Message to 1st connections – Linked Helper

This action is used to send messages to 1st connections. It can be useful for both sellers and recruiters who want to message their existing network.

It is one of Linked Helper's actions that can be added to your workflow.

You can switch between 4 (or 5 depending on whether there is 'Invite 2nd and 3rd contacts' or another 'Message to 1st connections' actions above current action) tabs to adjust the settings:

General tab
Message tab
Tags tab
Delay settings tab
Send replied to Zapier | Webhook [PRO license] tab
Advanced settings tab

General tab

In the General tab, it is possible to:

postpone action execution via the 'Start at' option;
switch on reply detection: when Reject if a contact replied after # setting is enabled, Linked Helper takes the date of sent message/invitation from the above action in the current campaign and searches for any reply sent after the date the message above was sent. This option is available only if there is 'Invite 2nd and 3rd level contacts or another 'Message to 1st connections' actions above current action. Important: this functionality cannot detect replies that were sent as InMails.
switch on rejecting already messaged profiles: when Reject if you messaged a contact after # setting is enabled, Linked Helper won't message those who were already messaged by you after the previous message sent by Linked Helper 2.
switch on rejecting already messaged profiles: when Reject if you or LH messaged a contact after connection date: setting is enabled, Linked Helper won't message those who were already messaged by you or Linked Helper after the connection date.

Please note:

the messaging history analyzer works only for 1st level connections in LinkedIn and Sales Navigator (analyzer for Recruiter is under development), and for your 2nd and 3rd-degree connections in case a message was sent via group or event;
the messaging history analyzer checks for replies or sent messages to the profile only in one platform - usually it's the one where the previous message was sent - it does not check messaging history in several platforms; in case no message was sent previously via the given campaign, Linked Helper checks messaging history only in the platform through which current messages will be sent;
Linked Helper won't send a message if the last message is exactly the same as the one you're about to send. This is done to avoid occasional duplicates;
when a profile is being processed by "Message to 1st connections", message history is checked only once.

When both settings are enabled, there will be two extra sub-lists added below the action:

Replied - contacts who replied to the previous message of the campaign.
Messaged - contacts who received any message from you (except for invitation note) no matter how the message was sent, manually or from LH, or via what campaign.

Message tab

In the Message tab, you can set up a subject and a message template itself (including images that can be sent to the profiles):

Tags tab

In the Tags tab, where you can set up automated tags for successfully processed profiles: how to use tags in Linked Helper;

Delay settings tab

In the Delay settings tab you can:

set up Bunch size - the number of profiles that will be processed in one go before Action goes to sleep, and Timeout between bunches - the time during which the Action will be sleeping before proceeding with the next bunch of profiles. You can limit an action to 50 profiles per day;
choose the text input method for your invitation message. Linked Helper 2 offers three options for that. Random method - Linked Helper 2 will choose the input method itself; Insert - your message will be pasted into the text field; Type - your message will be typed as you'd type it manually yourself using the keyboard;
set up how fast this action will work by switching between the FAST and SAFE timeouts, as well as tweaking the pauses between steps manually: please check the general article about working hours and limits:

Send replied to Webhook

This option appears only if the option 'Reject if a contact replied after # Message to 1st connections ' is set to YES. It allows you to send to Zapier only those profiles, who replied anything to the previous message of your campaign (including the reply itself):

Sub-lists section with processed profiles sorted to different sub-lists:

All profiles from the 'Successful' and 'Skipped' sub-lists are moved to the next action queue if there is one.

You can see several filters there. The Reject if any of previous messages sent by filter is used to indicate the sender of the content that needs to be found in the messaging history.

If you choose the You (1) option, it means that Linked Helper 2 needs to find your message that contains a certain phrase or expression.
If you choose the Contact (2) option, then it means that LH 2 needs to find a recipient's message that contains a certain phrase or expression.
If you choose the Any of you (3) option, then LH 2 needs to find a certain phrase or expression in the messages both from you and your recipients.

Contains filter is used for inserting the needed phrase or expression that needs to be found in the message history. Let's see how this filter works in more detail:

At least one phrase [OR]

When this option is enabled, Linked Helper searches for any of the phrases in the whole messaging history (no matter what switch is chosen: You/Contact/Any of you).

If you want to skip sending a message to those who have already received your message containing one phrase "how are you", you need to set the action up as it is shown in the screenshot below:

If you want to skip sending a message to those who have already received a message from you containing any of the two (or any of the X) phrases, in the example below that will be either "Goodbye" or "Have a nice day", you need to set the action up as it is shown in the screenshot below:

You need to click the Add phrase button to add an additional field for inserting another phrase.

All phrases [AND]

When this option is enabled, Linked Helper searches the whole messaging history BUT triggers only when all the phrases are within one message. For example, if you use All phrases [AND] filter and insert one phrase that was sent by you and another phrase was sent by your recipient, then your message won't be skipped, it will be sent anyway even if you have the "Any of you" switch enabled because the "All phrases [AND]" checks for phrases only in one message (either sent by you or your recipient, according to your settings).

If you want to skip sending a message to contacts who have already sent you a message containing several phrases in one of their messages like "bye" and "thank you", then you need to set the action up as it is shown in the screenshot below:

You need to click the Add phrase button to add an additional field for inserting another phrase.

Regular expression

A regular expression (shortened as regex or regexp; also referred to as rational expression) is a sequence of characters that specifies a search pattern. Usually, such patterns are used by string-searching algorithms for "find" or "find and replace" operations on strings, or for input validation. In our case, they can be used to find certain patterns in messaging history and reject profiles if a pattern is found.

Linked Helper 2 uses regex in accordance with Javascript ES6 regular expressions. You can learn more about regular expressions on Wikipedia and this page.

A use case can be as follows: let's imagine I have 3 000 1st-degree connections and some of them do not have their email address in the Contact section of their LinkedIn page. Prior to using Linked Helper 2, I created a list of such profiles and requested emails from them manually but didn't have time to check who sent me an email and who didn't. Now I'd like to get a list of those who sent me an email address and send a reminder to those who didn't. So now I need to create a campaign for sending a reminder message, upload the list into Linked Helper and adjust the Advanced settings of the message with a regular expression in such a way so that reminder will not be sent to those from whom I received any email address.

Here is the regex I need to use (it was taken from this answer in Stackoverflow, but you may consider finding a more or a less complex example that suits your needs since the one below, for example, do not recognize email in national characters like иван.сергеев@пример.рф or 用户@例子.广告):

(?:[a-z0-9!#$%&'*+/=?^_`{|}~-]+(?:\.[a-z0-9!#$%&'*+/=?^_`{|}~-]+)*|"(?:[\x01-\x08\x0b\x0c\x0e-\x1f\x21\x23-\x5b\x5d-\x7f]|\\[\x01-\x09\x0b\x0c\x0e-\x7f])*")@(?:(?:[a-z0-9](?:[a-z0-9-]*[a-z0-9])?\.)+[a-z0-9](?:[a-z0-9-]*[a-z0-9])?|\[(?:(?:(2(5[0-5]|[0-4][0-9])|1[0-9][0-9]|[1-9]?[0-9]))\.){3}(?:(2(5[0-5]|[0-4][0-9])|1[0-9][0-9]|[1-9]?[0-9])|[a-z0-9-]*[a-z0-9]:(?:[\x01-\x08\x0b\x0c\x0e-\x1f\x21-\x5a\x53-\x7f]|\\[\x01-\x09\x0b\x0c\x0e-\x7f])+)\])

With this setting and regular expression, Linked Helper will search for email addresses and if you receive one from the profile, Linked Helper won't send a reminder to such person:

Another use case is when you want to skip profiles to whom you already sent a certain phrase manually, but you're not quite sure what exact phrase you used. Let's take the same example with email addresses mentioned above: I have a list of 1st-degree connections without emails in their contact details, but I do not know to whom you already sent a request for email and to whom didn't. Moreover, I am not sure the phrase was always the same, there could have been variations, e.g.:

Please, send me your personal email address.
Send your work email and I will then send you the offer.
Once you send me your work email address, I will reply with the offer there.
After you send your personal email address, you will receive my offer via email.
I would like you to send a work email address in reply to this message.

Now I'd like to send a request for the email to those who did not receive it. In such a case, I can easily reject profiles who receive any of the message above (its certain part, to be more exact), with this regular expression:

send (me\s)*(your|a) (personal|work) email

You can easily check your regex and just it if needed using this or similar web services:

As you can guess, with this setting enabled, Linked Helper will not send a message if it finds any of the phrases that contains an expression that matches the pattern of regex.

Thank you very much for your attention. We hope that these tips helped you! Here are some more useful articles from our blog:

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General tab

Message tab

Tags tab

Delay settings tab

Send replied to Webhook

Advanced settings tab

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