LinkedIn Email Marketing: How Human Psychology Drives Growth

LinkedIn email strategy exploits absurdly simple human psychology: people open messages with familiar names in them.

The subject line says "Sarah viewed your profile."

Sarah? You remember her. You worked together 3 years ago and haven't spoken since. But curiosity gets the better of you, and you click.

Congrats, you’ve just fallen for one of the oldest and most effective tricks in LinkedIn’s growth playbook.

The platform sent a staggering 63.5 billion emails in 2023, and most of them leverage this one simple psychological hack: we open messages from people we know.

The Psychological Triggers Behind the Playbook

LinkedIn has built an entire system around borrowed social capital. It works by tapping into some very predictable human behaviors.

1. Personal Relevance

LinkedIn notifications are triggered by network interactions.

Firstly, it feels personal.

A generic update like "Your profile was viewed" is easy to ignore. But when it becomes "Emma viewed your profile" or "Michael endorsed you for Marketing," a boring event turns into a micro-social interaction that feels like it matters.

2. Status Anxiety and Information Gaps

Then there’s the classic fear of missing out (FOMO).

The email "You appeared in 15 searches this week" is a masterclass in creating an information gap.

Who searched for you? Was it a recruiter? An old boss? You have to click to find out.

By holding back the juicy details, LinkedIn makes the click feel necessary.

3. Social Proof and Peer Pressure

They also use a healthy dose of peer pressure. When you see a message like "Your connections are talking about this article," it frames scrolling not as something you choose to do, but as something the group is already doing.

It subtly pressures you to join the conversation.

Research shows people weigh peer behavior heavily when making decisions as we like to follow the crowd than go against it.

4. Reciprocity Norms

Finally, it triggers our need to reciprocate.

When someone endorses your skills, you feel a tiny social obligation to acknowledge it, maybe even return the favor.

This simple nudge creates a cycle of engagement.

LinkedIn's Viral Loop: Turning 70% Inactive Users Into Distribution Channels

This system turns every active user into a distribution channel. The architecture is designed to create viral loops where user activity becomes its own promotion:

• You post content → Followers get notified → Some engage → You get notified → You check engagement → The cycle repeats.

Each notification is a potential reactivation event. With roughly 70% of its user base not checking in daily, these emails drive a huge portion of return visits.

This is reinforced by a variable rewards system. It’s like a slot machine for your career; you know most notifications are duds, but you keep checking because the next one might just be a message from a recruiter at your dream company.

The $13 Million "Friend Spam" Settlement

This aggressive strategy eventually got LinkedIn into hot water. In 2015, the company had to pay out a $13 million class-action settlement for being a little too clever.

They were caught uploading user contacts without getting clear permission and then sending out connection requests that looked like they were personally written by the user.

The settlement required more transparency, but the line between user-initiated actions and LinkedIn-automated messages remains deliberately blurred. They still use this tactic in countries with lax-data laws, such as India.

How to Replicate LinkedIn's Email Strategy that Exploits Human Psychology

You can apply the same psychological principles to your own notification system with these 4 tactics:

1. Personalize with real names: Make notifications feel personal. Instead of a generic alert like "A customer upgraded," try "Jenny Lee from Acme Corp just upgraded her plan." See the difference? That's what Slack does.

2. Create Information Gaps: Don’t spill all the beans in the email. Hint at valuable information like who viewed what, who commented where so as to make that click irresistible.

3. Aggregate Social Proof: Bundle the social proof. Instead of notifying about one action, use phrases like "5 developers starred your repository" like GitHub does.

4. Lower the Friction for Reciprocity: Lower the friction for reciprocity. One-click buttons to endorse, congratulate, or reply will feed the engagement engine and keep the notification loops spinning.

LinkedIn’s success isn’t just about the volume of emails it sends; it’s about how cleverly it uses your own social network to pull you back in.

The best growth tools don’t make users feel like they're missing a product update; they make them feel like they're missing a conversation.

Top Tweets of the day

1/

I feel like this is temporary since AI is currently good at generating apps but soon gaming will overtake apps again as AI gets good at making games this year.

The best thing about games is users play them again and again if you make it an addictive game. And if you add a friends feature to it, then a group of friends in college will play it again and again.

2/

When in doubt, copy what's working.

3/

Now with AI writing so much software, this feels like the future for a cracked team.

Rabbit Holes

1. How to build a $1M app, in 10 minutes

2. The Viral App Playbook

3. How Search Engines Work

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