedIn and sequence them into an email campaign using Clay.

Scraping LinkedIn Influencers

First off, I found a link listing the top 100 LinkedIn influencers to follow. To scrape this list, I used the Clay Chrome extension, available on the Chrome store. This nifty tool allowed me to gather all the necessary information and map it out effectively using Clay formulas.

Once I clicked "Add to Workspace," a new tab opened, importing all the data points into a Clay table. From there, I filtered the list to include only profiles containing the word "LinkedIn." This gave me a plethora of LinkedIn profiles which I then named "LinkedIn profile."

Enriching Data

At this stage, all I had were LinkedIn profiles, which isn’t hugely helpful. Luckily, Clay offers an enrichment feature that finds more information on these individuals. By navigating to "Enrich Data" and selecting "Enrich Person from LinkedIn Profile," I could auto-populate the fields with detailed data.

Now, I had a list of names, their latest experiences, and personal descriptions. I popped out the first name and created a new column for it. Next, I extracted the website of their current company to find their email.

Finding Emails with Precision

To find their emails, I used the "Work Email Waterfall". This aggregates various email finding platforms into one, ensuring the highest data accuracy. By inputting their full name and company domain, and adding a validation provider, I ensured the emails were valid and real.

After running this process, I found 57 validated work emails out of the original 100 influencers. To protect their privacy, I blurred these emails. The next step was to write and send personalized emails to these influencers.

Crafting the Perfect Email

The email copy was straightforward and short. I emphasized that I wasn’t trying to sell anything or look for a job, just seeking advice. The email went something like this:

Subject: just a fan

Hey {{firstName}},

Not looking for a job or to sell you anything. Just a fan.

I've been following your work on {([opic}} for a while now (as I'm sure many others have) and really appreciate everything you do.

I'm contacting people I admire and asking them what their biggest piece of advice is for someone starting their career.

Would love your input. Thanks :)

Patrick

Adding Personalization

For personalization, I used Claygent, an integration that scrapes the internet for any public data points you want. By providing instructions and their LinkedIn account for reference, I could output accurate responses about their industry leadership.

Claygent flawlessly identified their industry, and I verified the accuracy by checking its reasoning. This process was incredibly efficient, costing just a fraction of a cent. I then used a formula to make the output lowercase and punctuation-free.

Building the Campaign

Finally, I built the email campaign in Instantly. I made minor tweaks to the copy and integrated the personalization. A quick preview showed how the email would appear to recipients, ensuring everything was in place.

And there you have it—a complete campaign ready to roll out. Follow me or Clay on LinkedIn for any responses I receive. We’d love to hear about any cool campaigns you create. ConHappy prospecting!