Export LinkedIn Contacts With Email Addresses—A Step-by-Step Guide

You’ve spent months or years building your LinkedIn connection list, and now you want to tap into it and see whether you can monetize it. Chances are, at least a chunk of your connections would be interested in your product or service, so it’s time to roll up your sleeves and launch an outreach campaign.

Sure, you can take the spray-and-pray approach by mass-sending direct messages. Unfortunately, any marketer or salesperson worth their salt will tell you it takes more than this to warm up your leads.

Instead, you’ll want to export LinkedIn contacts and execute a robust email campaign. In this guide, you’ll learn precisely how to do this and find all the information you need to make your campaigns fruitful. We’ll then show you the best way to build those campaigns through a platform trusted by over 30,000 marketing and sales pros. 🙌

Can You Export LinkedIn Contacts?

Yes, LinkedIn lets you export a list of connections to get a complete overview of all the relationships you’ve formed since creating your account. You can do this by asking LinkedIn to send copies of all your data in bulk or requesting the connection data specifically.

The process is easy enough, though it’s not foolproof, as you’ll learn a bit later in this guide. For now, we’ll go through the steps you should take to get the connection list.

How To Export LinkedIn Contacts Directly From the Platform

To export contacts from LinkedIn, you’ll first need to find your data—here are the steps you need to follow:

1. Click Me > Settings & Privacy 
2. Go to Data Privacy in the left-hand menu
3. Under How LinkedIn uses your data, choose Get a copy of your data

Here, you can choose between the two options we mentioned above—you can either download your entire data archive or opt for specific data files. Select the latter option, and then check the box next to Connections.

There’s an option to select other datasets, such as invitations, messages, and articles. Once you’re satisfied with your selection, click Request Archive.

Within a few minutes, you should get an email from LinkedIn saying your data is ready for download from the provided link.

Source: Email screenshot

When you click the link, you’ll be taken back to the Data privacy menu, from which you can download LinkedIn contacts.

By default, your data will be in the XLSX format, so you can open the spreadsheet with Excel. You’ll see it contains lots of useful information on your connections, most notably:

• First and last name 
• LinkedIn URL
• Company and position
• Date connected

Unfortunately, you’ll see that a vital piece of data is missing—your connections’ email addresses.

Why You Can’t Download LinkedIn Contacts With Email Addresses

LinkedIn implements various practices to protect user data, and email visibility restrictions are among the key ones. The platform lets every user decide who can view and download their contact information, with the following rules being in place by default:

• Only your direct connections can see your email address
• Email exports by connections are toggled off 

To make email exports available, your connections must enable this feature through the Visibility section of the settings menu, as shown in the following image:

Nearly all users keep this option disabled by default, so you most likely won’t see many emails in your connections list. This can be frustrating if LinkedIn prospecting is the main reason you want to download the list. Luckily, there is a way around it.

How To Export Email Addresses From LinkedIn 

When you have a list of LinkedIn connections, you can populate it with their email addresses by finding the email on each connection’s profile

Export LinkedIn Emails Manually From Users’ Profiles

Even if your connection disabled email exports, there’s a high chance they still made their email visible on the profile. If you can spare time, you can review your LinkedIn connections list and manually find email addresses.

You can do this in two quick steps:

1. Go to your connection's profile
2. Click Contact Info under their title

Depending on the information someone has made public, you may find lots of data beyond their email, such as:

• Social platforms and direct messaging services
• Birthday
• Phone number

You can pull this information and paste it into your connections spreadsheet. The problem here is that the process might take forever if you have hundreds of connections. 😮‍💨

Keep in mind that not everyone makes their email visible on LinkedIn, so you might need to look elsewhere for it. You can search their company’s website or certain social media accounts, but this makes the process more complicated and time-consuming.

Supercharge Your Outreach Efforts With Clay’s AI-Powered Features

Clay doesn’t only help you find the data you need to launch hyper-personalized outbound campaigns—the platform also puts it to good use through various AI features, most notably:

The above features automate countless tasks throughout the sales cycle to maximize your efficiency. With Clay, a single SDR can complete the amount of work that would otherwise involve an entire team. 💪

Don’t take our word for it—see what Clay’s users have said about the platform’s capabilities:

Flexible Pricing, No Wasted Money

If you want to see the aforementioned features first-hand, you can use Clay’s robust free plan to test them. It comes with 100 monthly credits, which you’ll use to get a taste of the platform’s enrichment capabilities.

Clay also offers four paid tiers suitable for different budget levels:

Each plan lets you choose between different credit amounts, which reduces the risk of overpaying. As you use credits to enrich your leads, you only pay once the information you need has been found, proving the platform’s cost-effectiveness. 💰

All paid plans come with a 14-day free trial, so you don’t need to make any commitments right away. You can play around with Clay’s features to decide whether they fit your workflow and make the final decision based on the real-life results you get.