How to Grow a Community: I Went From 0 to 500+ Members in Under a Week (93% Valid Emails, 10+% CTR)

Zero to 500+ members in under a week. No launch party, no paid ads, no Product Hunt day. I grew the Outbound Hub community with cold emails sent to people whose LinkedIn profiles I had already viewed. 93% of the emails I sent were deliverable. More than 10% of the people who got them clicked.

In this post, I’ll walk you through the exact 4-step framework I used: how I sourced the list in Sales Navigator, how I enriched it, and the three segmented campaigns I wrote (including the subject lines and the reasons each email worked).

First, the honest part. Cold outreach is one way to grow a community, not the only way. Events bring people together fast. Content pulls in the right crowd over months. Referral loops work once you already have members worth talking about. A Slack or Discord server gives everyone a place to stay. All of these are legitimate, and most strong communities run several at once. They share one problem, though: they need people in the room before anything compounds. Outreach is how you get the first few hundred people in the room.

It’s also how you get the right ones. According to Common Room data cited by CMO Alliance, 72% of community-led deals close within 90 days, compared with 42% of marketing-led deals. Proactive, relationship-first outreach beats passive waiting, and the pipeline reflects it.

So let’s get into the mechanics.

4-step outreach framework to growing your online community

1. Find your leads in Sales Navigator

One of the simplest ways to find a relevant target audience is to scrape the people whose LinkedIn profile you visited.

I was already researching my Ideal Customer Profile on LinkedIn every day. Those profiles weren’t random. Every person I’d viewed was someone I’d already judged to be a fit, which made them strong candidates for the community.

Targeting these people warms up your outreach before you send anything. LinkedIn notifies users about who viewed their profile. So when someone sees your name in that list and gets a message from you a few days later, you’re already familiar.

Here’s how you can scrape leads whose LinkedIn profile you visited in Sales Navigator:

1. 1.

   Sign into your Sales Navigator LinkedIn account or start a 14-day free trial

2. 2.

   Once you’re logged in, navigate to the Lead section

3. 3.

   Add a filter in the section “People you interacted with” → “Viewed profile”

P.S. You can go the other way around and target people who visited your profile. Those individuals have shown interest already, which usually means a higher conversion rate.

I did this filtering by hand. You don’t have to. Today, Intent Signal Agents can auto-detect this kind of LinkedIn engagement without manual Sales Navigator filtering.

2. Scrape your leads with lemlist Chrome extension

Once you have a list of leads whose profile you visited in Sales Navigator, use the lemlist Chrome extension to export them straight into your multichannel campaigns.

This is where I saved hours of copy-pasting and spent that time on revenue work instead.

Here’s how to scrape your leads from Sales Navigator with the lemlist Chrome extension.

If you don’t have the extension yet:

1. 1.

   Get the extension from the Google Chrome Store

2. 2.

   Make sure you’re logged into your lemlist and LinkedIn accounts. If you don’t have a lemlist account yet, you can start a 14-day free trial here

3. 3.

   Access the extension on the right-hand side of your app

When you’re on an individual lead’s profile, click the extension to:

• •

  get the lead’s verified email and phone number

• •

  push that lead to your outreach campaign or sync it directly to your CRM

Find or edit your lead’s information before importing them to a campaign, all from one spot.

Add your lead to an existing campaign or create a new one. No more back and forth between the lemlist app and the extension.

3. Find your leads’ verified data with lemlist’s Email Finder and Verifier

To find the right contacts without technical skills or hours of manual checking, use lemlist’s Email Finder and Verifier.

Thanks to the waterfall enrichment method, Email Finder and Verifier combines the best third-party data sources to give you 80%+ valid emails on average. It’s the equivalent of asking several providers for up-to-date lead information, without subscribing to several apps to do it.

On my list, enriching the leads this way returned 93% deliverable emails. That’s my result on a clean, LinkedIn-sourced list, not a number you should expect on every database you upload. Garbage in, garbage out still applies.

Once your new leads are imported into your lemlist campaign, select them in bulk (or one by one) and choose the “Verify email” option.

For each lead, the app will:

• •

  Clean the first name and last name

• •

  Extract and save relevant available information from the lead’s LinkedIn profile

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  Retain the best email found across multiple providers

• •

  If available, save additional information such as phone number, civility, job title, and other relevant details

P.S. If you’re exporting up to 300 leads, you can enrich them directly through the lemlist Chrome extension.

4. Create engaging outreach campaigns for different segments

To reach my freshly imported and enriched leads, I built 3 campaigns for 3 segments.

Different segments have different reasons to say yes. Writing one campaign for all of them means writing something vague enough to fit everyone, which lands with no one. Separate campaigns let you name the specific thing each group cares about.

It also protects you later. Segmented sending builds a cleaner base for future campaigns and keeps the same people from getting the same message twice.

I ran these as email-only sequences. You don’t have to stop there. With Multichannel Prospecting, each of these three segments can run as an email plus LinkedIn invite plus voice note sequence, so a lead who ignores your inbox message still hears from you somewhere they’re paying attention.

Here’s the full breakdown of the campaigns and segments.

Campaign #1 targeting super engagers

This campaign targeted people who had already engaged with another outbound community. These leads tend to drive a higher CTR, because they’ve proven their interest by showing up somewhere similar.

Step 1: Automatic email

Here’s why this email works:

• •

  the personalized icebreaker shows I did actual research on the prospect, which makes everything after it feel relevant

• •

  there’s a clear list of benefits for the recipient, followed by one straightforward CTA link

• •

  the “PS” line closes in a friendly tone, which lowers the cost of saying yes

• •

  the ask is small, so nobody has to think about it for more than four seconds

P.S. You’ll notice I used multiple senders for this campaign. That’s how you beat the sending limits set by email providers without risking spam placement. Check out this article on how you can do it too!

Step 2: Second automatic email after 3 days of no response to the initial email

Here’s why this email works:

• •

  the video catches attention faster than another wall of text in a crowded inbox

• •

  the thin context around the video makes it intriguing and pushes views, and the 38-second format repeats the benefits the lead may have missed in email one

Step 3: Third automatic email after 2 days of no response to the second email

No reply to your first two messages doesn’t mean no interest. People get busy, take time off, or lose your email under 40 others.

So send a third one. Only if it adds value.

Here’s why this email works:

• •

  I shared free resources that help leads even if they never join the community

• •

  I included social proof so they can see what’s achievable by taking the action

• •

  the funny image makes the email stand out and adds a personal touch

• •

  the CTA isn’t pushy and takes almost no effort, closer to something you’d send a colleague than a sales ask

Campaign #2 targeting lemlist users

lemlist’s ICP matches the ICP for the Outbound Hub community almost exactly. So inviting lemlist users whose profiles I’d visited was the obvious quick win.

I kept the same steps as the previous campaign and changed only the subject line and the content of the initial email in step 1.

Here’s why this email works:

• •

  it makes leads feel seen by naming their success and the contribution they could make

• •

  there’s a clear, segment-specific benefit, with a short list of advantages to prompt action

• •

  the PS element is casual, asking for a coffee chat instead of a formal meeting

• •

  the invite reads like it was sent to them, not to a list of 3,000 people

Campaign #3 targeting the rest of the qualified list

This campaign went to everyone else on the list: not lemlist users, no prior community engagement, still potentially great members.

Same steps as the previous two, with a new subject line and a new initial email in step 1.

Here’s why this email works:

• •

  the intro makes me familiar and shows I made the effort to look them up before writing

• •

  the benefit is broader than in the other campaigns but still gives a concrete reason to act, and the PS drops industry names that help the lead whether or not they join

The result?

• •

  10+% CTR (click-through rate; ratio of clicks on a specific link to the number of emails)

• •

  alongside other outbound and inbound efforts, the community went from 0 to 500+ members in less than a week

Final thoughts

A thriving online community doesn’t come from chance encounters or passive waiting.

Cold outreach is still one of the most effective ways to gather like-minded people.

Using personalized, genuine, and strategic cold outreach, you can find proactive community members → build the trust that keeps them active.

I built these three sequences manually, segment by segment. You can skip most of that work now. lemAgent can build this kind of segmented, multichannel sequence from a single prompt, then run it across email and LinkedIn from the same campaign.

The easiest way to follow these 4 steps is to create your lemlist account and let the platform handle the manual, repetitive parts. lemlist is rated 4.6/5 on G2 with 2,000+ reviews.

Start a 14-day free trial, no credit card required.

P.S. If you want to network with the sharpest outreach practitioners and apply their tips to sign more deals, join the Outbound Hub! No BS, no fluff, just genuine connections and collective growth.