LinkedIn prospecting with engagement signals

We acquire a new customer for $70.22 with cold outreach. That single number is much of the reason we're profitable and scaling as a team of three.

A big chunk of that efficiency comes from LinkedIn engagement signals. This is the article where I walk through exactly how we fold them into our LinkedIn prospecting to build the sharpest contact lists we possibly can.

It's the same logic social media platforms use to show you ads. When you scroll Instagram, TikTok, or LinkedIn, the ads you get aren't random. The platform watches what you engage with and then serves you more of the same. And you can borrow that exact rationale for B2B cold outreach: find the people engaging with a particular kind of content, then put the matching message in front of them.

To do that, we sort LinkedIn engagement into the four categories that perform best for us. Matching the message to the category is what lifts our reply rates ~5x, and it's a big reason our CAC is at $70.22.

1. Customer engagement

When a prospect engages with a post published by one of our customers, we drop that customer's name into the email and leave the rest of the copy untouched. That one change alone moves the needle.

If we happen to have a case study with that same customer, we lean in harder. Two lines on what we did for them, then a simple ask: want to see the material? It lands almost like a warm intro, because the prospect has already built up a bit of trust with the customer themselves before we show up.

Note that the only custom variable here is the first name. The signal has already guaranteed the email is hyper-relevant to whoever's reading it.

2. Competitor engagement

The instinct here is to name the competitor. Resist it. Naming them reads as defensive, a little desperate even. Trust me on this one.

What we do instead is build the email around the one specific advantage we hold over that competitor. Say they've been engaging with a competitor that makes users connect their LinkedIn account – we open with the fact that Jungler never asks for that. The competitor itself never appears in the email directly.

For this cold email copy, we added very light AI-personalization (prospect's core company use, "AI security" in this example) and a line referencing our advantage over the competitor – not connecting to their LinkedIn account.

3. Our own engagement

Being a mediocre LinkedIn GTM influencer myself, around 20% of my 10k monthly engagers match my ICP. Even though that's a real chunk of qualified people, I still don't cold-email them. They get a LinkedIn connection request instead.

And most of them accept – 81.75% on average. Once they do, they stay inside my content loop and keep getting nurtured for free. Dropping them into a cold inbox on top of that would be unnecessary.

4. Thought leader engagement

When someone engages with a thought leader who posts about the problem we solve, we change nothing about the message at all.

The default copy does the job, because the signal is already doing the work for us. That person is problem-aware or solution-aware before our email even lands in their inbox, and the reply rate climbs on its own.

One thing we never do: tell them we noticed them engage with a post. How would that ever make a person more inclined to write back or sign up?

How to build these contact lists in Jungler?

First, you pick whose engagement to track. Drop in any LinkedIn profile or company page URL, and Jungler keeps both their posts and everyone engaging with them auto-updated.

From there, Jungler enriches every engaged profile with company and personal data the moment we capture it. That lets you filter the list down to the people who actually match your ICP – by region, company size, job title, or whatever you run on – and leave the rest behind.

The last step is routing. Send your ICP-matched engagers straight into your sales tools through our native integrations, the API, or webhooks. Or export the list one-off from the app.

Find your signals

If you sell B2B and your ICP hangs out on LinkedIn, the odds are that LinkedIn engagement is one of the signals that ends up working for you as well as it does for us.

That's what we built Jungler to do. You can go from trial login to a filtered, ICP-ready contact list – built off LinkedIn engagement – in a few minutes, and take it straight into outreach.

Start with a free trial. The first 2,000 contacts are on us, every feature switched on.