How to Find E-Commerce Clients on Linkedin? [2023 Tutorial]

In this article, we are going to show you how to find e-commerce clients on Linkedin using Sales Navigator, one of the premium product of Linkedin.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a great tool for many industries, but it’s far from the best regarding e-commerce. That’s mostly because the technology lookup filter do not work.

LinkedIn won’t crawl the websites for technologies as other solutions can do. They rely on the information given by company page creators that are often poorly informed.

In this post you’ll find battle-tested digital marketing strategy that actually work.

5 techniques to find e-commerce clients on LinkedIn:

1. Linkedin Lead Search
2. Linkedin Account Search
3. Combiner Wappalyzer and Linkedin
4. Linkedin Groups
5. Linkedin Events

Look For E-Commerce Leads with Linkedin Lead Search

This technique focuses on finding people rather than find companies. LinkedIn Sales Navigator has many search filters and is more efficient at finding people than at finding companies.

If you don’t have an account-based linkedin prospecting strategy, you can simply look for the job titles you want in the Lead Search.

Let’s say you are looking for E-Commerce clients in a particular industry

You can create a sales navigator boolean search with the keyword “E-commerce” and the job titles you are looking for: “E-Commerce” AND (“Owner” OR “VP” OR “Director” OR “Manager”)

For example, with this search you are looking for:

• E-commerce Owner
• VP E-commerce
• E-commerce Director
• E-Commerce Manager

Warning

Don’t use the Seniority Level filter to look for decision-makers. It is really random as it’s LinkedIn trying to rebuild the hierarchy of companies through messy algorithms

You also want to exclude all non-decision makers personas as Intern or Assistant

You can also give LinkedIn Sales Navigator some details about an industry or some keyword depending on the product you are selling.

Once you are happy with the results, you can extract the lead list into a spreadsheet and start your outbound campaigns.

With this technique, the list of companies you are targeting will build itself from the potential client you find on LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

The next techniques will do the opposite.

Look for E-Commerce Businesses with Linkedin Account Search

If you have an account-based outbound strategy, you can start by building a list of e-commerce companies you want to target and then find the decision-makers in these companies.

As the Technology filter of LinkedIn Sales Navigator doesn’t work, your only weapons here are the keywords and industries.

Think about the keywords you want to see appear in the company page of your prospects. Here we chose E-Commerce and Fashion.

Let’s start by using the Sales Navigator advanced search filters to find your target audience.

So our boolean will start with “E-commerce” AND “Fashion“

Then think about all the potential irrelevant companies that could appear in this search (consulting firms, agencies, Saas Products for e-commerce etc…)

Exclude some keywords to avoid seeing them appear on your search like Agency, Consulting, Services, Platform, Software

So our boolean will now look like this: E-commerce AND Fashion NOT Agency NOT Consulting NOT Services NOT Platform NOT Software

Notes 

A good practice is to exclude keywords as you explore you search. Maybe you won’t find all the keyword to exclude on the first shot. This is an iterative process

Once you have a curated list of e-commerce websites, you can start to add them into an Account List

Your list will then appear on the Account List tab

Once you are happy with your list, you can use Lead Search to find the decision-makers within the e-commerce companies you just selected.

Go to Lead Results > Custom Lists > Accounts > Select the list you created

All the people working in these E-commerce companies will appear on the search

You can look for you persona/decision makers within this list by adding some keywords in the Title Filter

Congrats! You now have a list of the decision-makers in the targeted companies. You can start to doing the outreach on linkedin.

You now extract them to start your outbound campaigns with your favorite linkedin automation tool.

By the way, you can also target these people with Linkedin Ads.

Using Sales Navigator with Linkedin Ads guarantee a super optimization of your campaign as you precisely decide who is going to see your Ads.

Look For E-Commerce Stores Combining Wappalyzer and Linkedin

As we said earlier, LinkedIn Sales Navigator is not good at finding technologies used by e-commerce sites.

If you want to adopt this strategy, you’ll have to combine Sales Navigator with another technology lookup tool.

Here we are going to use Wappalyzer.

The thing is technology lookup tools are great at finding technologies used by companies but not good at finding people.

So LinkedIn Sales Navigator + Wappalyzer is a great combination to identify companies and then find decision-makers inside them.

Let’s do this.

Go to Product > Lead List

Enter a technology that allows you to identify e-commerce websites (here we take Shopify) and the country you are targeting.

Then Create a List and wait a few minutes

You now have a list of websites using the target technology you can buy anytime.

Now, we are going to import these file on Sales Navigator to see if Linkedin got them in their database.

Warning

You need a Sales Navigator team account to enjoy this feature. Otherwise, you’ll need to look for the companies in your file manually with the Linkedin account search

Download your CSV and upload it on Google Sheet

Delete all the columns except:

• URL
• Linkedin
• Company

Go to Sales Navigator > Account List > Upload accounts from CSV

Download your file from Google Sheet

Upload it into Sales Navigator and match the 3 columns with the right fields

Linkedin will try to find your companies in its database

Repeat the process described above to find decision makers in the companies on your list

This is one of the most efficient ways to get new leads and fill your sales funnel.

Especially if you are selling a technical solution that plugs itself on other specific technologies.

This step-by-step approach is a guaranteed way to map your target market.

Use Linkedin Groups

There are a lot of Linkedin groups gathering E-commerce business owners.

You can find them using the regular linkedin search engine.

But the best technique is to search Linkedin groups using Sales Navigator.

With Sales Navigator, you can use the group filter and add some other filters on top of that to find the right decision makers inside the groups.

You can also become a member of these groups and engage with active users.

That is a good way to build trust and get new clients.

Use Linkedin Events

You can also find potential customers in Linkedin events.

It’s indeed a good marketing strategy to identifying sign of interests on social media platforms to use them as a trigger for your messages.

To find E-commerce Linkedin events, simple write “E-commerce” in the search bar and select the Event Tab.

Then click on Attend.

You will get access to the list of all the Linkedin profiles that are willing to attend to this event.

You can send them connection requests to know more about their specific pain points.

The cool is that you can directly message some linkedin event attendees without sending a connection request first.

These messages are called “Message requests”.

They will land in the “Other Tab” of your Linkedin inbox.

This linkedin lead generation strategy guarantees a higher reply rate than a classic cold messaging campaign because you are using a relevant sign of interest to start building relationships.

Here is a template you can potentially use:

Linkedin Event outreach template

Hello <first name>

I’m trying to collect feedback on the webinar {{webinar_name}}.

Did you attend to it?

Interested in your thoughts

Best, JB

Simple, efficient, no fluff.

As all cold emails and email marketing campaigns should be.

Warm pitches are always way more efficient than non-personalized cold messages.

If you want to get more tips on how to write linkedin prospecting messages, you can take a look at this video:

Conclusion

Other articles will tell you to create a business page, post on Linkedin, be active on the social network. These are generic advice that won’t fill your CRM with qualified leads.

Social media marketing can work but it takes a lot of time to generate leads. With the 5 techniques I’ve shown you, you got 5 concrete ways to optimize your Sales funnel from tomorrow.

So pick one and just start implementing it from today!