How to use LinkedIn to save your business from GDPR
GDPR is coming
No doubt you are aware of the impending Meteor Of Doom that is heading towards B2B organisations across Europe in the shape of GDPR.
If, like most businesses, email marketing is your main channel through which you collect and communicate with your contacts then GDPR is particularly worrisome. If you don’t make your sales and marketing processes GDPR compliant, you will be fined up to 4% of your annual revenue.
In advance of May 25th, you will be forced to ask current contacts if they want to still receive emails from you (let’s be real: a large proportion won’t) AND install stringent opt-in checks when adding new contacts to your email database (let’s be real: very few will jump through your GDPR-compliant hoops for a company newsletter).
As such, come May 25th, this is what is going to face your business:
- A decimated email list
- An email list that will grow incredibly slowly (if at all)
So, what next then?
In all of the hubbub, B2B organisations are scrambling to identify alternatives to minimise the damage of GDPR. I’m here to tell you today: LinkedIn is one such alternative.
LinkedIn can replace your email platform
What if I told you there was a way to use LinkedIn to send messages to your current email database without having to worry about GDPR compliance?
You no longer need email and marketing automation platforms like Mailchimp, Marketo or Eloqua to send messages to your database of contacts. LinkedIn has wide variety of tools (both free and inexpensive) that allow you to send messages and nurture campaigns to all/some/a few of your contacts in one go!
Examples of tools that you can use to send emails/nurture campaigns, include:
There is a rich ecosystem of LinkedIn tools out there that can be used to achieve your business aims on autopilot: building lists of leads, growing your network, publishing content, and…sending personalised messages from you.
How to use Linkedin as an email alternative
Of course, it’s one thing to have to the tools – but you need to have a strategy and a roadmap (especially with May 25th so close!).
In preparation for GDPR, this is what you should be doing to use LinkedIn:
- Elect someone in your organization who is willing to have their LinkedIn profile used as the company’s main messaging account.
If you serve multiple sectors or industries (e.g. Finance, Pharma, Media, etc), I advise client organisations to have several profiles acting as messaging accounts, one profile dedicated to mailing contacts in each sector.
. - Connect with and add all of the contacts in your mailing database. You can connect with up to 30,000 people on LinkedIn. Add your email database to LinkedIn so you can start messaging them en masse by uploading a .csv file of their emails to LinkedIn. I show how to do this here.
. - Choose a LinkedIn messaging tool: these come in all shapes and sizes (and costs!), but the ones I recommended above are a good start.
Once you have done this, you will have successfully onboarded your email list onto your LinkedIn account AND are now in a position to mass email them, in a personalised way, at scale, just like you used to with your email marketing programmes!
Now, you are GDPR compliant AND can continue to market to your email base that you’ve worked so hard to build up.
Want to send 1,000 people a note about an upcoming webinar? No problem.
Need to blast 10,000 contacts to drive them to a new blog post? Easy.
How about hitting 30,000 targets with your latest offer landing page? Child’s play.
Thanks to Win At LinkedIn.
Want to talk further about using LinkedIn to get around GDPR?
My name is Jonny Rose and I’m the founder of Win At LinkedIn, a LinkedIn coaching service that trains B2B professionals to find leads, nurture prospects and close deals in a GDPR compliant way.
Let’s turn you into a Sales MACHINE, go here.
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