How to Export LinkedIn Contacts
LinkedIn is undoubtedly one of the best platforms to build your professional network. Especially in terms of selling, more and more activities are being pushed online, making LinkedIn the go-to place for sourcing leads and building prospect lists.
Many of us who have been using LinkedIn for a while probably consider ourselves to be experts by now, but there are so many different features hidden within the platform that can take years to discover if they are not intentionally sought out.
One of the latest and greatest that we’ve unearthed is the data export feature that will give you an (almost) immediate record of your account history, connections, and more! Keep reading to learn how you can take advantage of the connection export feature and retrieve any information that might be missing.
Table of Contents
- Why would I need to export my LinkedIn contacts?
- Where do I find this contact list?
- Why is the email address not showing up for some contacts?
- How can I retrieve someone’s email address if it does not appear on the list?
Why would I need to export my LinkedIn contacts?
While you should capitalize on the opportunities that LinkedIn facilitates to develop and maintain business relationships, it can easily become difficult to keep up with so many people, especially once your connection count starts reaching triple digits.
Instead of having to manually search or scroll through your list of connections every time you would like to refer back to one of them, LinkedIn’s export feature will compile an organized list for you.
Another motive to keep an updated list of your connections outside of the LinkedIn platform is for security in case anything were to happen to your account. Imagine it got hacked, deleted, or blocked for any reason – you would lose access to all of the partners, clients, and contacts that you’ve invested time into adding over the years with a low likelihood of recovery. You can never be too cautious, so why not take advantage of the data export feature every once in a while to keep your information safe?
Whether it be for personal records, to build an outreach campaign, or to segment contacts who work in a certain position or company, exporting your connection archive can serve many purposes.
Where do I find this contact list?
LinkedIn’s data export feature will provide you with a list of your first-degree connections including their last name, company name, position, email address, and date of connection in the form of a .csv file.
To get started, follow the steps below:
- Open the LinkedIn platform and click on the Me icon at the top of the page
- Under Account, click on Settings & Privacy from the dropdown menu
- Under Data privacy, confirm that you are redirected to the How LinkedIn uses your data page
- Under How LinkedIn uses your data, select the Get a copy of your data option
- Select the Want something in particular? Select the data files you are most interested in option and click on the Connections square below
- Click on Request archive
- Submit your password and click Done
- You will then receive an email to your Primary email address that contains a download link
And voila! It’s that easy. The whole process takes less than 10 minutes and you now have an editable list of all of your LinkedIn connections and their professional details.
Why is the email address not showing up for some contacts?
Once you have downloaded your list of connections, you may realize that some of your contacts’ email addresses are missing. This is not an error, but rather, a privacy measure that is used to protect the personal information of LinkedIn users. The default setting under Visibility has the Allow your connections to download your email toggle switched off, meaning that unless your contacts have manually gone into their settings and switched it to yes, their emails will not appear in your data export list.
So now what? No need to panic. There are a few tools that can be used to source and compile your contacts’ email addresses in the case that they are needed, but do not appear.
How can I retrieve my contact’s email address if it does not appear on the list?
If you downloaded your list of connections primarily for outreach purposes, not having email addresses won’t get you very far. There is no way to circumvent the privacy settings that LinkedIn has put into place in terms of data consent, so the only way to solve this problem is to integrate third-party tools that can do the job externally.
There are many instruments that are capable of scraping LinkedIn profiles for different pieces of information. While it is not illegal for most of these tools to compile data that is publicly shared on the web, it is crucial to make sure that the tools’ data extraction methods abide by your country’s data protection rules and regulations. For example, if you are in the European Union, you need to confirm that the third-party resource you choose to use works within the boundaries of General Data Protection Regulation guidelines.
One of the best tools on the market to not only source, but also organize your LinkedIn information is Leadjet. Leadjet is a 100% GDPR compliant tool that builds a connection between LinkedIn and your CRM, allowing you to synchronize messages and contacts between the two platforms with the click of a single button. Leadjet connects with Hubspot, Salesforce, Salesloft, Copper, and Pipedrive, meaning that users can simultaneously update their CRMs without ever leaving the LinkedIn interface. Contact enrichment is just one of the many features that Leadjet facilitates.
Leadjet has integrated with a number of email providers that will search the web in a cascade manner to instantaneously retrieve your connections’ most up-to-date contact details. More specifically, Leadjet is integrated with Dropcontact, VoilaNorbert, Hunter, Kendo, Lusha, Snov.io, and Skrapp, meaning that all of these contact enrichment tools will work together to retrieve your connections’ company names, email addresses, and phone numbers. Check out the image below to see Leadjet in action.
Because all of these tools work in unison, Leadjet is more likely to locate your connections’ contact information than any other tool on the market. For more information, refer to Leadjet’s comprehensive guide that covers exactly how the tool works to export LinkedIn contacts.
The added benefit that Leadjet provides is the fact that it synchronizes directly with your CRM. Rather than having to copy and paste emails into an excel file then manually compose email campaigns or outreach messages using this information, you can directly transfer everything to your CRM to keep your data organized and team members up to speed.
Bottom Line
There are many tools on the market to help you retrieve your connections’ data depending on your needs, so don’t hesitate to take advantage of them if you can’t extract everything you are looking for using LinkedIn’s export feature. Also, you may want to consider adjusting your own privacy settings accordingly to your preference based on the information that has been shared.
