Although LinkedIn stops showing the number of connections after you hit 500, growing your network well above that number is pretty standard among avid networkers.
Our recent LinkedIn poll shows that 65% of our followers have more than 1,000 connections, with 13% of them having more than 10,000. These numbers certainly allow you to do some serious networking magic.
But before you start expanding your LinkedIn network, keep in mind that as the number of connections grows, so does the amount of messages.
At a first glance, getting a lot of messages might seem like a great thing (and it can be). We all love the thrill of seeing a new message notification. However, once the number of messages becomes too high, it’s easy to miss the important ones.
Do you ever get overwhelmed by the number of unread messages and simply want to mark them all as read?
Do you neglect important conversations because they keep getting pushed down by a constant flow of new messages?
Then you need to better organize your LinkedIn inbox. Luckily, we have some tips and tricks that can help.
Benefits of Organizing Your LinkedIn inbox
Ideally, you want to be left with 0 unread messages once you’re done with LinkedIn for the day. This goal isn’t realistic for everyone, especially if you receive 20+ messages daily.
However, trying to reach this goal can help you become more organized and keep your inbox more manageable.
Once you have your LinkedIn inbox organization under control you can:
- prioritize important messages,
- timely read messages and respond to them quicker, rather than miss them,
- spend less time sorting through messages and more time doing valuable networking,
- build stronger relationships and more engagement,
- maintain a positive, professional reputation.
The Problem With LinkedIn’s Inbox
Although LinkedIn offers amazing networking opportunities, it’s not without its flaws.
First of all, the LinkedIn interface is known to be cluttered. From new messages to new connection requests, notifications can easily overwhelm even the most organized users. With red alerts all around, everything seems urgent — and when everything seems urgent, it’s difficult to establish what really is.
Additionally, someone can pay to message your main inbox, pushing the messages you really care about out of sight (although some EU users won’t have to worry about this anymore as LinkedIn is stopping the display of Message and Conversations Ads to EU members to limit the use of third-party personal data).
To understand the problem with LinkedIn even better, let’s see how many messages users get and how that affects their inbox management.
We obviously love LinkedIn polls and we always like to hear from our followers, so we asked them how many messages they receive daily. Most responders (71%) stated they receive up to 10 messages a day.
For active users who get 5-10 messages a day, it can be challenging to keep a well-organized inbox. On top of that, LinkedIn will send you nudges for the messages you didn’t manage to read in a while.
Our poll also shows that 9% of our responders receive between 11 and 20 messages daily, making it even more difficult to stay on top of their inboxes.
Not to mention that highly active users who receive over 20 messages a day will not only struggle with the above-mentioned issues on a larger scale but will also receive a lot more spam, making it almost impossible to distinguish what’s important and what’s not.
Although only 7% of our poll respondents stated they receive 21+ messages, those (un)lucky few need some serious inbox management tricks up their sleeves in order to stay organized.
How to Better Organize Your LinkedIn Inbox
Now, you might be wondering what those tricks are. Here are some of the things you can do to better organize your LinkedIn inbox:
- Delete or archive messages — You probably won’t need to go back to most of the conversations from your inbox ever again. Especially if you receive a lot of messages daily, chances are many of them are irrelevant or spam, so don’t be afraid to delete them. However, if you think you might need them in the future, you can archive them instead. That way, you’ll make way for the important stuff in your inbox and still be able to find archived messages if needed.
- Use message filters — Linkedin message filters can help you find messages much quicker. Simply open your LinkedIn inbox and click on the icon on the right of the search bar. You will be able to select archived messages, messages from your connections, unread messages, InMail, and messages marked as spam.
- Manage your notifications settings — It’s great to have multiple options, but you probably don’t need to be notified of every single thing that happens on LinkedIn. If you prefer to deal with your messages on your computer, turn off message notifications on your phone. If you know you have a lot of unread messages, turn off the message nudges. That way, you’ll be able to deal with your inbox at your own pace without notification pressure.
- Use productivity tools — If all of these options still don’t cut it for you, fear not. Productivity tools like LeadDelta can help. Keep reading to find out how.
How LeadDelta Helps You Manage Your LinkedIn Inbox
LeadDelta is a LinkedIn connections manager that enables you to organize your network by offering a more efficient view of your connections, allowing you to add custom tags and notes, filter, sort, and search connections, remove connections in bulk, and export your connections.
LeadDelta also offers a simplified version of LinkedIn inbox for your first-degree connections, without ads and distracting notifications, with more space to write.
This means that you can both organize your network and access your LinkedIn inbox all in one place, within your LeadDelta CRM.
To access your LinkedIn inbox within LeadDelta, simply open the LeadDelta extension in your browser (if you want to learn how to access LeadDelta even faster, read this article!), then click on the Inbox option in the top menu bar. This will open your Inbox.
Now, let’s check out the LeadDelta Inbox features, and how they can help you:
Pinned, Stared, and Tagged Messages
For anyone who actively uses LinkedIn and has over 2,000 connections, features such as pinning the most accessed messages can significantly boost productivity.
The ability to pin the messages completely changes the way you use your inbox. For all those important conversations that keep getting pushed down by tens of new messages, you get in the meantime, having an easier way to find them is essential.
With LeadDelta, you can easily pin top-priority conversations or those that you frequently get back to so they’re always at the top of your list.
And every time you get a new message from your pinned conversation it will get pushed to the top of the inbox, so the messages are ranked by priority.
To pin a conversation within LeadDelta Inbox, simply go to your Inbox, select the conversations you want to pin using the checkboxes on the left, and click the Pin button at the top of your conversation list. To unpin, open the conversation and click on the Unpin button in the upper right corner of the conversation window, right next to Delete.
But that’s not it! We’ve also prepared a super easy way of tagging your inbox conversations so that you actually tag the connection that is a part of the conversation + you can filter them out by using our well-known filters. This way you can easily decide which ones you want to prioritize.
Besides tagging and pinning connections, you can also Star conversations as your favorites and later use the inbox filters to search for them.
View Contact Data With The Sidebar
Having to switch back and forth between messaging someone and checking information about them can be daunting.
Thankfully with the LeadDelta sidebar, you can do this without leaving your inbox.
While in your inbox click on a conversation and look at the top right where you will see the sidebar button (Lef-Pointing Arrow <<). Click on the button and the sidebar will open.
In the sidebar window, you can see the most important information about the person, like their headline, the industry they work in, their email, company, when you connected, the number of followers, and all the tags and notes you have on them (You can also edit them from the sidebar).
With the sidebar, you can have all of the information while chatting with the person which can save you a lot of time and make the conversation smoother. You can also take notes on the conversation without having to leave the inbox which will improve your workflow.
Separate Sales Navigator Inbox
There are many benefits of using LinkedIn Sales Navigator one of which is the Sales Inbox where you can track your InMails and talk with your prospects.
But the Sales Navigator Inbox doesn’t sync with the LinkedIn Inbox, so you are forced to have conversations on 2 separate platforms which can get annoying.
Well, with LeadDelta’s Inbox, you can have all of your Sales Navigator and LinkedIn conversations in one Unified Inbox. This way, you won’t need to navigate through different apps, and you can still sort those two channels within the tabs, so you always know where your messages are coming from.
And the best part is, you can use all other LeadDelta Inbox features such as Tags, Pins, Notes… with your Sales Navigator conversations.
Inbox Filters
Sometimes, you are looking for a specific conversation you want to go back to, but your inbox is filled with 100s of conversations.
Here’s where the Inbox Filters come into play. On the upper right corner of the inbox click on the “Filters” button and the filter bar will open (see picture below).
With the Inbox filters, you can list every conversation that is still unread and answer every unopened message easily.
And those tags that you were setting up for hours, you can make use of them and pull up every conversation with a specific tag or tags. Want to get back to your leads? Filter them by the tag and restart the conversation.
You are also able to filter your inbox for stared and pined conversations, even open up all the archived conversations you have.
Templates
Sometimes you have predefined messages that you use all the time, or you crafted a good-looking message that you want to save for later use.
You can use the “Template” button and pull up all the message templates you saved from the Templates tab, or take the message you are currently writing and turn it into a template with a click of a button.
Other Notable Features
When you open up the LeadDelta Inbox for the first time all of your LinkedIn conversations will be loaded and you will be able to scroll through them distraction-free and send new messages to people you haven’t messaged yet.
On top of your Inbox, you will see the search bar which can search through your conversations, not only by the contact’s name but also by the content of the conversation.
You will also notice the tic-box beside the contact’s picture which allows you to select single or multiple conversations. After selecting the desired conversations you can mark them as unread if you want to get back to them, or as read.
The last 2 features allow you to archive conversations if you don’t want to see them in your inbox, but you might want to go back to them and restore them. You will be able to find them with the archive filter.
But if you want the conversation to disappear from your inbox forever, you can delete it. Just be careful; once you delete a conversation, it vanishes for good.
Overall, LeadDelta provides you with all the essential LinkedIn inbox features with fewer distractions. It allows you to focus on what really matters and quickly find important conversations.
Over to you!
LinkedIn inbox management isn’t always smooth sailing. With a growing network, it’s easy to get overwhelmed and lose track of important messages.
However, staying on top of your inbox is not only vital for staying organized but also for keeping your professional reputation positive.
By using LeadDelta, you can better organize your LinkedIn inbox and stay on top of your networking.
Stay tuned for more updates and new Inbox features!
