LinkedIn Message Ads (formerly Sponsored InMail)

Video Transcript:

LinkedIn is one of my favorite advertising platforms. The b2b targeting on LinkedIn is so much better than any of the other networks that are out there and I personally just do a lot of b2b advertising. 

But one of the things that I don’t think people use as much are the Sponsored InMail or Sponsored Message Campaigns. I know a lot of people are interested about them, but I don’t think a lot of people use them, or know how to get the most out of them. 

So today, I want to run through an example of what they look like, run you through the campaign creation portion, and then talk about some of the metrics that you need to pay attention to and talk about some calls to action that you can use to get the most out of a Sponsored InMail or Message Campaigns. 

And in case you can’t tell, they kind of have two names. They used to be called InMail. They’re now called Sponsored Messages. So I’m going to go back and forth throughout this demo, but hopefully by the end of it, you’ll feel a lot more confident about giving them a try. 

So to start off, I want to show you what a Sponsored InMail looks like from the user perspective. This is in my own inbox on LinkedIn. I’ve got a message pulled up here and you can see over on the side that it actually says sponsored right here in the notification on the left hand side. 

So you can tell at a pretty quick glance which messages coming through are sponsored and which aren’t. Then you can notice the anatomy of this, we’ve got a call to action button up here at the top, it says sponsored, you can tell that there’s a person who sent it and then there’s a message here with a number of different links throughout the entire message. 

There’s also a corresponding banner off to the side that also is trying to promote this product. To me, this is kind of how an InMail or Sponsored Messages will look when it shows up in your messaging center in LinkedIn. 

So let’s hop into how you would create this campaign type. It’s pretty easy to get started. Click Create Campaign and the first thing we need to do is choose our objective. Sponsored Messaging (Sponsored InMail) is available for all of these different campaign objectives. For now, I’m going to choose Website Visits to get started. 

The next thing you do is set up your campaign. Just the way you would any other LinkedIn campaign, choose the location that you want to target your language, who your target audience is, and you end up setting up all those different pieces. 

But what I really want to focus on is the actual setup of a Message Ad as opposed to the rest of the campaign. Just to save some time, we’re going to scroll down to format. The way we choose a Sponsored Message Ad or InMail Ad is to choose Message Ad from the ad format section. 

You’ll see that the LinkedIn Audience Network is removed because Message Ads are not eligible for that placement. Next, set up your bid and budget the same as you normally would. 

Then down here at bid type, you’ll notice this is a little bit different because it’s set at maximum CPS bid or cost per send and there is no drop down. You can’t click this to have it be something else. InMail and Sponsored Messaging Campaigns will charge you on a cost per send basis. You’re always going to pay to send your ads to a group of people, you need to set your bid amount for the price that you would want to pay for sending out your message to these users.

The recommended bid here is 20 cents. That’s usually a relatively decent range. I would encourage you to keep within the range that LinkedIn provides you in mind down here. Maybe even more so than some of the other campaigns. 

In a previous video, I’ve talked about LinkedIn Bidding Strategies and how you can bid to the floor to get lower cost per click while still sending to your target audience, kind of getting the lowest click cost you can get there. 

But with InMail Campaigns/Sponsored Messaging Campaigns, it’s a good idea to make sure you have a competitive bid to get your message in somebody’s inbox. 

LinkedIn does a really good job of making sure that people don’t get bombarded by Sponsored Messages all the time. I want to say It’s close to once a month that somebody can get a Sponsored Message in their inbox. So you need to be competitive to make sure that you show up. And to do that, I would suggest you choose something within this range that LinkedIn normally sends you. 

If you end up seeing that you have lots of sends and you want to test lowering the cost per send, great! Or if you’re not seeing as much volume come through, and you want to up that bid beyond the range that it gives you, that’s also fine. But I would suggest that you start off with a bid somewhere within the range that LinkedIn is suggesting. 

So outside of that, we just need to click Next. And now we get to set up our Message Ads. So I’m going to come up here to Create New Ad. And here is where we’re going to start to set up the ad creative that the user is going to see. So you start off by giving it a name. 

The next thing we’re going to do is choose the sender. This is who the message is going to look like it is coming from and this is an important thing to keep in mind. You want to have a sender that seems reputable, that seems reasonable, and that seems like a good fit. It would not make sense for you to have somebody as a sender that isn’t going to be the person who would normally be making that type of outreach. 

Let’s say your call to action is to reach out and set up a demo of some type of software. It wouldn’t make sense if that message is coming from somebody who works in the finance department or the billing department of a company, right? That’s just a little bit of a mismatch. 

So think about who you want to be the voice of this message. Who makes sense here. Who has some credibility and make sure that you’re choosing a good sender. 

Right now it’s defaulting to me, because I’m the one who’s setting this up. But to add a sender, you simply click this button and then you can search for the person that you want to add. It’ll populate the person based on who has access to the ad account and who you’re connected with. You can then choose this and then send a request and that person get an email from LinkedIn where they just have to click to approve the link and then they will be an eligible Sender for your Sponsored InMail/Sponsored Messaging Campaigns. But for right now, I’m just going to leave it as myself. 

Now I want to set up the actual message that’s going to populate in the inbox. Here you can see there are a number of different tools available that are effectively just like writing an email. You end up having a subject line, message text, and then we have a call to action landing page URL. And we’ll get into the banner creative here in a little bit. 

What I want to do is run through some of the suggestions and best practices for setting up this type of message. I wanted to use this version of seeing the text specs for InMail because it’s just easier to see it all in one place.  Start by giving it a name up to 50 characters. Choose a proper sender that you want to have in place. 

But here are the different pieces that we want to have for the text that’s available. Message subject, this can be up to 60 characters. That includes spaces just like everything else. The message text can use up to 1,500 characters. I like to keep it a lot shorter than that, usually closer to 500, and have your message be something that’s easy to read. Likely bullet points as opposed to big paragraphs. But just remember, you’ve got a max up to 1,500 characters there.

You can use up to three links within your message. So keep that in mind of where you want to embed those links. And then you can use up to 60 characters for those different link headlines, the link text itself. You can customize your terms and conditions to be up to 2,500 characters and your call to action button copy can be 20 characters long. 

Then you add in your regular landing page URL in the same way you would any of the other LinkedIn ad units. So make sure to keep all of your UTM parameters in place on that landing page URL exactly as you normally would. 

The last thing I want to cover is this pro tip section here that LinkedIn has put together. This is how we can start to customize our message to speak directly to the user in their own messaging inbox without having to choose a very, very small target audience to go after. 

There are lots of custom fields that we can use to make the message more directed at people. Looking at my message in my inbox again, you’ll remember that the very beginning of this says “Hey Michelle”. There is no way that this person put together a list of users on LinkedIn that only had the first name Michelle. That’s just unrealistic. 

This is being done through a dynamic parameter that’s pulling that information from my LinkedIn profile. And these are those fields that you can use. You’ll see over here that there are parameters in all caps. So there’s first name, last name, company name, job title, and industry. All of those are available options for you to add into the message that you have in your Sponsored Message and have that dynamically populate some variables based on the user’s LinkedIn profile. 

Let me put together an example of what this would look like. Is this a good example? No, but you can see how we’re putting things together to make all this populate. 

Effectively what’s going to happen here is I’ve typed Hi, and then FIRSTNAME, LASTNAME, and I kept these percent markers on each side of the value parameter. Effectively what this would do is populate “Hi, Michelle Morgan” for me, and then a comma. The new paragraph and then at the end, it’s going to type in my job title at the company name. 

We know that keeping up to date industry reports are very impactful. Each of these things LinkedIn is going to replace, it’s not going to have first name last name in the message that somebody sees. It’s going to populate that information based on what I’ve chosen for my LinkedIn profile. 

Keep in mind, there are some times where maybe people have really weird things here. I have seen many strange job titles added in through LinkedIn. So if somebody has a really wonky job title, that might seem kind of goofy. Make sure that you’re trying to use these in a way that will seem like natural language and not just that you added all these different things in here and it’s clear that it’s coming from some sort of dynamic variable. Do your best to come up with something that seems like natural language. But this is effectively how you would use these parameters in your message to populate the information in somebody’s profile. 

The next thing I want to talk about is the banner creative. Let’s hop back into PowerPoint for some of the best practices and another example of what that looks like. Banner creative is pretty easy. It’s actually one of the other main sizes that you would usually use on the Google Display Network: 300 by 250, Max 40 KB file size, and that can be either a jpg, GIF, or PNG. Whatever you want to use, but it has to be a static image because you can see here non animated, no flash. So it needs to be a flat creative piece and then you can add your click through URL for that image created that you got in place. 

In the interface to do this, all you need to do is click Upload, choose the image you want to use, and then hit save. Once you’ve selected your image and you filled out all the fields like I’ve done here, you can click this blue Create button, run through that last page of review and launch your campaigns. 

The last thing I want to show you is how to review the performance for your Sponsored Messaging Campaigns because they are is a bit different than what you would have for the other campaign types in the LinkedIn interface. There are a couple things you can do up here.  You can filter for just a Message Ad Campaign, which I’ve already done. 

The next thing you can choose in the column setup. It will always default to performance, but if you slide down here to Sponsored Messaging, which I’ve already done, you can see stats that are specific to the Sponsored Messaging ad type. So let’s run through each of those. 

So we have over here: send, opens, clicks, button clicks, banner clicks, link clicks, open rate, click to open rate, cost per send, cost per open, and average CPC. Each of these different metrics is very specific to the Sponsored messaging ad type, as you can see, because there’s effectively an extra step when it comes to these compared to regular ads. That’s why we pay per send. 

Some people open them, but then there’s also a click within that. You have to click to open it, but then there’s a secondary click after that, whether it’s just on a link, a banner, or a button within the ad message. 

One important thing to keep in mind is that opens should not be a success metric for you. If you’re anything like me, I go into my LinkedIn inbox, and I don’t want any of my messages to be unread. So I will go through and open all of them just so there are no notifications. But for somebody who’s optimizing their InMail Campaigns, their Sponsored Message Campaigns, and thinks that an open is a success, I’m a false positive. I opened it, but it wasn’t for the reason that I actually wanted to read the message. 

They should be focusing more on clicks, whether it’s on the button, banner, link, whatever it is. These campaigns have an open rate of just shy of 61%, but the click to open rate, so any of the clicks that are in here is a point three, 8%. That’s very low. 

Actually, one of our friends in the industry, AJ Wilcox, who does quite a lot of LinkedIn advertising has a pretty good benchmark on this. Based on his experience, InMails are opened at about 50%. There’s about a 50% open rate. If you send an InMail to somebody, that seems great. But also, again, it’s not really a positive metric. 

Aside from the fact that somebody might have seen your message. This is almost the equivalent to an ad impression on the Google Display Network. They were able to read it, but it doesn’t mean that they actually read what’s there. He then goes into a number of different equations here. If you want to look up this article, it’s on Social Media Examiner: How to Analyze LinkedIn Ad Performance. And if you want to find additional information about LinkedIn from AJ, he actually has his own podcast that is really informative. You can check it out. He’s got 26 episodes as of this recording. Check out any of the other things that he’s got in here if you want to learn anything else about LinkedIn Ads. Or, you know, any of the other ad videos that we have on the Paid Media Pros channel. Either one will get you some really quality LinkedIn Ads information. 

So going through this to recap, but also give you some best practices. I want to talk about some specific things to keep in mind as you’re building your Sponsored Message Campaigns. 

The first, again, is to use a credible sender. Make sure the message makes sense coming from that person and there’s not a mismatch. Otherwise, it’ll come off even more hokey and advertising than it normally would. If there’s a good match between the person that’s sending the message and the message itself, that will really go a long way in making sure that everything is credible and giving a more realistic chance that people will have a positive engagement with your brand. 

Next, use those hyperlinks. You’ll remember in the example I showed you, everything that was hyperlinked ended up being blue, which already helps things to stand out a little bit. But it also gives the user a lot of different options of what to engage with and how they can choose their experience with you on the next step. It just makes for a more appealing ad unit. So make sure that you’re using hyperlinks in your messages and keep your body text under 500 characters as well as making it easy to read. Nobody wants to read big blocks of text. That’s part of the reason that most blog posts you see have effectively one sentence per paragraph, and most use bullet points. Use short segments of text to help make it easier to read almost skimmable so people can get to the information they want in a quick manner. 

It’ll also help them if they do open it, it’s easier for them to skim really quickly as opposed to having to stop and pay a lot of attention, and you’ll probably get a lot more link clicks out of it, even after they open it, whether they meant to read it or not. 

This one, I cannot stress enough. Use a memorable offer that users can’t get anywhere else. For the most part, people feel like LinkedIn Sponsored Messaging ends up being a little bit of an invasion of privacy. And I totally agree with that. It feels a little bit silly coming in and trying to sell me something in my messaging inbox when I’m supposed to be networking. 

To get around that, try to stay away from white papers or on demand webinars, anything that’s available to the general public. The calls to action that work the best for Sponsored Messaging are something that people can’t get anywhere else. Make it so that it’s worth the slight invasion of privacy, if you will. 

To get the message in front of a really specific person, maybe it’s inviting them to an exclusive event, whether it’s virtual or in person. Maybe it’s giving them a discount on your product or service that they can’t get anywhere else. 

Whatever it is, make sure that it is a great deal or a great opportunity that’s hard to pass up, because that will help keep their attention and help you seem like a lot more valuable offer in their inbox and some of the other people that are just offering them an industry report or something like that that they could get anywhere. 

And lastly, don’t focus on opens for success. I know we talked about this in the stat section, but again, opens are not a measure for success because it’ll send you a lot of false positives. Expect that to be somewhere around the 50% range, like AJ said, and that’s probably going to be the benchmark. If you start to see things be a lot higher or a lot lower than that, then you’re either onto something great or you really need to work on your headline and target audience to make sure you’re speaking to the right person. But aside from that, don’t put any stock in the open metric. Make sure you’re focusing on all the other engagement metrics after that.

Written by Michelle Morgan