How to Cold Email Someone Who Liked a LinkedIn Post

Ever noticed someone engaging with a LinkedIn post and thought they’d be a perfect prospect?

Prospecting can be tough. One reason is that you hardly know anyone you’re trying to sell to. 

This is why tapping into LinkedIn post interactions can be a gold mine! Use this information to find out your prospect’s needs or interests. 

And, emailing someone who showed interest in a post can be the start of a valuable professional relationship!

With Clay and PhantomBuster, you don’t need to manually make an effort to get to know your prospects.

In this guide, I’m going to show you how to scrape emails of LinkedIn post likers and write a compelling cold email. Let’s dive in!

How to Get the Emails of LinkedIn Post Likers

Before we begin, there are a few things that you need to set up.

• Have an active account in PhantomBuster. 
• Install the app on your Google chrome extension. This allows your ‘Phantoms’ to connect to your Linkedin account and automate on your behalf. If you need more information, you can refer to this tutorial.
• Have the URL of the LinkedIn post you’re interested in.

Once you have everything set, follow the steps below.

1) Extract LinkedIn Post Likers Using PhantomBuster

Log into your PhantomBuster account. Go to the Phantom store and look for the ‘LinkedIn Post Likers Export’ action.

To make the search a little easier for you, type the keyword ‘post’ on the search bar. On the left side menu, click ‘LinkedIn’ under ‘Categories.’

Once you find it, click the ‘Use this Phantom’ button. This will lead you to the set up page. 

Enter the title of your new Phantom.

Then, connect to your LinkedIn via a session cookie. Click save to proceed to the next step.

Paste the URL of the LinkedIn post on the ‘Your post URLs’ field. Note that you can also use Google sheet or CSV file to add multiple LinkedIn posts here. But we'll focus on a single post for this guide.

Under the behavior section, you have the option to:

• Remove duplicate profiles between different posts. This is useful if you've entered multiple LinkedIn posts on the previous step.
• Watcher mode to collect info from new post likers.

We won’t be touching them in this tutorial. 

PhantomBuster provides options to set up manual or automated launches for your Phantoms. For now, we’re going to set everything to manual.

Click 'save', then 'launch'.

Once done, you should see a list of data under the ‘Results’ tab.  Download the CSV file for further enrichment in Clay.

Note that we can also use PhantomBuster to scrape emails. However, I personally find Clay to be more cost-effective.

2) Enrich LinkedIn Profiles on Clay

Let’s now enrich the data we’ve collected on Clay.

Start with a blank table. Import the CSV file containing the LinkedIn profiles of your prospects.

Tip: Instead of importing a CSV file, an alternative way is to connect your PhantomBuster account via an API key. Check our separate tutorial about Pulling Data from PhantomBuster Using Clay to learn how.

At this point, you should have all the basic info of your prospects, such as the LinkedIn profile, name, job, and post URL. 

The next thing you’ll need to do is enrich the LinkedIn profiles to get email addresses.

On the right most column, click ‘Add Enrichment.’ Look for ‘Enrich Person from LinkedIn Profile’ and click to open. 

On the settings window, you’ll have a few options to set up your input. 

We’ll not use the ‘LinkedIn Profile’ as input because we don’t have the actual LinkedIn profiles of our prospects. If you check again the table produced by Phantom, you’ll notice the extra characters on the LinkedIn URLs. These are VM IDs and they’re automatically added on scraped URLs. 

For this reason, we’ll be using the ‘LinkedIn Sales Navigator or Recruiter Profile’ to set our input. 

Click the drop down and choose ‘profileLink.’ Then, click ‘Continue to Add Fields’ to proceed.

Next, select the data you would like to add as a column to your table. Here, we’ll choose the company name and company domain under the ‘latest experience’ section. We’ll need this information later to scrape the work emails of our prospects. 

Once you’re done, click save and run.

3) Add a Column for the Full Name

To scrape emails, we’ll need the following information:

• Full name
• Company Name
• Company Domain

Notice that on our table, the first and last names are placed in separate columns. So, we’ll need to combine them and add a new column for the full name.

To do that, right-click the column on your table and select ‘formula.’

Enter the following formula. You should be able to preview the output on the table. Then, click the ‘Output is correct. Save formula.’ button.

You should now see a new column with the prospect’s full name. Notice that I’ve changed the column name to ‘Full Name’ for easier access later on.

4) Scrape Work Emails Using the Company Domains

Once again, let’s enrich our table. 

On the pop-up window, navigate to the ‘Waterfall’ tab and click ‘Work Email.’

In the settings window, we’re going to use three apps to scrape emails - Clay Enrichments, Datagma, and Hunter. Clay is our main source and the rest are just back ups in case our first app fails.

Next, we’ll need to input the contact’s full name, company name, and company domain, as shown below.

Note that Debounce is our default email validation provider. Feel free to add more apps on the drop down menu.

Once everything is set, click save and run. Your table should now look like this.

Note: Clay may not be able to fetch all emails of our prospects, and this is normal. Go ahead and clean your list before proceeding to the next steps.

5) Use Clay’s AI Writer to Generate Personalized Email

Now you have all the details, the next step is to craft a killer cold email. We’ll be using Clay’s AI writer. But we’ll make it personalized by adding a bit of details about the LinkedIn post they liked.

We’ve actually created a separate tutorial about how to write personalized cold email using Clay. You might want to check this out to learn more.

For now, let’s try to enrich our data by using chatGPT.

Enter a prompt on the provided field. 

Tips when writing a prompt:

• Be specific about what you want to happen.. 
• Specify your inputs. It could be the contact’s name, posts, or email.
• Describe the output that you want. For example, you can tell AI to make the email casual and friendly. You can also be specific about the word count. 

In this example, I’ve written the following prompt (feel free to edit this to meet your needs):

Assume you are a sales professional. Your job is to start sales conversations with potential customers as a representative of the XYZ company. You speak in a professional tone and manner with the experience of a 20 year veteran in the business field. 

Write messages that are under 100 words to potential customers. Try to reach out to your prospects by mentioning the LinkedIn post they liked. Offer what services you can offer in relation to the LinkedIn post. Mention something that you noticed about their company. Don't make it too complimentary. 

Bridge what you noticed about their company with a question that makes them think thoughtfully about the problem we can solve and if they have that problem, why should they care about whatever your intention is. Add a soft call to action. 

The client's name is this: /firstName

The LinkedIn post is this: /postURL

Once you’re satisfied, click save and run. On a new column, you should be able to see the generated cold email.

For this example, here’s my result:

Hi Caner, 

I saw you liked a post on LinkedIn about scalability challenges. 

Do you also experience these hitches when expanding your operations? Our firm helped tech start-up, iGrow, streamline its expansion - facilitating an incredible 45% growth in revenue within a year. This efficiency could boost your bottom line significantly. iGrow's CEO has publicly commended our input. 

Would you be interested in exploring how we could devise a tailored solution to accelerate your growth journey?

What’s Next?

In this tutorial, you’ve just learned how to turn LinkedIn post likers into potential prospects. We’ve also shown you how to use PhantomBuster and Clay to scrape emails and write a killer message.

So if you work in sales and don’t already use these tools, then you are missing a huge opportunity!

Hopefully, this article will help you start generating high quality leads. If you have any questions, please let me know in the comments!