I see opportunity everywhere. It comes in the form of strategic partnerships, direct business for my creative digital marketing agency, helping others, new business ventures and collaborations, receiving referrals, simply sharing my story, connecting and networking. More often than not, the opportunity is just an email away.
That’s why I cold email everyone.
For instance, I recently had the pleasure to speak with one of my favorite rappers. The opportunity to chat with him came about from a cold email. It was simple, I guessed his email address (not too hard when finding his website and seeing the format through the contact form), confirmed it with Rapportive, used my personal story as the hook (I’ll show you an example below), and was very direct and concise with what I wanted to accomplish within my email (just a five-minute chat).

Here’s the actual email I used to contact Vin Diesel last night. Although, as a disclaimer, I haven’t heard back from him (yet).

Subject: How My Life As An Entrepreneur Shaped My Time In Prison

Vin,

Ten years ago, I made one of the biggest mistakes in my life, and got into a fight in a Las Vegas nightclub. It eventually landed me in state prison for two to five years.

As a big mental note: prison totally sucks (just ask Piper Kerman) -- I’d recommend not going if you have the chance (lol).

However, through my experience I have been able to show the world how my experience as an entrepreneur helped me survive and thrive while in prison (I write about my journey and experiences weekly as a contributor for Entrepreneur, and on my personal blog).

My ultimate goal is to help shine light on how other entrepreneurs can use their different entrepreneurial skills to overcome extravagant obstacles, and ultimately accomplish your dreams.

There are few people who have the experience to show the parallels in building startups and going to prison, but I’m here to bridge the gap for everyone. You’re welcome :)

I love and respect your business acumen + acting skills.

Any chance you'd be willing to chat with me for 5 minutes? I'd love to get some advice and share my story.

All my best,

Andrew

--

Andrew Medal

Resilient Entrepreneur & Digital Geek

International CSS Web Design Awards Nominee

Contributing Author: Entrepreneur Magazine

Published Author: Hacking the Valley

My rate is about one to four right now, which is pretty good in my opinion, seeing as how most of these people are high profile, busy and have never heard of me.

If you already practice this approach, or reading this is giving you inspiration to give it a shot, I have some tools I recommend using:
Rapportive. This tool is used to show you information about your contacts. If you have a person’s email address, and it is used in their LinkedIn profile (more often than not, if it’s their primary address), their LinkedIn profile will show up on a right sidebar. This tool is key to making sure you have the right address.
Bananatag. This tool is used to show you who has opened your emails. This tool helps you understand your open rate, and helps you fine tweak your message.
Google Drive. Use spreadsheets to track your work.
The process I follow is simple.

1. Tools

First, you’ll need the above tools.

2. The objective

After getting the tools in place, you need to determine what your overall objective is. Do you want new business, do you want to network, do you want to share your story, etc. Figure out the reason for connecting with people and write it down.

3. Target list

I typically create a list of people I’d be interested in speaking with, depending on what I want to accomplish. For instance, I’m in the process of rolling out a new web platform for CrossFit athletes, and have been looking for the right distribution partners. I created a list of my ideal partners.

4. Email message

Once you determine the reason for your outreach and figure out the right target list, it’s time to create your email message. Sometimes I test out different messages to see which yields a higher open rate. Whatever the case, make it engaging, keep it short and be respectful. Make sure to include one sentence as to what you want to accomplish. This is key.
My example above makes it very simple and clear: "Any chance you'd be willing to chat with me for five minutes?" The five-minute chat was my goal.

5. Guess emails 

This is where you’ll need to put on your creativity hat. Explore around that person’s social media profiles or websites. Try to find the format they use for their website through contact forms (for example, if the format for contact is contact@andrewmedal.com, and my target’s name is Andrew, I would try andrew@andrewmedal.com).
You’ll compose a new message and guess different variations of their potential email. The cool thing is that when you guess right, their LinkedIn profile will show up in the right sidebar thanks to Rapportive.

6. Track progress 

Using Banantag, you’ll be able to see how often your target list is opening emails. Use this data to tweak your message, optimize and try again with new targets.
Cold emailing has afforded me the most random, awesome opportuntities in my career and life. Cold emailing helped me get my first dream job at age 23, my second job at 25, and ultimately helped me secure founding status for a now very large company. I’ve spoken and met with the most random celebrities and business people. I’ve earned actual business for my company. Cold emailing actually afforded me the opportunity to contribute to Entrepreneur.
I incessantly cold email, and am pleasantly surprised at how effective it is. I just wonder why more people don’t do it as frequently? I’d love to hear stories if you have them in the comments section below.

Digital marketers—like you!—are all stars. You have your hands full with all the many ways to reach your audience. At any given time, you may need to be fluent in email, content and social media because your audience is cross-platform.
Few people make buying decisions anymore based on information from a single medium. So when marketers focus all their energy on one channel, they could be missing out on other opportunities and the natural rhythms of the buying cycle.
So how can you keep on top of channels as different as social media and email? And how can you do so in the most efficient way possible?
I’m excited to share are a number of ways to integrate social media and email marketing to help save you time and let you reach your audience where they are. In this post, I’ll show you six of my favorite tactics to get more out of each channel.

1. Upload your subscriber list to social networks.

There are a few key reasons you might want to do this:

1. Relationships. It puts a face and a name to your email subscribers.
2. Listening. Following them on social networks will give you a better idea of their needs and wants.
3. Community. If you are publishing interesting content on social networks, you might earn some new followers.

Uploading your subscribers to social networks differs by platform. Here’s how to do it on a few popular networks.

Uploading Subscriber Lists to Twitter

You can link your Twitter account to your Gmail or Yahoo! account to scan your personal contacts. This is a good place to start.
First, head to Twitter.com. On the left sidebar, look for a link that says Find people you know.

Here, you can connect your personal or work email account. Twitter will check those emails against their user database and show your contacts’ profiles. Now follow them!

This works especially well if you use Google Apps for Business since you can easily sync all of your professional contacts with your personal or business Twitter account.
To upload a CSV of contacts from your email service provider, the process is quite different.
First, export a CSV from your email provider.

Now, head to ads.twitter.com. Click “Tools” then “Audience Manager”.

Create a new audience list by first naming the audience, then choosing the type of data you’ll upload.

Next, upload your list.

It will take a few hours for Twitter to process the list. Once it’s ready, you can use Twitter ads to target this group. This is a great way to promote things like offers, new content, and downloads and can even be used for retargeting (more on that in a minute).

Uploading Subscriber Lists to LinkedIn

LinkedIn allows you to search contacts in your personal email or upload a list of contacts.
From the LinkedIn home page, hover over “Connections”, then click “Add Connections”.

Next, click “Any Email”.

Then upload your file.

LinkedIn will process the file, then show you a list of matches. You can connect with them all at once or pick and choose who you want to connect with. Once you are connected, you can invite these people to groups or to follow your company page.
(I’ve blurred names and faces since these are actual Vero blog subscribers.)

Uploading Subscriber Lists to Google+

From any page in Google+, hover over “Home” and select “People”.

Next, select “Connect services”.

Then, “Open Address Book”.

Upload your file and see who you know!

Uploading Subscriber Lists to Facebook

While you can import contact lists to your personal Facebook, I don’t recommend doing this. It’s common for people to use Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ for professional networking but that isn’t always true for Facebook.
Instead, you can create a “Custom Audience” and run targeted ads. You can use these ads to get more “Likes” on your Facebook page or use them as part of a retargeting campaign.
To start, navigate to the Ads Manager.

Then look for the “Audiences” link.

On the right side of the page, click the green button that says “Create Audience”, then “Custom Audience”.

Next, choose “Customer List”.

You need to choose how you plan to add these people. Uploading a CSV will work regardless of which email provider you use.

From here, Facebook will prompt you to create an ad. Facebook Ads are a huge separate topic, so I’m not diving deep on that here. Instead, I recommend checking out Noah Kagan’s post What I learned spending $2 Million on Facebook Ads.

2. Run retargeting ads on Facebook and Twitter for people who click your emails.

This is a super smart trick that hardly anyone takes advantage of. Blindly running ads is an easy way to spend a lot of money. But matching intent and interest with targeted ads is a good way to make a lot of money.
Here’s how retargeting works.
You install a tracking code on your website. This allows your ad platform to cookie visitors, then show them ads on other platforms (like Facebook).
If you create a targeted email campaign for your subscribers, then retarget only the ones that clicked through, you eliminate guesswork. Social networks are perfect platforms to run your ads because 1) it’s affordable and 2) these sites are heavily trafficked.

How to Retarget Email Subscribers on Facebook

Perfect Audience is a great tool for Facebook retargeting. To get started, you’ll need to create an account and install the tracking code on your website.
The first thing you need to do is queue up a smokin’ email. Let’s say you’re offering a free trial to people who downloaded an e-book. Segment your list in your email provider and get the content ready to send.
Now head back to Perfect Audience, hover over “Manage” and select “Retargeting Lists”.

On the right side of the page, click “Create new list”.

Once you name the list and decide how long to run your ad, you need to decide how to track people. I prefer to use a querystring since I use them to track email campaigns anyway. That way, when people end up on a landing page, you’ll know how they got there and Perfect Audience will know to cookie them.
To do this, head to Google’s URL Builder and define a campaign source (“freetrialoffer”), medium (email) and campaign name (retargeting). Append these parameters to the links in your email. (Read more about how to use parameters here.)

Next, you’ll need to create an ad. Hover over “Manage” and select “Create Ads”.

There’s an art and science to creating ads that goes beyond the scope of this post. Check out another Noah Kagan post How to Spend Your First $100 on Retargeting Ads to learn all about it.

How to Retarget Email Subscribers on Twitter

Retargeting on Twitter is a little trickier since it’s managed directly through Twitter.
From ads.twitter.com, create a new campaign.

Again, ad creation is a separate topic so I’m going to skip to the part about retargeting your email subscribers. Scroll down until you see “Add tailored audiences”.

Here you can create a custom audience by uploading your email list (as we covered earlier) or monitor behavior with a tracking code. The tracking code allows you to do real retargeting since you can specify that ads are only show to people who clicked through in an email.
Learn more about this on the Twitter blog.

3. Let social networks send emails for you.

File this strategy under “indirect email marketing”.
I got this idea from Scott Van, who wrote a detailed post on how he caught Copyblogger sneaking into his inbox.
Here’s Scott describing how it works:

When you subscribe to a LinkedIn group, unless you consciously decide to unsubscribe from email notifications, you will start regularly getting emails from LinkedIn triggered by activity inside the group.
Since LinkedIn is most likely tied to your primary email account, not some junk account set up to catch all those emails you subscribed to but didn’t really want to read, Copyblogger is regularly getting to the top of your inbox and they never once hit the send button on their email list.

The key to making this work is to run a great community. It’s not about self-promotion — rather it’s about helping people in your niche. If you’re able to do that and grow your group’s membership, you’ll end up in the inbox on a daily or weekly basis.
As an added bonus, the emails are really good. The “from” name is the same as the group name. They tease new content and use a nice blue button to call readers to action.

You can even send email announcements to your group members via LinkedIn.

4. Automate email outreach to drive more social shares.

What’s the secret to getting influential people and blogs to share your content?
Social proof.
I’m hesitant to reveal this strategy because it’s one of our best weapons here at Vero but we believe in transparency, so here we go.
When you publish new content, you have to seed it with shares before you can ask influential people to share it too. If you write something great, then email Guy Kawasaki asking him to share it five minutes later, he will see that it has no shares. The content has not been validated.
That’s where email comes in.
At Vero, we use email to get social sharing rolling. Once a post has a few hundred shares, I start reaching out to bigger sites and more influential people who can see that people love our content. This is the exact method I used on ourEmail Marketing Best Practices guide, which has now been shared more than 10,000 times.
The fastest and easiest way to do this is to use a tool called SendBloom which helps you automate emails from your personal Gmail account.
First, start a new campaign.

SendBloom will walk you through a few self-explanatory steps, then it’s time to create the email.
SendBloom will ask you how many times you want to email people. You can choose to email them once, or choose to email them once but send a follow-up if they don’t open your message.

Then you decide when to send a follow-up.

And then you can start creating the emails, which you can personalize with first names and a number of other variables. Here’s an example of a template I’ve used successfully in the past.

After that, just schedule your emails to be sent and you are done. Once you’ve got the ball rolling, you can use social proof to pitch bigger and bigger influencers.
If you don’t have a SendBloom account, you can also do this process manually. The idea with SendBloom is not to send marketing emails, but rather to speed up the process of sending personal emails.
Alternatively, you can include a call to action to share your content in a newsletter to achieve the desired effect.

5. Collect email addresses on Twitter and Facebook.

Did you know that people can signup for your email newsletter directly on Twitter? It’s really easy to setup and works very well.

So how can you get started for yourself? First, let’s take a look at what you’ll need:

• Something valuable to give away: No one is giving away their email address for free. Be prepared to offer a book, guide, webinar, course or something else valuable.
• A privacy policy: Because there is an exchange of sensitive contact data, you must show Twitter and Twitter users how that data will be handled.
• A credit card: Even if you don’t plan to run ads, Twitter requires a credit card to use this tool.

Head to ads.twitter.com. Click “Creatives” then “Cards”.

Next, click “Create Lead Generation card”.

Twitter will ask you to write a headline, description and call to action. You can also ad an image, which should be 800 pixels wide by 200 pixels tall. Use a tool like Canva to make the perfect image.
The idea is that people can signup for your newsletter without leaving Twitter, so your button call to action is key. Twitter will store leads that you can download later or you can use a POST URL to pass the data directly to your email provider.
For more details and an instructional video, check out our post How to Collect Emails Addresses on Twitter.

Using the Facebook Call to Action Button

You can do something similar on a Facebook page, although the setup is entirely different.
There are a few ways to go about this. First, you could use a Facebook app to embed a signup form on a tab on your page. This okay but it has to be hacked together. If you want to try it, Aaron Lee will walk you through it here.
I prefer to drive traffic to a page I have more control over. You can use Facebook Call to Action button to send people to a landing page.
Here’s how to set it up.
Head to your Facebook page and click the button that says “Create Call-to-Action”.

You can choose a number of different calls to action depending on your objective. For newsletters signups, choose “Sign Up”, then add a URL to your landing page.

That’s it! It’s the first thing your Facebook fans will see when they go to your page and you can even measure clicks using Facebook’s analytics.

6. Create an exclusive social group for your email subscribers.

This is a hugely underrated tactic. I learned it from Noah Kagan, who used it to create a 5,000+ member Facebook group. Here’s how he did it.
First, he created an email course called Email1k. He recruited a bunch of smart people to contribute lessons and made the content free to anyone who signed up.
When people sign up for the course, they are asked to email two friends about it. If they do, they get access to the private Facebook group.

The key to making this strategy work is to create an active, engaged group. The Email1k group is moderated to keep the user-generated content informative and useful. No spam and no self-promotion here. Their hard work has paid off. Posts often get 20 comments and sometimes 50 or more.
You could double-down on this strategy by creating an exclusive LinkedIn group to leverage strategy #3. That way, LinkedIn will send email digests to members, bringing your email to social to email strategy full circle.

Digital marketers—like you!—are all stars. You have your hands full with all the many ways to reach your audience. At any given time, you may need to be fluent in email, content and social media because your audience is cross-platform.
Few people make buying decisions anymore based on information from a single medium. So when marketers focus all their energy on one channel, they could be missing out on other opportunities and the natural rhythms of the buying cycle.
So how can you keep on top of channels as different as social media and email? And how can you do so in the most efficient way possible?
I’m excited to share are a number of ways to integrate social media and email marketing to help save you time and let you reach your audience where they are. In this post, I’ll show you six of my favorite tactics to get more out of each channel.

1. Upload your subscriber list to social networks.

There are a few key reasons you might want to do this:

1. Relationships. It puts a face and a name to your email subscribers.
2. Listening. Following them on social networks will give you a better idea of their needs and wants.
3. Community. If you are publishing interesting content on social networks, you might earn some new followers.

Uploading your subscribers to social networks differs by platform. Here’s how to do it on a few popular networks.

Uploading Subscriber Lists to Twitter

You can link your Twitter account to your Gmail or Yahoo! account to scan your personal contacts. This is a good place to start.
First, head to Twitter.com. On the left sidebar, look for a link that says Find people you know.

Here, you can connect your personal or work email account. Twitter will check those emails against their user database and show your contacts’ profiles. Now follow them!

This works especially well if you use Google Apps for Business since you can easily sync all of your professional contacts with your personal or business Twitter account.
To upload a CSV of contacts from your email service provider, the process is quite different.
First, export a CSV from your email provider.

Now, head to ads.twitter.com. Click “Tools” then “Audience Manager”.

Create a new audience list by first naming the audience, then choosing the type of data you’ll upload.

Next, upload your list.

It will take a few hours for Twitter to process the list. Once it’s ready, you can use Twitter ads to target this group. This is a great way to promote things like offers, new content, and downloads and can even be used for retargeting (more on that in a minute).

Uploading Subscriber Lists to LinkedIn

LinkedIn allows you to search contacts in your personal email or upload a list of contacts.
From the LinkedIn home page, hover over “Connections”, then click “Add Connections”.

Next, click “Any Email”.

Then upload your file.

LinkedIn will process the file, then show you a list of matches. You can connect with them all at once or pick and choose who you want to connect with. Once you are connected, you can invite these people to groups or to follow your company page.
(I’ve blurred names and faces since these are actual Vero blog subscribers.)

Uploading Subscriber Lists to Google+

From any page in Google+, hover over “Home” and select “People”.

Next, select “Connect services”.

Then, “Open Address Book”.

Upload your file and see who you know!

Uploading Subscriber Lists to Facebook

While you can import contact lists to your personal Facebook, I don’t recommend doing this. It’s common for people to use Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ for professional networking but that isn’t always true for Facebook.
Instead, you can create a “Custom Audience” and run targeted ads. You can use these ads to get more “Likes” on your Facebook page or use them as part of a retargeting campaign.
To start, navigate to the Ads Manager.

Then look for the “Audiences” link.

On the right side of the page, click the green button that says “Create Audience”, then “Custom Audience”.

Next, choose “Customer List”.

You need to choose how you plan to add these people. Uploading a CSV will work regardless of which email provider you use.

From here, Facebook will prompt you to create an ad. Facebook Ads are a huge separate topic, so I’m not diving deep on that here. Instead, I recommend checking out Noah Kagan’s post What I learned spending $2 Million on Facebook Ads.

2. Run retargeting ads on Facebook and Twitter for people who click your emails.

This is a super smart trick that hardly anyone takes advantage of. Blindly running ads is an easy way to spend a lot of money. But matching intent and interest with targeted ads is a good way to make a lot of money.
Here’s how retargeting works.
You install a tracking code on your website. This allows your ad platform to cookie visitors, then show them ads on other platforms (like Facebook).
If you create a targeted email campaign for your subscribers, then retarget only the ones that clicked through, you eliminate guesswork. Social networks are perfect platforms to run your ads because 1) it’s affordable and 2) these sites are heavily trafficked.

How to Retarget Email Subscribers on Facebook

Perfect Audience is a great tool for Facebook retargeting. To get started, you’ll need to create an account and install the tracking code on your website.
The first thing you need to do is queue up a smokin’ email. Let’s say you’re offering a free trial to people who downloaded an e-book. Segment your list in your email provider and get the content ready to send.
Now head back to Perfect Audience, hover over “Manage” and select “Retargeting Lists”.

On the right side of the page, click “Create new list”.

Once you name the list and decide how long to run your ad, you need to decide how to track people. I prefer to use a querystring since I use them to track email campaigns anyway. That way, when people end up on a landing page, you’ll know how they got there and Perfect Audience will know to cookie them.
To do this, head to Google’s URL Builder and define a campaign source (“freetrialoffer”), medium (email) and campaign name (retargeting). Append these parameters to the links in your email. (Read more about how to use parameters here.)

Next, you’ll need to create an ad. Hover over “Manage” and select “Create Ads”.

There’s an art and science to creating ads that goes beyond the scope of this post. Check out another Noah Kagan post How to Spend Your First $100 on Retargeting Ads to learn all about it.

How to Retarget Email Subscribers on Twitter

Retargeting on Twitter is a little trickier since it’s managed directly through Twitter.
From ads.twitter.com, create a new campaign.

Again, ad creation is a separate topic so I’m going to skip to the part about retargeting your email subscribers. Scroll down until you see “Add tailored audiences”.

Here you can create a custom audience by uploading your email list (as we covered earlier) or monitor behavior with a tracking code. The tracking code allows you to do real retargeting since you can specify that ads are only show to people who clicked through in an email.
Learn more about this on the Twitter blog.

3. Let social networks send emails for you.

File this strategy under “indirect email marketing”.
I got this idea from Scott Van, who wrote a detailed post on how he caught Copyblogger sneaking into his inbox.
Here’s Scott describing how it works:

When you subscribe to a LinkedIn group, unless you consciously decide to unsubscribe from email notifications, you will start regularly getting emails from LinkedIn triggered by activity inside the group.
Since LinkedIn is most likely tied to your primary email account, not some junk account set up to catch all those emails you subscribed to but didn’t really want to read, Copyblogger is regularly getting to the top of your inbox and they never once hit the send button on their email list.

The key to making this work is to run a great community. It’s not about self-promotion — rather it’s about helping people in your niche. If you’re able to do that and grow your group’s membership, you’ll end up in the inbox on a daily or weekly basis.
As an added bonus, the emails are really good. The “from” name is the same as the group name. They tease new content and use a nice blue button to call readers to action.

You can even send email announcements to your group members via LinkedIn.

4. Automate email outreach to drive more social shares.

What’s the secret to getting influential people and blogs to share your content?
Social proof.
I’m hesitant to reveal this strategy because it’s one of our best weapons here at Vero but we believe in transparency, so here we go.
When you publish new content, you have to seed it with shares before you can ask influential people to share it too. If you write something great, then email Guy Kawasaki asking him to share it five minutes later, he will see that it has no shares. The content has not been validated.
That’s where email comes in.
At Vero, we use email to get social sharing rolling. Once a post has a few hundred shares, I start reaching out to bigger sites and more influential people who can see that people love our content. This is the exact method I used on ourEmail Marketing Best Practices guide, which has now been shared more than 10,000 times.
The fastest and easiest way to do this is to use a tool called SendBloom which helps you automate emails from your personal Gmail account.
First, start a new campaign.

SendBloom will walk you through a few self-explanatory steps, then it’s time to create the email.
SendBloom will ask you how many times you want to email people. You can choose to email them once, or choose to email them once but send a follow-up if they don’t open your message.

Then you decide when to send a follow-up.

And then you can start creating the emails, which you can personalize with first names and a number of other variables. Here’s an example of a template I’ve used successfully in the past.

After that, just schedule your emails to be sent and you are done. Once you’ve got the ball rolling, you can use social proof to pitch bigger and bigger influencers.
If you don’t have a SendBloom account, you can also do this process manually. The idea with SendBloom is not to send marketing emails, but rather to speed up the process of sending personal emails.
Alternatively, you can include a call to action to share your content in a newsletter to achieve the desired effect.

5. Collect email addresses on Twitter and Facebook.

Did you know that people can signup for your email newsletter directly on Twitter? It’s really easy to setup and works very well.

So how can you get started for yourself? First, let’s take a look at what you’ll need:

• Something valuable to give away: No one is giving away their email address for free. Be prepared to offer a book, guide, webinar, course or something else valuable.
• A privacy policy: Because there is an exchange of sensitive contact data, you must show Twitter and Twitter users how that data will be handled.
• A credit card: Even if you don’t plan to run ads, Twitter requires a credit card to use this tool.

Head to ads.twitter.com. Click “Creatives” then “Cards”.

Next, click “Create Lead Generation card”.

Twitter will ask you to write a headline, description and call to action. You can also ad an image, which should be 800 pixels wide by 200 pixels tall. Use a tool like Canva to make the perfect image.
The idea is that people can signup for your newsletter without leaving Twitter, so your button call to action is key. Twitter will store leads that you can download later or you can use a POST URL to pass the data directly to your email provider.
For more details and an instructional video, check out our post How to Collect Emails Addresses on Twitter.

Using the Facebook Call to Action Button

You can do something similar on a Facebook page, although the setup is entirely different.
There are a few ways to go about this. First, you could use a Facebook app to embed a signup form on a tab on your page. This okay but it has to be hacked together. If you want to try it, Aaron Lee will walk you through it here.
I prefer to drive traffic to a page I have more control over. You can use Facebook Call to Action button to send people to a landing page.
Here’s how to set it up.
Head to your Facebook page and click the button that says “Create Call-to-Action”.

You can choose a number of different calls to action depending on your objective. For newsletters signups, choose “Sign Up”, then add a URL to your landing page.

That’s it! It’s the first thing your Facebook fans will see when they go to your page and you can even measure clicks using Facebook’s analytics.

6. Create an exclusive social group for your email subscribers.

This is a hugely underrated tactic. I learned it from Noah Kagan, who used it to create a 5,000+ member Facebook group. Here’s how he did it.
First, he created an email course called Email1k. He recruited a bunch of smart people to contribute lessons and made the content free to anyone who signed up.
When people sign up for the course, they are asked to email two friends about it. If they do, they get access to the private Facebook group.

The key to making this strategy work is to create an active, engaged group. The Email1k group is moderated to keep the user-generated content informative and useful. No spam and no self-promotion here. Their hard work has paid off. Posts often get 20 comments and sometimes 50 or more.
You could double-down on this strategy by creating an exclusive LinkedIn group to leverage strategy #3. That way, LinkedIn will send email digests to members, bringing your email to social to email strategy full circle.