Outreach Templates & Playbooks

Outreach that gets replies is rarely better-written outreach. It is outreach with a reason to exist that the recipient can see.

Four things do most of the work. A real reason to connect, verifiable in seconds — a shared client, a post they wrote, a problem their team is visibly hiring against. A first message that asks for nothing, so accepting your request doesn't immediately cost them a meeting. Follow-ups that each carry something new instead of bumping the thread. And the medium: text is the default, so a voice note is the thing that doesn't sound like the default.

One correction worth making before you rewrite a single template. The personalised note does not do what most guides say it does. On the large published datasets from Expandi and Reachium, whether a request carries a note barely changes whether it gets accepted — but among the people who did accept, those who received a note reply at roughly double the rate. Personalisation isn't an acceptance tactic. It's a reply tactic, and it pays off one step later than you'd expect.

It also pays to check what a reply rate is counting before you compare yours to anyone's. Replies per message sent and replies per accepted connection are different denominators, and the same campaign looks very different depending on which one you quote.

The order we'd read these in

Start with the connection request that gets accepted — the only step gated by a stranger's judgement. It also has to fit inside LinkedIn's connection-note limit, so draft it against a LinkedIn character counter before you paste it in. Then the first message, where most campaigns quietly die; our guide to increasing your LinkedIn reply rate covers what to send once you're connected. Next, build the sequence: follow-up message examples for the wording, and outreach sequence templates for the spacing and the number of touches.

Once that's working, change the medium. Voice notes are still rare enough to stand out on format alone, and voice message automation is how you send them without recording each one on your phone. Finally, personalising at scale without getting flagged — the constraint everything above eventually runs into.