I've been trying to grow my LinkedIn but other than the content aspect, it's really time-consuming to reach out to people with the same copy-paste method. I had to edit their names and then triple-check that I didn't get the wrong person. I'm in law school, so my use is a little bit different from closing sales (hence the name Closely).

So here's what I did on Closely. I'm part of a group of active professionals.

1. I started an outreach campaign with a custom message using their first name, and a follow-up message to be sent 2 days after they've connected with me and if they did not reply,
2. I pasted the LinkedIn group URL and it pulled up an audience/list of people to target for me right away.
3. I set the campaign to start and voila. All done.

In the past 2 weeks, I've grown my network by 47 connections. It has sent out 84 connection requests with 47 people accepting my connection. That's a 56% success rate. Your results will vary as well. That's not even mentioning that the group is around 400 people. If it continues at this rate, I'll have around 200 connections in a month of use. That's amazing.

Now here are some highlights:

Dedicated IP
Dedicated IP is safer to use than Chrome Extensions like Waalaxy. It doesn't matter how many connections you add if your account gets banned after all. Slow and steady is better than being able to go past LinkedIn's limits and getting banned.

Inbox (Lightweight CRM)
This is not real-time but you can use it to message people to get that one-on-one feeling or to go into more personalized conversations with your campaign connections. You can add tags and notes, and it shows which campaign they were from in the Inbox section—really helpful.

Campaign from Group URL, CSV, or Event URL
You can create a list of people to send requests to just by adding a simple URL or even uploading a CSV of emails. I added a group that was active and had a list of 450 people ready to go.

Explorer/Closely Surfer Chrome Extension
You can find prospects and their contact information by company, title, location, and industry—chrome extension shows their contact info when you're on their profile.

Warm-Up Mode and Working Hours
This is meant to warm up your account to send requests—don't use LinkedIn while campaigns are running and don't try to send 20 requests at once. Stick to Warm-Up Mode and set your working hours.

Multiple Campaigns & Variables
You can run multiple types of campaigns—just make sure not to target the same person in multiple campaigns. There's a feature to see if someone was part of another campaign and you can exclude them if you don't want to target them. You can also set up variables like {first_name} to create templated messages.

Compared to other solutions, they may be a little newer and limited in features but they've been really responsive to issues and feedback. They're also developing and adding campaigns to send to your current network, which is going to be amazing.