Heyo, Ilya here 👋

LinkedIn, Cold email or both?

Almost every team I talk to says both. One cadence, same person, touched on two channels.

I think that is the wrong thing to build for around 90% of teams. Not because it is too much work. Because of what it does to your ability to learn anything.

Day 1, cold email.
Day 3, connection request.
Day 5, second email.
Day 7, LinkedIn message.

Same person. More touches. Two channels. It looks modern.

This is the part nobody explains, and it is why so many smart people get it wrong.

Ten years ago, one SDR had one LinkedIn profile and one mailbox. Same limits on both sides. Same shape. Treating email and LinkedIn as two versions of the same motion was correct, because they were.

Then one side changed, and the other did not.

Today you can send thousands of emails a month, and adding more is a purchasing decision.

On LinkedIn you still get one profile per person, and a few hundred connection requests a month before you start putting that account at risk.

Same two channels. Completely different physics now. The playbook stayed where it was.

Here is the reframe that changes what you build.

When you start outbound, your job is not to generate leads. Your job is to find out what actually works, so you can build something that keeps working.

Which segment responds. Which angle lands. Which signal means anything.

Leads are what happens after you know those three things.

Once you accept that, the question stops being which channel gets me more replies, and becomes which channel teaches me faster.

1. You cannot tell what worked.

Someone gets your email and your LinkedIn message. They reply.

Which one made them reply?

You do not know. You will never know. And now multiply that across ten segments, five angles, and three signals. Every result you get back is blurred. You ran the test, and you learned nothing.

If you read last week's issue, this is the same disease. Starting from a trigger gives you four suspects and one data point. Blending two channels does exactly the same thing to your channel data.

2. LinkedIn caps the whole thing.

The moment LinkedIn sits inside your cadence, the cadence can only run as wide as LinkedIn allows.

A few hundred people a month, no matter how much email capacity you own. You bought a wide channel and then put a narrow one in front of it.

3. It makes you slow, and that is the real damage.

This is the one that costs you the quarter.

An email test gives you a verdict in about six working days. Small batch, clean read, kill it or keep it.

The same test on LinkedIn takes about three weeks. Send the requests, wait for acceptance, message the ones who accepted, wait again. And the batch is small, so the answer is weak when it finally shows up.

Three weeks per iteration is roughly four learnings in a quarter. Six days is twenty.

That gap is the whole difference between a team that has a working outbound motion by December and a team still guessing.

There is a real case where LinkedIn goes first. If this is you, you can stop reading here.

Small, defined market. A few hundred to a few thousand companies. A clear offer. A deal big enough that one person's attention is a sensible thing to spend on it.

In that case you are not testing, because you cannot test. Your market is too small to give you a meaningful answer no matter what you do. So you stop trying to learn and you go build relationships instead. LinkedIn first, email for the follow up.

That is maybe 10% of teams. If it is you, that is the right answer, and the rest of this is not for you.

There is no real ceiling. You want more reach, you buy more capacity. Thousands of emails a month is normal, and going bigger is something you purchase, not something you hire.

Now the honest part, because nobody tells you this before you start.

Even when it is built properly, do not expect more than about 5% human reply rate (even if you’re lucky 🤞 )

Our own numbers, so you have something real to compare against:

→ Generic campaigns: around 1.6% human reply rate.
→ With 1 to 1 copywriting: 2.8 to 3.3%.

Of the people who reply, expect somewhere between 10% and 30% to be actually interested.

<10% → something is wrong.
>30% → you have found something worth scaling.

If somebody promises you double-digit reply rates, they are selling you something.

One profile. A few hundred connection requests a month, and that is the ceiling before you start putting the account at risk.

Then acceptance cuts it again. A third to a half accept when it goes well. I have seen it at 15% when the targeting or the profile is off.

Everyone who did not accept is gone. You cannot message them. There is no second attempt.

What is left converts far better than email. There are just very few of them.

So: email is where you buy information cheaply, at a volume where the answer means something. LinkedIn is where you spend attention you cannot replace.

People try. It is worth knowing exactly how it fails.

Renting or buying profiles is the obvious move and the worst one. Those accounts get restricted, usually sooner than you expect, and when they go, every conversation inside them goes with them.

The legitimate version has the same hole. You run outreach on your team's real profiles, it works, and then somebody leaves. Every relationship they built walks out with them. No export, no backup, no access.

So do not build your pipeline on top of LinkedIn. Use it to lift conversion, then move the relationship into something you own, your CRM and your inbox, as early as the conversation allows.

Email capacity is something you buy. LinkedIn capacity is something you hire, and it leaves when the person does.

Small, limited market. LinkedIn first. Email supports it and lifts the follow up. You are not testing, you are building relationships.

Big market. Cold email only. Do not add LinkedIn. It multiplies what you have to build and maintain, and at that deal size it buys you nothing.

Mid size market, deal value in the middle. This is the only case where multi-channel is a real word. And not the way you think.

Do not run two channels at one person. Run one channel to find out what works, then promote the winners into the other one.

Cold email runs the portfolio. Many segments, many angles, many signals. Small batches. Six working days, then a verdict.

LinkedIn gets reserved for the segments and angles that already passed.

You are not multi-channelling a person. You are promoting a proven hypothesis into a more expensive channel.

Done this way, LinkedIn stops being a second channel and becomes a multiplier on a motion you already proved. That is where it doubles and triples what the same campaign was doing on email alone.

→ Open your current cadence. If it touches the same person on both channels, split it. One channel per test.
→ Separate your reporting. One reply rate across both channels means you cannot manage either.
→ Count your LinkedIn profiles and multiply by a few hundred. That is your real monthly LinkedIn capacity. Decide what deserves it.
→ Put everything else in email, and let it earn the LinkedIn slot.

If you are running the email plus LinkedIn sequence right now, send it to me. Just paste the steps.

I will tell you which of the two channels you are using for the wrong job, and what I would cut.

No pitch unless you ask for one.

New issue every Monday, 3pm CET.

Ilya growth.band