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Findings from 109 live LinkedIn campaigns for technology businesses, over six months: who accepts, who replies, and what turns a reply into a lead.
We define a lead as a confirmed next step: a meeting booked, an email requested, or an event signup. (Not a link clicked or a website visit)
| Campaign type | Connected | Lead rate | Leads expected | Connections per lead | Cadence |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Partner Recruit | 44537.1% connect rate | 4.54% | 20.2 | 22 | |
| End User | 35429.5% connect rate | 3.62% | 12.8 | 28 | |
| All campaigns, pooledfor one campaign of 1,200 contacted | 37631.3% connect rate | 3.68% | 13.8 | 27 | 2.29 per active campaign-week |
The factors below are ranked by how much each one moves replies, measured across every contact row in the export and scaled so the strongest is 100.
Message length ranks above who the person is: longer messages and more sentences associate with more replies, and longer sentences with fewer. Industry and job function matter less, and are fixed before any message is sent. Campaign sits first because it is compared against rather than credited, so a strong campaign cannot pass itself off as good wording.
Medium openers still reply 1.98 times better than the campaigns they ran in, so this is the wording. Most short openers are bare connection requests.
Against 5.1% for balanced wording and 7.0% for we-heavy. Only 358 openers led with “you”, so the effect is real but measured on few messages.
Openers with a question reply 2.00 times better than the campaigns they ran in.
Leaving the call-to-action out looks better, but the gap disappears once you compare each message with its own campaign. This is which campaigns wrote it, not the tactic.
Small samples are pulled toward the average so a handful of replies cannot create a false winner. A tactic only counts as a real effect if it beats what its own campaigns already achieve, which is what separates the wording from the campaign it appeared in.
Computer and Network Security replies at 34.0% and IT services at 25.6%, against the 21.7% average.
Sales accepts invites at 44.2% against a 30.6% average, and replies at 11.5% against 6.8% per invite sent.
Follow-up 2 replies at 9.7% per message sent, the strongest step. Stopping after follow-up 1 gives up a third of replies.
Replies to follow-ups 2 and 3 become leads at 21.3% and 24.6%, against 8.8% for connect-note replies.
Managers reply at 8.2% per invite sent, against 5.5% for directors and 5.2% for c-level titles.
CCO and Co-Founder, Visibility Wins
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