Maxime BessonOctober 9, 20269 min read
5 ways not to waste InMail, from the product manager who built it
For months, one request kept coming back to me: "Let me send InMail from lemlist."
Our users already sent InMails, just not from lemlist. They had a campaign running in lemlist and a Sales Navigator tab open next to it. They sent InMails by hand, then tracked who got what on the side.
I understood the frustration. Half the sequence lived in one tool, and the other half lived in their head.
So we built InMail into lemlist campaigns. While building it, I spent more time thinking about how people could misuse it than about the send button.
A Sales Navigator Core seat gets 50 InMail credits a month. Premium Business gets 15. That is not a volume channel. Treat it like one and your credits are gone before the end of week one.
My own first InMail from lemlist got a reply in 11 minutes, and I'll show you what I wrote. By the end, you'll also know how I pick the few people worth an InMail, plus 5 setups you can copy into a campaign today.
A pending invite usually means missing context
Think about your own LinkedIn. You get invites from strangers every week and you ignore most of them. You didn't weigh each one. A bare invite from someone you don't know just gives you nothing to react to.
Your prospects do the same. Sometimes a pending invite is a real no, I won't pretend otherwise. The problem is you can't tell a real no from a quiet maybe.
When someone sits outside your network, you have several ways in. In lemlist, they can all live in the same sequence:
An invite with a note. It's free, and it works well when the note gives a real reason to connect. Premium senders get 300 characters instead of 200.
Engage first. A profile visit and a thoughtful comment make your name familiar before you ask. lemlist runs the profile visit and drafts a comment on their last post for you to approve, then sends the invite.
Email. It runs in parallel with LinkedIn, and lemlist can find and verify the address for you.
A mutual intro. It's the warmest option when you share a contact.
InMail. Your message lands in their inbox right away, with no invite needed. Each one costs a credit, and you get a limited number every month.
The strongest campaigns combine them. But sometimes you can't afford to wait.
The moment won't last, like a new VP picking tools this month. Or the person matters too much to leave in a pending invite for two weeks, like the decision maker at your top target account. That's where InMail earns its place.
It's also what worried me. When a step solves "I can't wait," it's tempting to use it for everyone.
What I worried about while building InMail
My biggest fear was simple. If we made InMail too easy, people would send it to their whole list and burn a month of credits in one afternoon.
So most of our product decisions were about protecting those credits:
Here's the math I keep repeating to our users. 50 credits across about 20 working days is 2 or 3 InMails a day. Every InMail you send to the wrong person is one less for the right one. Unused credits roll over too, up to 3 times your monthly allowance (150 on Sales Navigator Core).
Our help center article on InMail shows how lemlist tracks your balance and daily cap.
Narrow your list before you write a single InMail
Before anyone gets an InMail from me, they pass four checks. If one fails, they get another step in the sequence instead, like an invite, a chat message or an email.
Something just happened. A new role, a funding round, a post on a topic I know well. I don't hunt for these by hand. Signal Agents watch target accounts and people for me and turn each event into a lead.
They are not already connected to me. This sounds obvious, but people forget it. The "Is in my LinkedIn Network" condition splits the sequence. Connections get a free chat message, and everyone else moves on.
I tried the free door first, or I have a reason to skip it. For most leads, an invite comes first. The Accepted invite condition waits a few days, and only the "No" branch gets the InMail.
I can write the first line for this one person. I use AI variables to draft an opener from the signal, for example their new title or the post they liked. Then I read every line before it goes out.
My rule: if I wouldn't send the message to one specific person on purpose, I don't automate it to fifty.
You might wonder why I automate InMail at all if I only send a few. Automation doesn't mean volume. The campaign is already your short list, and lemlist handles the timing and the conditions. So each InMail goes out at the right moment, and only to the people who need it.
Here's an example with a Premium Business account, which gets 15 InMail credits a month. A signal brings 30 people into a campaign. 10 are already connected, so they get a chat message. The other 20 get an invite. If 6 of them don't accept within a week, only those 6 get an InMail. That's 6 credits out of 15, so you still have more than half your month left for the next signal. And nobody had to track it in a spreadsheet.
When someone replies, the answer lands in lemlist's unified inbox, next to your emails and other LinkedIn conversations. You answer everything from one place, without jumping between Sales Navigator and your mailbox.
My first InMail from lemlist got a reply in 11 minutes
The day InMail went live, I wanted to test it on someone who had asked for it. Jonathan Chemouny runs global GTM at ElevenLabs, one of our customers. His team had pushed for InMail, so he was the obvious first person to hear it was ready.
I sent this straight from lemlist:
11 minutes later, he accepted it and replied: "haha love that. Can we get access?" Plus six praying-hands emojis, which I'm choosing to read as enthusiasm.
It's a tiny message, but it passes every check from the list above:
A real reason. He asked for this feature, and the subject line says so in four words.
Written for one person. Five short lines that only make sense for Jonathan. No template can fake "you asked".
The message is the proof. He knows it came from lemlist the moment he reads it. I didn't need to explain the feature.
A reply that takes two seconds. "Reply yes" is easy to answer, even from a phone.
Would I send "You asked. It's live." to 500 people? No. It only works because it was true for Jonathan.
5 InMail use cases I'd set up today
1. A new decision maker joins a target account
People in a new role get a lot of attention in their first weeks, and they often review their tools early on. Most of the time, you're not connected yet. An invite with a note is the free first try, but don't let it sit for two weeks while the news gets older.
Setup:
New hire or Promotion signal → profile visit
Network check
Connected → chat message
Not connected → invite with a note
Accepted invite condition (wait 2 days)
Yes → chat message
No → InMail
Email 2 days later
If they accept, a chat message does the job for free. If they don't, the InMail still arrives in the first week of their new role.
Example InMail:
Subject: Your first 90 days at {{companyName}}
Hi {{firstName}}, congrats on the move to {{jobTitle}}. Most heads of sales I talk to spend their first months auditing the outbound stack. If that's on your list, I'm happy to share what similar teams at {{industry}} companies changed first.
🤖 A quick confession: I didn't build these campaigns by hand. I described each one to lemAgent in plain words, and it built the full sequence, branches included. Here's what I typed for this first one:
"Build a campaign for new heads of sales at my target accounts. Start with a profile visit. If we're connected, send a chat message. If not, send an invite with a note. If they don't accept within 2 days, send an InMail, then an email 2 days later."
2. Your short list of key accounts
Account-based selling rarely means one person per company. For a short list of 10 key accounts, most teams pick 2 or 3 people in each buying group. The managers who use the tool often accept an invite. The VP who signs the budget often doesn't, and that's the person InMail is for.
Put the managers and the VPs in two campaigns. The only difference is what happens when someone doesn't accept.
Setup for the managers:
Profile visit and Like last post
Email
Invite with a note
Accepted invite condition (wait 2 days)
Yes → chat message
No → follow-up email
Call
Setup for the VPs:
Profile visit and Like last post
Email
Invite with a note
Accepted invite condition (wait 2 days)
Yes → chat message
No → InMail
Follow-up email
Call
With 10 accounts, you send 10 InMails at most. That fits in a Premium Business month with credits to spare. By the time the InMail arrives, the VP has already seen your name in their notifications and in their inbox.
3. The strong-fit prospect with an old pending invite
This is the scenario that started the whole project. You sent an invite weeks ago in an older campaign. The campaign ended, the invite is still pending, and the account is still a perfect fit.
You can't send a second invite while the first one is pending. So the next step is an InMail, and the time that passed works in your favor. It reads like a second try, not a reminder.
Setup:
Add the leads from the old campaign to a new campaign
Network check
Connected → chat message (they accepted after the old campaign ended)
Not connected → InMail
Email 2 days later
Write the InMail as if the invite never happened. "Did you see my invite?" adds nothing. Give them the context the invite was missing.
4. A target company starts visiting your website
When a company from your target list visits your website, they may be comparing options right now. Timing matters more than usual here, because next month they may have already picked a tool.
Setup:
Website visitors signal → pick the decision maker at that company
Network check
Connected → chat message the same day
Not connected → invite with a note the same day
Accepted invite condition (wait 2 days)
Yes → chat message
No → InMail
Email 2 days later
The wait is short on purpose. Two days give the invite a fair chance, and the InMail still lands while they compare tools.
One warning: don't write "I saw you on our website." Nobody likes to feel watched. Talk about the problem you solve for companies like theirs, and let the timing do the work.
5. Someone engages with a topic you know well
LinkedIn Keywords and LinkedIn People Profiles signals show you who engages with posts on a specific topic. For example, you can see who comments on posts about cold email deliverability.
Setup:
LinkedIn Keywords signal → AI variable that summarizes what they engaged with
Network check
Connected → chat message that continues the conversation
Not connected → invite with a note that mentions their comment
Accepted invite condition (wait 2 days)
Yes → chat message
No → InMail that continues the conversation
Example InMail:
Subject: Your comment on {{postTopic}}
Hi {{firstName}}, I saw your take on {{postTopic}}. We ran into the same issue at lemlist last year, and {{oneLineInsight}}. Curious if you've tried something similar?
When InMail is the right step, and when it isn't
If you skimmed everything above, here's the short version.
InMail works best as one step in a multichannel sequence, where invites, chat messages and email share the load. It shouldn't carry the whole campaign alone.
Final thoughts
We built InMail because you asked for it. We built the credit tracking, the daily cap and the Premium detection because I didn't want you to regret using it. Pick fewer people, give each one a real reason, and your credits will last the whole month.
If you have a Premium or Sales Navigator account connected, you can add an InMail step to your next campaign in a few minutes. New to lemlist? You can try it free for 14 days and run the full LinkedIn + email sequence from one place.
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