LinkedIn Lead Gen cards are a great tool for driving leads. Reducing the barrier to adaption, they make the ‘ad to form to content’ journey seamless. And with lots of great integrations into marketing platforms such as Elqoua, Marketo, Pardot and Hubspot, they make dropping leads into SDR inboxes or nurture campaigns automated.

But, there is a problem.

Just getting personal emails through LinkedIn Lead Gen cards?

Perhaps the biggest benefit of LinkedIn Lead gen cards is also their downfall for B2Bs. Pulling from profile information, LI will autofill your form with the person’s first name, last name, country/region, job title, company name, and their email address. Whilst this is great and means your lead is just one click away, in most cases, it’ll leave you with a bunch of gmail and hotmail address. LI has profile space for a work email, but this is relatively recent and most users won’t have added this in yet. So, ultimately LI will default back to the email used to register the profile – a personal address.

While personal email addresses have their uses, if you’re B2B looking for business leads, that work email is golden, often being a key requirement of your lead scoring program.

So how do you get work emails through LinkedIn?

Ok, so our method is not foolproof, but we’ve seen an 85% increase in work email submissions through the campaigns we manage for our clients. The downside, a 10-15% increase in cost per form fill but, from our point of view, this is well worth it.

As well as the usual pre-fill field options offered by LinkedIn, you can also create custom fields. These you may have used for questions, extra information, or perhaps even dietary requirements for an event. In this case we use a custom field for the Work Email, and don’t use the autofill Work email field offered by LinkedIn. As you can see from the below, this presents to the user in exactly the same way, but it won’t auto-fill. Now, without the option of just pressing go, they need to manually add their email, and since we specify work email, and they are on LinkedIn, in a work mode, that’s what we normally get.

The slight hit in conversion comes from the fact we are asking viewers to do one more step, but this is insignificant in terms of the reward – better, warmer, more relevant data.

Need some help with your LinkedIn campaigns? Get in touch.