Cold Email or LinkedIn: Which Channel Goes First

Picture a founder who has just bought Sales Navigator. It comes with 50 InMail credits, so she writes one good message, sends it to 50 people in a week, and gets two replies. Both are polite no-thank-yous. Her conclusion is that LinkedIn does not work for her firm, and that cold email probably would not either.

The conclusion was wrong, but the experiment was set up to fail. InMail is the most expensive message on LinkedIn and the least suited to a first touch. Used that way, it tells you nothing about LinkedIn, and nothing about cold outreach.

This piece does two jobs. First, it explains what InMail on LinkedIn actually is, how the credits work and how it differs from a normal message, because most people who search for it want that answer. Then it takes up the question behind the search: when a B2B service firm starts cold outreach, should the first channel be email or LinkedIn?

What InMail on LinkedIn is

InMail is LinkedIn's paid way to message a person you are not connected to. On a free account, you can only message your first-degree connections. InMail removes that limit for a fixed number of messages a month, which LinkedIn calls credits.

You get InMail credits with a paid plan: Premium Career, Premium Business, Sales Navigator or Recruiter. The message lands in the person's LinkedIn inbox marked as an InMail, with a subject line, and LinkedIn also sends them an email notification. An InMail has a subject of up to 200 characters and a body of up to 1,900, so it is closer to a short email than to a chat message.

Two things make InMail different from every other message on the platform. The recipient knows you paid to reach them, which makes it read as sales from the first line. And LinkedIn lets people switch off InMail from strangers altogether, so some of the people you most want to reach cannot be reached this way at all.

LinkedIn InMail credits: how many you get and how they work

The number of credits depends on the plan. LinkedIn changes these from time to time, so treat the figures below as the ones current when this was written, and check the plan page before you buy.

Three rules govern how the credits behave:

• Unused credits roll over, but only up to three months' worth. On Premium Business you can never hold more than 45.
• A credit comes back when the person replies within 90 days. An accepted or declined reply both count, so a message that gets any answer is free. A message that is ignored costs the credit.
• Open Profile members cost nothing. Some Premium members switch on Open Profile, which lets anyone message them without a credit. You will see the tag on their profile.

To send one, open the person's profile and click the Message button. If you are not connected and have credits, the window that opens is an InMail window, with a subject line. Sales Navigator has the same button inside its own interface, and the credits there are separate from the ones on a Premium Business account.

InMail vs message vs connection request

There are three ways to reach the same person on LinkedIn, and most of the confusion about InMail comes from treating them as one thing.

The order of those rows is also the order in which people reply. A message from a connection gets read and usually answered. A connection request with a short note gets accepted more often than not, if the note is not a pitch. An InMail from a stranger is the one most people learn to skim and delete, because the only InMails most professionals receive are from recruiters and from people selling things.

That is the central problem with the "50 InMails in a week" plan. It spends the most expensive message on the coldest moment.

Where InMail earns its credit

InMail is not useless. It has three jobs it does well, and a good outreach routine keeps it for exactly those.

When there is no email address. For some senior people, a verified work email is hard to find and the domain bounces anything guessed. An InMail reaches them, with a subject line and a proper body, when nothing else does.

When one person is worth a lot. If a single account could be a year's revenue, a carefully written InMail to the one decision-maker is a fair use of a credit, after you have already engaged with their posts and sent a connection request.

When they have shown interest but not replied. Someone who viewed your profile after your email, or who accepted your connection request and then went quiet, is warm. An InMail here is a nudge to a person who already knows your name, and it is refunded when they reply.

Sponsored InMail, which LinkedIn now calls Message Ads, is a different product. It is advertising, priced per send, and it belongs in a discussion of LinkedIn ads, not outreach.

Cold email or LinkedIn: which goes first

Here is the position. For a B2B service firm in India starting cold outreach, email goes first, and LinkedIn is the second layer that makes the email work harder. Not the other way round.

Four reasons.

Email is where buying decisions get handled. A head of operations at a manufacturing firm in Pune may open LinkedIn twice a week on her phone. She opens her email inbox forty times a day, and that is where she forwards things to colleagues and replies with "send me a price". A message that needs a decision has a better chance in the inbox.

Email has no weekly ceiling. LinkedIn caps connection requests at around 100 a week and InMail at your credit count. A warmed sending domain can carry a few hundred personalised cold emails a week without strain, which is the volume a small firm needs to learn anything in its first quarter. The piece on cold email templates covers what those emails should say.

Email is measurable. You can see delivery, replies and bounces per segment, and change one variable at a time. LinkedIn tells you an InMail was sent and, sometimes, read. That is not enough to improve on.

LinkedIn punishes volume. LinkedIn restricts accounts that send too many requests or run automation, and a restricted account takes your personal brand down with it. The piece on LinkedIn automation covers what gets accounts restricted. Email done badly hurts a sending domain you can replace. LinkedIn done badly hurts a profile you cannot.

None of this means LinkedIn is optional. It means LinkedIn's job in cold outreach is different from email's. Email asks the question. LinkedIn makes the sender a real person with a face, a history and clients, so the question gets taken seriously. A reply often comes from someone who received the email, then looked at the profile before answering.

A two-week routine that uses both channels

This is the sequence we run, and it is a good default for a firm doing its own outreach. It assumes a list of companies showing a buying signal, each with the right person and a verified email. If you do not have that list yet, start with the piece on the ideal customer profile.

Notice where InMail sits: step seven of eight, aimed at warm people only. By that point, the person has seen your name four or five times, and your credit is spent on someone who already recognises it. The follow-up sequence piece goes into what each email should contain.

Two cautions. Keep the two channels in one place, a CRM or a sheet, so nobody gets a LinkedIn note the day after they replied by email. And keep the profile that does the LinkedIn work honest and current, because every email you send will be checked against it.

The connection request message

The connection request is the most useful free touch on LinkedIn, and the easiest to ruin. LinkedIn limits the note to a few hundred characters, and the free tier now limits how many notes you can send a month, so many people send requests with no note at all. That works better than a note with a pitch in it.

If you do write one, it should fit in two short sentences and ask for nothing. Three that work:

• "Saw your post on hiring in tier-2 cities. We work with a few firms on the same problem. Happy to connect."
• "We both know [a shared contact] at [their firm]. Thought it made sense to connect."
• "I emailed you last week about the new Chennai plant. Connecting here too."

The third one is the honest multichannel version. It names the email, so the two touches join up in the reader's mind instead of looking like two strangers.

Read receipts, grey ticks and whether they read it

Three of the questions people ask about InMail are about knowing whether it was read. The honest answer is that LinkedIn gives you less than you want.

In a normal message thread, a small grey tick under your message means it was sent and delivered. A small copy of the person's profile photo under the message means they have opened it, but only if they have read receipts switched on. Many people switch them off. You can switch yours off too, under Settings, Data privacy, Messaging, and then nobody sees when you read theirs. It works both ways: turn yours off and you lose the ability to see theirs.

For an InMail, you get the same signals, plus one that is more reliable. If your credit comes back, they replied. If it does not come back within 90 days, they did not. That is the only read receipt that matters.

Frequently asked questions

The founder with 50 credits did not need a new channel. She needed the same 50 people in a different order: an email first, a profile view, a connection request, and the InMail kept for the handful who looked but did not answer. Run that way, LinkedIn stops being a channel that fails and becomes the thing that makes the email believable.

If you would rather have the whole routine run for you, that is what our B2B lead generation service does. Every month, up to 500 contacts at companies showing a buying signal get the email sequence and the LinkedIn touches alongside it, from pre-warmed domains, and every reply is sent to you the day it lands. Plans start at ₹75,000 a month with no setup fee.