ICYMI: LinkedIn Sponsored InMail’s are now available for all

In 2015 LinkedIn launched Sponsored InMails, an exciting new opportunity for B2B marketers to reach prospects directly in their inbox. However, with a minimum spend of around $10,000 it was out of reach for a lot of businesses.

If that applied to you, then there is good news! LinkedIn has now included Sponsored InMail in its self-serve portfolio alongside Sponsored Updates – making it available to all.

If you’re not familiar with InMail, it offers many of the benefits of both social media advertising and email marketing.

Although email remains an essential channel for nurturing existing customers and prospects, it offers little opportunity for reaching new contacts. With InMail, you can target individuals based on their job title, seniority, industry or company size and reach them with a personalised message straight to their LinkedIn inbox.

What’s more, the message is only delivered when the user is actively using LinkedIn, giving you 100% deliverability.

It’s still too early for us to report back on just how effective this opportunity is, but some case studies (provided by LinkedIn) point to an open rate or nearly 50% and click-through-rates of 5-10%.

From our own experiments we’ve seen a minimum bid of £0.45 per send to reach a local B2B audience, so it may prove to be a more costly option than Sponsored Updates but, perhaps, a valuable option for lead generation.

Over the coming weeks and months we will be looking for further opportunities to utilise this for our clients and we’ll be sure to feedback on what went well, what learnings we have taken away and best practices. As such, be sure to keep tabs on the blog.