1. Overview
Paid InMails and Open InMails allow you to contact prospects on LinkedIn without needing to connect with them first. With Salesflow's InMail campaign, you can send both types of InMails seamlessly as part of your outreach strategy.
This approach helps you expand your reach beyond your immediate network and engage with high-value prospects more efficiently.
Important Open InMail update (April 2026)
LinkedIn has recently changed daily limit and how Open Profiles are identified. This makes it harder to tell whether a contact can receive an Open InMail before sending.
What changed in SalesFlow: Instead of checking eligibility when contacts are imported, our system now checks at the moment a message is sent.
What this means for you:
If a contact can receive an Open InMail, the message sends as normal.
If not, the contact returns an error or sends a Paid InMail if you have a Sales Navigator account and have enabled the campaign to send Paid InMails.This can happen if the contact doesn't have an open profile, or you've hit your LinkedIn sending limit.
2. Types of Messages Supported
Open InMails are free messages that can be sent only to Premium Contacts that have set their Profile as Open.
Paid InMails are paid LinkedIn messages that let you contact people outside your network directly, without sending a connection request first.
3. Create an InMail campaign:
1. Click on Campaigns and click on Add New Campaign
2. Select InMails campaign and click next
3. Name the campaign and add a description (optional)
4. Decide if you would like the campaign to drop a like in one of the contact's posts and/or visit the profile.
5. Create your InMail message.
InMail Template Name: the name of your template, only you can see this
Message Title: the subject line of your message, say something catchy
The message: the body of your message, make sure to use custom fields to increase success
You can use an existing template or create a new one.
6. Click Save as a Template
7. Set how many days later you want to send the InMail message.
Note: Timing is calculated based on when the contact is added to the campaign.
Example: If a contact is added on July 15 and the delay is set to 2 days, the InMail will be sent on July 17.
Setting the delay to 0 will schedule the InMail to be sent within 24 hours.
8. Click Next.
9. Set the amount of Open InMails you want to send per day. Your campaign will try to send this amount of Open InMails to those contacts in the campaign that have an Open Profile.
If you have a Sales Navigator license, you can also send Paid InMails. You can define how many Paid InMails are sent per day and per month.
You can configure two types of limits:
Daily limit: Set the minimum and maximum number of Paid InMails to be sent from a campaign each day.
Monthly limit: Set the minimum and maximum number of Paid InMails to be sent from a campaign each month.
If the monthly limit is reached, it will override the daily limit. Once this limit is met, no additional Paid InMails will be sent from the campaign until the next monthly cycle.
You will be able to see how many credits you have left in your Sales Navigator account in the same section where you set your Paid InMail limits.
10. Set the Schedule of the campaign: how many days to run and the time period each day
Enable run Campaign by schedule: should always be on unless you don’t want to run the campaign just yet
Days of the week: Select the days on which the campaign should run.
Working hours: Define the time window during which the campaign is allowed to run each day.
Run campaign every 3 hours: to ensure human-like activity, the campaign will only run every 3 hours. You can increase this number but cannot lower it.
11. Click Next.
12. Review the details, and click Create.
13. Once the campaign is created, it's time to import the campaign members. Those are contacts that allow 2nd or 3rd-degree contacts to contact them via InMails. Once you find them, import them into the campaign using any import method listed here.
Only contacts with a Premium license will be imported into InMail campaigns.
Those that have an Open profile will be sent an Open InMail (If LinkedIn limits allow it)
Those that do not have an Open Profile, or those that you cannot send an Open InMail to because you have hit the Open InMail limit, will be sent a Paid inMail.
4. Things to take into consideration
Upon the import of the contacts, the system scans for premium accounts (with the IN badge), and those can be open or not.
If you have a Sales navigator license, we’ll send Open InMails over the Sales Navigator inbox.
In the campaign, you can filter out the contacts to see who has received an InMail and who hasn't.
Paid InMail and Open InMail limits are cumulative. This means that each limit is applied independently.
For example, if your campaign is set to send a maximum of 20 Open InMails per day and 5 Paid InMails per day, it can send up to 25 InMails in total per day (20 Open + 5 Paid).
You can only send one InMail (Open or Paid) per contact.
If you have run out of InMail credits, all those contacts that are eligible to be sent a Paid InMail will present an error.
You can identify when a contact has received a Paid or Open InMail by checking the contact's activity log:
Note: Statistics and Analytics currently display the total number of InMails sent (both Open and Paid combined). More detailed segmentation will be available soon!
We hope you found this article helpful! However, if you have any questions please contact us via the support chat or at support@salesflow.io
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