LinkedIn Contact Export

This month I took on the daunting challenge of exporting all of my contacts from LinkedIn, cleaning the data, and organize it into my CRM so that I can more quickly and effectively bridge introductions and better support my network. Here’s what I’ve learned and the process I took.

Some data to start us off, cause I’m nerdy that way:

• 5,261 contacts
• 11,368 rows of very messy spreadsheet data
• 3,248 emails added to my mailing list
• 70 hours 49 minutes of processing

The Process:

• Merge duplicates:
  • This was by far the most time-consuming and tedious process.
  • Some contacts had multiple emails and were entered on different lines.
  • Some emails had no names associated with them and I had to do reverse email lookups.
• Consolidate with existing contacts in my mailing list to ensure that I would not re-add people who unsubscribed.
• Clean the data:
  • Some enter Firs Name/Last Name differently in LinkedIn depending on their cultural backgrounds.
  • Some added emojis or accreditations in their name fields.
  • Parsing all available emails through an email validation tool to scrub out typos, people who had left their organizations, company emails that had been discontinued, and domain names that had expired.
• Index the contacts
  • Tagging them based on area of expertise, service, or type of contact.
  • e.g. sales, marketing, investor, guest speaker, mentor, founder, product, F&B, etc.

Lessons:

• Yes, quality over quantity. I don’t generally send out LinkedIn connection requests (especially not to strangers), but I have been a little too generous with accepting random requests (probably people who automated their LinkedIn outreach/connection process). I need to be more selective with who I accept.
• It took A LOT of time to do this, but the intention is that my ROTI (Return On Time Invested) through the many minutes I spend combing through my contacts to try to remember who I could bridge an intro to, ask a question, etc. would be greatly reduced through this indexing effort.
• Can I just randomly add people like these to my newsletter?
  • Technically yes. Canada’s anti-spam legislation (CASL) requires that you obtain Consent. While these contacts did not provide Expressed Consent, they do fall under the category of Implied Consent. This category encompasses existing relationships within the previous two years where express consent is not required.
  • To take it a step further. I have Double Opt-In enabled, the people I added would not be formally subscribed to my newsletter unless they agree to the opt-in email I sent them to confirm.
  • And lastly, include a readily accessible unsubscribe mechanism in all the emails I send. (No hard feelings and I won’t hold it against you if you choose to unsubscribe from my newsletters!).
• You should archive your unsubscribed/cleaned/inactive contacts if you use a mailing client like Mailchimp.
  • They bill you based on the number of contacts in your database.
  • Archived contacts do not count towards that number (reduce cost!).
  • By archiving instead of deleting, it prevents you from accidentally re-adding them back into your database if you do a future import. This also reduces the likelihood of infringing on any spam regulations.
  • Inactive contacts should be achieved even if they haven’t “unsubscribed” from your newsletters (by my definition, if they haven’t open any of my emails in the last 6 months, they should be scrubbed. Having them on your list negatively impacts your deliverability rate (and results in your emails landing in spam/social/promotions folders).

*UPDATE

I made a big mistake today and I believe it’s important for me to share transparently because:

• As you know, authenticity is one of my core values (it informs my decisions to share things like this).
• By understanding my mistakes so you can avoid doing the same.
• It’s important to set an example:
  • That business owners are human and can make big mistakes too
  • To encourage others to do the same and acknowledge their mistakes + know that owning up to it and apologizing doesn’t make you weak.

What happened:
As you know, I exported contacts from LinkedIn to import into my mailing list. I had double opt-in enabled and thought that they would receive my opt-in confirmation email before being formally added to my mailing list.

Turns out NO. Double opt-in only works for people who directly subscribe to your mailing list. If you do a manual import, people directly go into your list as a full subscriber.

What I should have done was send them my opt-in email directly to ask for their permission to be added to the list.

Not one of those “better to ask for forgiveness than for permission” moments
For real, this caused a lot more damage than it was worth the additional subscribers to my mailing list.

• High unsubscribe rate (7%>, industry average is 2-3%) damaged the deliverability of my domain. Emails are now more likely to end up in spam/promotion folders.
• I also had quite a few people mention that links in the email went to “Bad Gateway”. I did check the link prior to sending and they all worked fine; however, I tried them again in my inbox and I got a gmail pop-up along the lines of “Link could be malicious, do you want to proceed”.
  • Either the above issue penalized my domain links, or gmail is now detecting Mailchimp tracking links and mislabelling them as malicious (hyperlinks in Mailchimp are masked with their tracking link and redirected to your actual link. This is how Mailchimp is able to provide you data on clickthrough rates).
  • Not sure if this is temporary or permanent, but it could have a lasting negative impact on my clickthrough rate.

Another lesson I wish I learned earlier:

• Archive contacts that have unsubscribed or are active in your mailing list. If not, they still count towards your Mailchimp contacts, and if you use Mailchimp, you know you pay proportionately to the # of contacts you have.
• Archiving them ensures that they won’t be re-subscribed if you do an import.
• Lowers your contact count (by archiving, I cut down my monthly subscription by about $30).

So much for sharing about CASL regulation, makes me sound like a total hypocrite. I just shot myself in the foot and totally infringed on CASL. I’ve updated the LinkedIn export lessons blog post to reflect this post as well: https://classynarwhal.com/linkedin-contact-export/

I did also send those new contacts an apology email.

Hope this was as informative for you as it has been for me. Lesson learned.