Guide to multichannel prospecting strategy

Using a multichannel outreach strategy can more than double your response rate.

To 2x your outreach, here's our guide to generating leads across multiple channels, including LinkedIn, cold email, and cold calls.

Everything we’ll discuss here is going to change the way you do outreach and it will have a tremendous impact on your growth.

Not only that, but it will also help you expand your network on LinkedIn and turn your profile into a lead gen machine. 🚀

Without further ado, let’s get started so you can do this for your business! Starting with the most basic question.

What is multichannel prospecting?

Multichannel prospecting is a sales tactic that involves using multiple channels at the same time to communicate with your prospects. This includes:

• Cold emailing
• Cold calling
• LinkedIn
• More social selling options (e.g. Twitter, Communities, etc)

You want to use the channels simultaneously so you can reach your lead on the platform that works best for them, which helps increase your response and meetings booked rate.

Why you should use multichannel outreach

By reaching out to your leads on several channels you are getting maximum exposure and therefore have heightened chances they'll respond.

It's a wonderful opportunity to build relationships with your target audience in a smart way, as you can do a ton of different things.

You could start establishing a rapport with your prospects and expose them on LinkedIn prior to reaching out.

You could deliver smart email follow-ups if they don't answer your cold call or LinkedIn DM.

Or create any funnel you pretty much want to.

Just check out some of the results and messages we’ve gotten from multichannel sequences… they are game-changing.

And even better, the results associated with some of these campaigns:

In this case, the first line is the results from email steps and the second is through LinkedIn. See the difference in response if we had only used email?

How to develop a multichannel outreach strategy

There are three fundamental aspects that you’ll need to have down:

If we break this down a bit more, we can see that the goal of the first step is to get your audience aware of who you are. You can do this through the social media side, connecting with them and engaging with their posts on platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter.

Then, you want to be sure that if they click on your profile they can see that you are someone they should trust. So you have created content or participated in events like podcasts and webinars that position you as an expert in the field.

And finally, the fun part comes in, actually reaching out to leads on the channels that work best for them. This is where you send them some emails, make some cold calls, and shoot over a DM.

By following this structure you are taking outbound from an unwanted sale out of the blue to creating mutually beneficial relationships.

Let's break these steps down a little bit more with some actionable tips that will get you real results!

Build relationships

Building relationships means talking to real people in your audience on a daily basis and providing value for them at all costs... which sometimes means actually dropping the sales aspect.

It’s all about focusing on the needs of this audience and creating a two-way relationship based on trust.

So how do you do this? Go to the place designed to connect people and build professional relationships, LinkedIn.

And what do you do once you get there? Connect with your target audience, using a scrapable persona, and start engaging with their posts and sparking conversations.

By searching with this scrapable persona you'll be able to connect with people that will not only want to talk to you but will benefit from it. Thus creating a pre-qualified lead that is more likely to buy and keep using your product/solution.

Once you have this narrowed down, you start the search. Check out how this looks:

There are a lot of ways to find leads on LinkedIn, and you can dive a lot deeper to find the perfect targets and get in touch.

This is now the part where you start engaging with leads!

We love automation, but there is a time and place for it. And this is not it. That comes in your later steps. In this part of your process, you want to focus on creating real, human relationships.

The formula you can use for success is: read the lead’s content + provide valuable and genuine comments. This will lead to some cool conversations and end up getting you some meetings booked in the process.

To show you a real-life example of this, check out how our Head of Sales Nadja, knocked this out of the park:

She left this comment on a post about how cold email is dead to show the author what they can do to improve their results.

You can see from the engagement with her comment that it was some pretty good advice, and people kept following up.

Which sparked longer conversations and led to some demos booked and conversions later on. All thanks to one comment on a post.

The key here is that she isn’t trying to be sales-y at all or chase demos with every comment! You just want to focus on the problem your audience is facing, and genuinely try to help them solve it.

Thus creating some really valuable relationships that attract the kind of leads you want to have. With those who fit your offer and who will want to stay for a long time.

Position yourself as a thought leader

In order to be able to build a mutually beneficial relationship it is imperative that your prospect knows who they’re dealing with.

How can we achieve this? With our personal brand.

It is important to be honest, transparent, and vulnerable to be able to connect with our prospects not only professionally, but personally.

With a clear personal brand our prospects will know they need us.

Engage with people on their terms

The last step of the multichannel outreach funnel is to start engaging with your audience, transforming them into proper leads.

Once people know who you are, you can start reaching out. Making your outreach more of a “warm” approach. You already know the three main channels of multichannel, the question is how to combine all of these to create the perfect method of communication for your leads.

Here are the steps we recommend for your multichannel campaigns:

• LinkedIn profile visit
• LinkedIn invite
• LinkedIn message
• LinkedIn voice message
• Cold call
• Cold email & follow-up
• Manual task

How to mix multiple outreach channels

This really depends on the goals of your campaign and where you want to share your valuable info. But, we have a few suggestions to get you started:

Step 1 - LinkedIn profile visit and invite first

This adds some context to your future messages, gets people interested in your profile if you haven’t exchanged yet, and is a way to show you did some research and have interest.

Just keep limits in mind - no more than 20 LinkedIn invites daily.

Step 2 - LinkedIn (voice) message

If you want to connect with people from a networking perspective, you can start your communication with a LinkedIn message since you don’t really need to add much context. However, if you want to give them information it’s best to leave the LinkedIn message as a follow-up, like this one:

Even better, you can now leave a LinkedIn voice message for your prospects, giving yet another dimension to multichannel outreach with lemlist.

Just select "Voice message" as a step in your campaign's sequence, record the message, and you're good to go!

Step 3 - Cold call

This one and an email can really be interchanged, it just depends on your leads and what type of communication they prefer.

If you do use a cold call before your email and the lead doesn’t answer, you can always leave the “I’m about to send you an email” voicemail that mentions you’ll send them an email and give them the subject line (something intriguing) so they know to look out for it in their inbox.

Plus, with multichannel tools like lemlist you can easily integrate cold call steps by leaving your script so all you need to do is press the call button.

Step 4 - Cold email

The big benefit of cold emails in multichannel sequences is that they allow you to personalize them immensely but in an automated way.

So you’re getting things done really fast but also appealing to your leads. The other huge advantage is that you can share a lot of info without it being overwhelming.

You give context for why you are reaching out, show how you can help them in a way that positions yourself as a solution to the problem you know they have, and give an opportunity to keep the convo going.

And this also leaves room for the follow-up email, aka your partner in crime for getting your response rates up.

See how Clémence manages this for the message above:

Response rates are always higher even after a single follow-up, so don't sleep on these steps!

And to ensure your emails stay out of spam, there are a couple of limits and benchmarks to keep in mind:

1. No more than 100 - 200 emails per week
2. Open rate >50%
3. Reply rate >20%
4. Conversion rate >10%

But just as long as you've warmed your email, specifically targeted your lead list, hyper-personalized your message, and are focusing on providing value - you'll kill these benchmarks.

Step 5 - Manual task

This really ties the relationship-building aspect we talked about before. You can't automate relationship building, nor should you.

However, you could add a reminder in your campaign and lemlist will tell you it's time to leave a comment or engage on somebody's LinkedIn or Twitter post.

You could leave the idea for a comment or the comment itself in the "Notes" field, as well as the link to the post to speed things up.

Multichannel outreach sequence examples

We’ll go over a few of our own multichannel sequences to give you a real idea of how these look.

Here's what we’ll be looking at:

• Breakdown of a warm outreach sequence following engagement on LinkedIn
• Different types of multichannel sequences you can use

Starting with...

Warm sequence with Simon

This was a campaign Simon sent following a comment and get post on LinkedIn that shared our Cold Email Hub. The goal was twofold: share this valuable resource + start up some conversations.

Creating a post that brings leads to you

Before even starting your sequence you can engage with your audience to share value and get a conversation going. This makes your email outreach much more of a warm effort.

Take a look here at how Simon created a post about our cold email hub:

Outreach sequence

Then the next step is to keep your word by sending the resource to your post commenters, but you absolutely can (and should) use this as an opportunity to keep the convo going.

Check out how Simon tackled this for his post 👇

Let's break this down step by step so you can take away some actionable tips for your own campaigns...

Step 1: Email following LinkedIn comment

After people expressed interest in the hub by commenting on Simon’s post he scraped these profiles using Phantombuster. This way he could automatically download a CSV with the people that commented and add them right into this campaign.

Of course, he added some custom variables to personalize it a little bit and then sent it off.

Steps 2 - 4: Visit LinkedIn profile

After this, he went in with several LinkedIn profile visits back to back to spark interest and show his leads that he wanted to get to know more about them.

Step 5: Follow-up email

Then he followed up with this email that added more value based on the fact that they were interested in the cold email hub.

Take a peek:

This step was so great because he showed that he understood them, but without sounding sales-y.

He knew for a fact that they liked content about cold email templates, so he provided another resource that could be really helpful in combining channels for a multi-channel approach.

Step 6 & 7: Visit LinkedIn profile

Then he added more LinkedIn profile visits again just to emphasize the interest and grab their attention.

Step 8: LinkedIn message

He finished the sequence off with a LinkedIn message to ensure he covered all his bases, especially since the original communication was via LinkedIn.

And by including a question in this message he was able to open the conversation up:

Now let’s take a look behind the scenes of this sequence. As important as your steps are, it’s also essential to set up a proper delay so you aren’t bombarding leads but also aren’t giving them too much time so they forget about you.

In this case, he added a really short delay, usually one day, between steps and only a longer delay before the last one.  He did it this way because of the nature of his outreach: to provide a resource that the leads had already asked for.

And it worked really well for Simon!

So if Simon had only sent the emails he would only get a 9% reply rate, which still isn’t bad considering he was sending resources in hopes that leads would use them (AKA click).

But by adding that LinkedIn message and starting a conversation he was able to get a 40% response rate in total and get to know his leads better 🧨

Another example of the power of a multichannel strategy + follow-ups!

Other multichannel sequence variations

You already know all the steps, so here are a few variations you can use to combine outreach channels.

Variation 1: The conversation starter

LinkedIn profile visit → LinkedIn profile invite → cold email → visit LinkedIn profile → LinkedIn (voice) message → follow-up email → profile visit → LinkedIn message

This is the sequence Clémence used to spark a discussion with her leads, and it worked really well!

By starting with the LinkedIn steps you are automatically adding context to your sequence and showing you did your research.

Then, the email lets you get in detail about why you're reaching out, profile visits in between steps act as reminders, and ending with a LinkedIn message ensures you've covered all the bases while also positioning them as an opportunity to verify they got your previous emails.

Check out the results Clémence got with this one 👇

Variation 2: Networking for the win

LinkedIn profile visit → LinkedIn invite → cold email → LinkedIn profile visit → follow-up email → LinkedIn profile visit → LinkedIn (voice) message → LinkedIn profile visit → email → LinkedIn profile visit

A sequence like this works really well for networking because the numerous profile visits are good reminders, email steps let you add fun memes and videos, and sending a DM ensures you are reaching them where they like to communicate.

Follow-ups are especially important in sequences like this because most times people won't be ready to have a chat based on your first reach out. You've gotta prove you're dedicated to the cause to get a response!

I tried out this strategy for myself and got some cool coffee chats booked 👇

Variation 3: Full multichannel outbound

LinkedIn profile visit → invite → manual task (engagement on twitter) → email → visit  → call → follow-up → visit → LinkedIn (voice) message → email

In this case, the sequence combines all of the channels for the perfect outbound strategy.

By adding the social media steps, first, it puts your face in the minds of your leads, then going in with an email to add context, trying out a cold call to book a meeting, and immediately following with an email if they don't pick up, then another LinkedIn visit to act as a reminder and a final email to signal the end of the sequence.

The key with a campaign like this is to add a longer delay in between steps like the first email and cold call. This way you aren't overwhelming your leads or seeming too pushy.

Another way to make this sequence come together seamlessly is to mention previous steps in your communication or tease up to the next one.

For instance, if they don't pick up the call you can leave a voicemail stating that you'll be sending them an email and leave the subject line for them. Then in the LinkedIn message, you can mention your previous emails and verify that you have the right address.

Iryna was able to use this hyper-personalized strategy to convert some leads 👇

Variation 4: Land some podcasts

LinkedIn profile visit → cold email → LinkedIn profile invite w/message → LinkedIn profile visit → follow-up email → LinkedIn (voice) message

This campaign works perfectly for podcasts because you start with a heavier step to explain the reason for reaching out (the email), then go in with the message to really entice leads in case they haven't seen your email yet or have time to respond, and then repeat this process.

Check out Daria's results for our latest podcast campaign 👇

Key takeaways

Now you are ready to create your own multichannel outreach strategy to generate some qualified leads, create awesome relationships, and book more meetings!

Start firing up your LinkedIn, research your leads, get your cold emails prepped, and load up those call lists 🔥

Multichannel prospecting strategy FAQs

What's the difference between multichannel and omnichannel?

In marketing, multichannel means using different channels to contact clients, separately. And omnichannel means using multiple channels simultaneously. In prospecting, multichannel and omnichannel are synonymous.

What are the basics of multichannel?

Building real relationships with your audience through social platforms, positioning yourself as a thought leader to create credibility, and engaging with your audience on their terms through several channels.

Multichannel marketing vs. multichannel sales?

Marketing is communication (like sending a newsletter & writing blog posts), sales is prospecting through channels like email, calls and social media (like cold emails or LinkedIn DMs).

How do sales engagement and multichannel work together?

Multichannel is the strategy to use to connect all the channels together and sales engagement includes this, but adds the level of CRM and analysis to organize the data and make the process more efficient.

What tools should I use for multichannel?

A cold calling tool (like aircall), cold email tool (like lemlist), social networks (like LinkedIn), CRM (like Pipedrive), and a sales engagement platform to make them all work together & analyze the results.