LinkedIn Outreach

The LinkedIn page mirrors Email in most ways — Reference URLs, AI prompts, Run Setup (views + criteria + field updates + schedule) all behave identically. There are LinkedIn-specific controls at the top.

Account status cards

Three read-only cards at the top of the LinkedIn page. Populated automatically from the connected LinkedIn plan.

• Account Type — Free / Premium Career / Premium Business / Sales Navigator / Recruiter Lite / Recruiter.
• Connection Requests — weekly cap. 100/week on Free, 150+ on Premium.
• InMail Credits — monthly InMail quota. Free accounts show "N/A".

If you upgrade your LinkedIn plan, reconnect on the Connections page to refresh these.

Rate controls

One input plus a fixed pacing policy:

• Hourly Limit — max connection requests per hour. Capped at 10 regardless of plan. If a run reaches this cap, the remaining sends simply wait and resume within the hour — nothing is lost.
• Send pacing (fixed) — Leadmeister spaces every connection request 7–12 minutes apart. This is deliberate and not configurable.

Why LinkedIn sends are slow — rate limiting explained

LinkedIn doesn't publish its automation limits and doesn't return errors when you cross them. It just quietly stops delivering invites from accounts that look automated — your requests appear sent, but they never reach the recipient. By the time you notice your acceptance rate has collapsed, the account may already be restricted.

Burst speed is the strongest automation signal: no human sends a connection request every ten seconds. So Leadmeister works the way a diligent human would:

• Each connection request goes out 7–12 minutes after the last, with the exact gap randomised so there's no robotic rhythm.
• Sends only happen inside your working hours. If your LinkedIn schedule is enabled, anything left over when the window closes waits and resumes the next working day — no 3am invites.
• Your hourly and weekly limits are enforced at send time. A lead that would breach the weekly cap is recorded as skipped with the reason shown in the run history, not silently dropped.

This means a LinkedIn run is intentionally slow: 20 connects take roughly 3 hours; 50 take a working day or more. The run screen shows the pacing, when the next send is expected, and an estimated finish time — a slow-moving LinkedIn run is healthy, not stuck.

If you see the run paused with a "cannot resend yet" notice instead, that's LinkedIn itself imposing an account-level cooldown — see the Errors chapter.

AI Prompts

Two separate prompts:

Connection Request Prompt

The short personalised note on invites. 200 characters max; LinkedIn truncates longer. Default prompt is tuned for warmth + specificity — keep overrides punchy.

InMail Prompt

Greyed out on Free / Premium Career accounts (no InMail credits). When available, longer-form than notes but still mobile-readable. Include subject line guidance.

Include a personalised note toggle

Above the Run Once button. When on (default), invites include an AI-written note. When off, invites are plain "Connect" with no note — useful if the weekly note quota is hit.

Run Setup

Identical to Email — see the Run Setup topic. Same four blocks: Target CRM Views, Criteria, Field Updates, Schedule.

LinkedIn-specific field update patterns:

• LinkedIn_Connection_Sent → Current date
• Pipeline_Stage → "Connection Sent"
• LinkedIn_Note_Sent → "Yes" (if you include a note)

Skipped leads

Check the Dashboard's Recent Runs for common skip reasons:

• Already connected — you're already LinkedIn-connected with the lead.
• No LinkedIn URL — the CRM lead has no LinkedIn URL field populated.
• Pending connection — LinkedIn already has a pending invite to this person.
• Rate limit — hit the hourly or weekly cap; resumes next period.

When the recipient accepts (auto-followup)

Leadmeister listens for invite acceptances from LinkedIn (via the Unipile integration we use under the hood). The moment someone accepts your connection request, two things happen automatically on the lead's CRM record:

1. The original "LinkedIn connection request — <name>" task is marked Completed, with Closed_Time stamped to the acceptance time. This pulls it out of your open-tasks list immediately so you only ever see invites still pending action.
2. Optional: extra CRM fields you've configured get updated. Configure these in the "Field updates when invite is accepted" section on the LinkedIn page (sits between the 2x2 grid and the Schedule block). Common patterns:

- Lead_Status → "LinkedIn Connected" - LinkedIn_Connected_Date → Current date - Pipeline_Stage → "Engaged"

Field updates here use the same builder + date offsets as everywhere else in the app — plain strings pass through; date pickers support "Current date" and "Current date ± N days".

The on-acceptance updates are independent of the on-send updates above them in the page. Many teams set the on-send bucket to Pipeline_Stage → "Outreach Sent" and the on-acceptance bucket to Pipeline_Stage → "Connected" — the second update overrides the first when the recipient accepts.

If you've never configured this section, you'll see two ghost suggestions ("Lead_Status → LinkedIn Connected" and "LinkedIn_Connected_Date → Current date"). Click either to add it; you can then edit or remove from the configurator above.

When the recipient replies to an outreach email (auto task close)

Same idea on the email side, but lighter — the moment a lead replies to one of the outreach emails Leadmeister sent on your behalf, the original "Follow up on email — <name>" task in Zoho is marked Completed.

You don't need to configure anything for this — it runs automatically every 30 minutes against your active outreach. (Note: requires the optional Microsoft 365 → Zoho Email Channel integration to be set up so replies actually land on the lead's Zoho timeline. See the Getting Started topic for the 3-minute setup.)

Out-of-office and auto-replies are ignored

Leadmeister filters obvious auto-responses so they don't close the task prematurely:

• From-address — anything from noreply, no-reply, postmaster, mailer-daemon, bounce style addresses is ignored.
• Subject patterns (case-insensitive, after stripping Re:/Fwd:) — "Out of office", "Automatic reply", "Auto-reply", "On leave", "On vacation", "Away from office", "I am away", "Maternity leave", "Undeliverable", "Delivery status notification", and a handful of similar variants.

If the lead is out of office until Friday and replies for real on Monday, the OOO is skipped and the task closes when the real reply lands.

Limitations: the filter is English-only today, and an OOO from a system that doesn't follow the standard openers (e.g. "Sarah is currently at a conference until Wednesday") will get treated as a real reply and close the task. You can always re-open the task manually in your CRM.

Optional on-reply field updates

The Email config page now has a parallel section: "Field updates when reply is received" (between the 2x2 grid and the Schedule block). Configure any CRM fields you want updated the moment a genuine reply lands — same builder + date offsets as everywhere else. Common patterns:

• Pipeline_Stage → "Replied"
• Last_Reply_Date → Current date
• Lead_Status → "Engaged — Replying"

Empty by default with two ghost suggestions you can click to add. The updates only fire after the auto-reply / OOO filter clears the message, so vacation responders don't trip your pipeline updates.