This is a question that often comes up with our users. How do I use Mr. or Mrs. in an LinkedIn automated message? Or rather, how do I know if my prospect is male or female on LinkedIn?
Only inserting a last name seems very automated (a little strange too, let’s be honest), while only using the prospect’s first name comes across a little too familiar on what is still a professional network.
Let’s be clear: there is no way to 100% automate this.
But I am going to present to you two possibilities. Both are more or less practical and effective. 👌🏻
Why is there no tool that allows you to personalize a LinkedIn automated message by Mr. or Mrs.?
Think back to when you created your LinkedIn account. I know that was probably a while back for some. But essentially, you were never asked if you were a man or a woman. LinkedIn does not request this data from its users.
As a result of this, this information is not available on user’s profiles.
LinkedIn-based automation tools retrieve profile data from user’s profiles. So if LinkedIn doesn’t have the info, neither do we!
But the question still remains: how to use titles related to gender when sending a LinkedIn automatic message? 😅
Using tags to separate men and women
Once in the list, scroll through the profiles and, based on the photo and name, assign them a tag. Let’s say you want to separate the men first.
(If the photos don’t appear in your list, go to the settings page and enable the option).
- Select each profile that appears to be a man on the campaign page.
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- Once you have made your selection, give them all a “man” tag.
- Repeat the operation page by page.
- Then filter by “tag”; “exclude: male”.
- Select all the results and tag them “woman”.
You now have a list of prospects with identified men and identified women. 😊
Write your message templates dedicated to men and women
In the “campaign” tab, click on the “Message templates” tab, and “Create a template”.
- Write your message dedicated to Men, and write the title, for example “Message #1 – Men”, do the same for Women.
Launch your campaigns Mr and Mrs
- Click on “Campaign” and “Create a campaign”.
- Choose the sequence you want, for example the sequence “Message”.
- In “Add prospects”, click on your list of prospects and filter by the tag “Men”. You will get a list of all the men in this list.
- In “Message”, use the previously created message template, “Message #1 – Men”.
- Launch your campaign. 🚀
Do the same thing for women. You will have two campaigns running with messages dedicated to Men, and messages dedicated to Women.
➡️ Guide to launching a campaign.
Simple, effective, but requires several manual operations. Fortunately (or not, there is an automated solution). 🙃
Automated solutions to retrieve the gender in an automated message on LinkedIn
We have tested two solutions: Dropcontact and Gender API.
Dropcontact is by far our favourite. Ready to take a look? 👀
1. The solution with Dropcontact
Dropcontact does not only find, validate and verify email addresses. The tool enriches B2B contacts with all the information necessary for hyper-personalized and therefore effective prospecting, including gender.
It is therefore possible to find the gender of your contacts with Dropcontact with a simple drag-and-drop of a Waalaxy list export to Dropcontact.
Thanks to its algorithms, Dropcontact is able to provide the gender of your contacts (but also the professional and verified email address, all legal information of your contacts’ companies…)
Export your prospect list to a CSV file
To enrich the civility on your prospect list, you must first export it to a CSV file to put it in Dropcontact.
Once you have the CSV file in your email, download it.
Treatment by Dropcontact
- Register with Dropcontact, or start the free trial.
- Click on “Submit a file” from the Dropcontact homepage.
Dropcontact will enhance your file, you can then download it by clicking on the download icon below.
- Retrieve and open the file from Dropcontact. You will find your list, enriched with the civility.
Separate Men and Women in the processed file
You will have to create two different CSV files from the Dropcontact enriched file: one dedicated to Men, and the other dedicated to Women.
- Create a new sheet “Men”.
- Copy the rows from the “Men” sheet and paste them into the new “Men” sheet.
- Do the same for the Women.
You will have two separate files, one dedicated to Men, and one dedicated to Women.
Re-import these files into Waalaxy
You will only have to create two lists on Waalaxy: “Men” and “Women” and, import each of the CSV files into the right list of prospects.
⚠️ You will first need to delete the prospect list you originally exported. Waaalxy handles duplicates, the tool will not allow you to import both CSV files if you do not delete the leads initially.
You can then tag the prospects (male and female tags) and launch two campaigns simultaneously. (see tutorial in the first part of this article)
The solution with GenderAPI
GenderAPI is a tool to find the gender and therefore the Civility based on the first name of a person according to probabilities. They have also integrated the email address. It’s a pretty powerful tool, but it doesn’t guarantee 100% accuracy.
I recommend you check out their FAQ first to understand exactly how they work. 😊
Like Dropcontact, we start from the CSV file exported from Waalaxy.
- Register on GenderAPI.com.
- Click on “CSV upload”.
- Import your file.
- Choose the fields that GenderAPI will use to determine gender. Here we will take the First Name and Country.
🤔 We strongly recommend that you put the Country. This is because it will significantly improve their ability to determine the gender of the person concerned. For example: ‘Andrea’ is a male name in Italy, but a female name in Germany and a mixed name in the USA. In such a case, GenderAPI.com will indicate a precision value in the result of the request.
Validate, then upload the enriched file.
- You will have a “Gender” column in the file.
From there, it will be the same system as with Dropcontact, you can copy the “male” rows and put them in a new “male” sheet; do the same for the females.
You will only have to import the two separate CSV files into Waalaxy to make two different campaigns: one campaign with a message dedicated to Men, and one campaign with a message dedicated to Women.
That’s it. 👌
If you have any questions about this, feel free to come and see us at Waalaxy chat support! 🚀
