Email and LinkedIn DMs are the two highest-ROI cold channels, but they reward very different message styles and volumes. Here is how to decide which channel a particular campaign should lead with — and when to combine them.
Quick decision framework
Use email when your prospect job involves email all day, the value prop is concrete, and you can verify deliverable addresses.
Use LinkedIn DM when email deliverability is unreliable for your audience, when the prospect is hard to reach by email (engineers, founders, executives at large companies), or when you need a relationship vibe rather than a pitch.
Use both when stakes are high and the audience is small — top-of-funnel ABM, enterprise sales, candidate sourcing.
Email — strengths and limits
Strengths: high volume (200+ per inbox per day with warm domains), structured tracking, easy to A/B test, replies land in a central inbox.
Limits: deliverability is fragile, prospects increasingly route cold mail to a separate filter, every link can hurt landing rates.
LinkedIn DM — strengths and limits
Strengths: the prospect sees a face and a profile, conversational tone is the norm, no spam filter to fight, very high reply rates relative to email.
Limits: very low volume (20 to 50 DMs per account per day is the safe ceiling), no rich tracking, conversation tone means longer back-and-forth, no native scheduling on the prospect side.
When to lead with LinkedIn DM
Your audience is on LinkedIn daily — founders, sales, marketing, recruiting, exec leadership.
You cannot find verified emails for more than 50% of your list.
Your offer benefits from social proof — your profile, your company page, mutual connections.
You are in a niche where cold email reputation is rough (crypto, supplements, agency outreach).
When to lead with email
You can buy or build a clean enriched list with verified emails.
You want to send 1,000+ messages a week.
Your audience uses email more than LinkedIn — IT ops, finance, legal, executive assistants.
You need link clicks (demo bookings, content downloads).
Combine them well
The standard multichannel cadence in BrandJet looks like:
Day 0: LinkedIn connection request, no pitch.
Day 2: cold email — short, value-led, ask a question.
Day 4: LinkedIn DM only to leads that accepted the connection request.
Day 7: email follow-up.
Day 10: break-up email.
BrandJet workflow nodes (Has email, Has LinkedIn, Connection accepted) let you route leads down the path that matches what you actually have on each row.
What about the case where my admin will not approve LinkedIn connection requests?
Some accounts (especially shared corporate ones) cannot send connection requests freely. In that case, set the campaign to DM without connect — BrandJet falls back to InMail-style messages on accounts that have Sales Navigator credits, or simply skips the LinkedIn step for affected leads.
Volume guardrails
LinkedIn: max 40 to 50 connection requests per day per account, max 100 DMs to existing connections.
Email: stay below 100 sends per inbox per day for the first 30 days post-warmup, then ramp.
Combined: do not exceed 3 touchpoints per lead per week across all channels.