When people think about starting e-mail marketing campaigns, one of the first doubts they have is how to get the e-mail addresses of the first people to whom they want to send the information. There are many actions that can be carried out to attract subscribers, you just have to use your imagination, although it is important to stay within the margins of current legislation and professional ethics.
Achieving a sufficiently large volume of subscribers for e-mail marketing to become a profitable tool is an arduous task for freelancers and SMEs whose business activity is not very large. The required size of the database will vary between companies and sectors of activity. There are companies that with 500 people get a staggering profitability. However, other businesses will need thousands of subscribers to take advantage of it. In any case, with 1,000 subscribers in B2B sectors we can generally see positive results in terms of customers after 6 months of activity, as long as we have a clear strategy and interesting content planning.
Using LinkedIn as a source of email marketing subscribers
Due to this initial difficulty in getting subscribers, many businesses consider taking shortcuts and carrying out campaigns that, although not illegal, are borderline illegal and, at the very least, NOT ethically correct. Among these actions is the use of LinkedIn contacts as a quick and “easy” source of subscribers. Basically, it consists of connecting with a multitude of people through LinkedIn who hold key jobs in sectors that we consider within our market and then export the contacts and start sending them company information through the newsletter, whether commercial or content.
With this type of action we may encounter several barriers:
- That LinkedIn itself gives us a warning for maintaining a suspiciously active activity.
- That people on LinkedIn don’t want to connect with us out of ignorance.
- At the time of sending the information, people do not recognize the sender and we get very low open rates.
- That people recognize our company, but feel that it is not their right to send them information.
- That some recipient denounces us to the AGPD [We have been denounced for this test… It happens in the best families… ]
On many occasions, some of our customers have proposed this action to us as one of the possible ways of attracting new customers, and although we have always advised them not to do it, some of them, as I have already told you, do not pay any attention to us. In any case, we had no data to demonstrate these problems and the bad results of sending newsletters to this database. Therefore, we decided to launch a small test to shed some light on this practice. Of course, the test has its shortcomings, but it is the best we could do within our possibilities without affecting anyone. We used the following lists:
- List with B2B Company Permits: 1,000 recipients.
- LinkedIn B2B company contact list: 2,000 recipients.
- LinkedIn B2C company contact list: 3,000 recipients.
Note: Approximate subscriber data.
To carry out the test, we used Mailchimp for six months to send newsletters with a variety of content, both commercial and informative and educational content on different topics, as well as some promotions and events.
The results obtained were as follows:
Average quality of Users: [From 1 to 5]. 
Medium openings 
Percentage Clicks 
Spams, bounces and unsubscriptions 
Some ideas for attracting subscribers through LinkedIn
As I mentioned at the beginning of the article, our recommendation is to stay within both legality and what could be considered ethically correct. From there, there are a multitude of ideas that could help us use LinkedIn as a legitimate source of subscribers to our business newsletter.
