Add Hundreds of Contacts to Your Email List Quickly
Many business owners I meet don’t have a lot of email contacts on their list. If this is you, my first piece of advice is to start collecting email address for all your customers and prospects NOW. An email list is a very valuable tool for any business. Read my blog post, Email Marketing for Small Business to learn more about why.
However, another marketer recently shared this tip with me to help businesses increase their email list immediately and I thought it was great enough to warrant a blog post. You can download your a list of your LinkedIn contacts and use it to build an email list!
Here are the step-by-step instructions. However, if you find this too complex, contact me and I’ll be happy to help you get this going.
- Log in to LinkedIn
- Click on your picture at the top right and select “Settings & Privacy” from the drop-down menu.
- Click on “Getting an archive of your data” under the “Partners and Third Parties” tab. Keep “Fast file only” checked and click “Request Archive”. You’ll be asked to re-enter your password for LinkedIn.
- LinkedIn will send you an email when the export is ready. Download it to your hard drive.
- The file will be a zip file. Open it and you’ll see there are actually many files there. The two you are interested in are called “Contacts.csv” and “Connections.csv”
- Open your email client. Every email client I’ve worked with provides a way to upload contacts to increase your mailing list. Use that feature to add the contacts to your mailing list. You might want to put them in a group (MailChimp) or tag them (Constant Contact) so you know they all came from LinkedIn.
That’s it! You are now the proud new owner of a bigger email list.