The statistics show that 4 out of 5 of LinkedIn’s 900 million members drive business decisions. It makes LinkedIn the most promising channel for direct B2B sales today. That is the reason why you might wish to discover professional tools for generating B2B leads on LinkedIn. In this article, we present two of them — Impasto.io and Expandi.
What is Impasto.io?
Impasto.io is a cloud-based service for LinkedIn prospecting with a consulting package included. It means that along with an automatic tool you will have hours of live communication with professionals in LinkedIn outreach and sales. So, Impasto is a good choice even for enterprenuers and sales specialists new to LinkedIn outreach.
Impasto claims they will enable you to get your first hot leads within a week.
How is it possible to achieve such results even without prior knowledge about LinkedIn outreach?
You will be guided step by step through all lead generation steps. First, Impasto managers will show you how to build the ideal customer profile for your campaigns. Then, you will be provided with the optimization and warmup strategy for your LinkedIn profile. Once everything is set up correctly, you will get your initial message sequence to run your first campaign. You will be guided on how to use the Impasto automatic tools for your benefit. Along with automatic features, such as a contact finder, verifier, and messaging tool, Impasto also includes robust hyper-personalization features to grab prospect attention and increase click rates. We will discuss them in detail later.
What is Expandi?
Expandi positions itself as a LinkedIn automation tool for sales teams and agencies. However, its features, such as data scraping and image personalization, are also applicable for recruitment and fundraising. Expandi enables you to use a multichannel approach, as it contains tools for LinkedIn and email outreach directly in its control panel.
Unlike Impasto, Expandi does not have a consulting service, but Expandi partners can expect a customer success manager, plus they have much educational content to learn from it. Also, you can get a demo if you consider adding more than ten seats for outreach. Note that Expandi charges for every seat in your cart.
Expandi has robust automatic features, such as smart sequences, advanced search, and various campaign types like event invite campaigns. But be prepared to spend quite a lot of time to master all the features, as the control panel is complex and not obvious.
Impasto.io vs Expandi features
Let’s dive into the features of both services.
| Impasto.io features | Expandi features |
| Consulting package | _____________ |
| Team management | Team management |
| Data import/export | Data import/export |
| Sequence template | Smart sequences |
| Scoring system | _____________ |
| Hyper-personalization | Hyper-personalization |
| Contact finder | Contact search |
| Contact verification | Contact verification |
| Analytics system | Analytics system |
| Integration with any CRM | Integration with any CRM |
| LinkedIn limit control | LinkedIn limit control |
| _____________ | Smart campaigns |
| Inbox (Coming soon) | Inbox |
| Warmup mode (Coming soon) | Warmup mode |
| _____________ | Email outreach |
- We have already discussed consulting opportunities that you can get in both services.
- You can add up to 10 LinkedIn accounts to Impasto and run campaigns through them simultaneously with a single license. With Impasto, you are required to upgrade to the Agency plan to manage multiple accounts and purchase additional seats if you want to connect more than one user.
- Both services allow you to import contact information from CSV files and export scraped data.
- Regarding sequence templates, Impasto provides a single template for sending invites and follow-ups, as it is what salespersons need the most. Expandi contains branched sequences of actions, such as messages, followings, profile views, and skill endorsements. You can put them in any order for your campaigns.
- Impasto has a scoring system that helps gauge interest even of the prospects who have not replied to your messages. There is no such thing in Expandi.
- Both services include variables for personalizing messages, such as {first_name} and {company_name}. Impasto also provides a unique built-in feature for personalizing images and link previews. Expandi offers to connect a similar feature through the third-party service at an additional cost.LinkedIn message created with the Impasto personalization feature
- In Impasto, you can search for contacts by pasting any LinkedIn search URL, by a domain and company name. Also, you can add contacts to your list by adding a CSV file with contacts or by adding profile URLs. With Expandi, you have seven search options, such as Basic and Sales Navigator, Group, and Event search.
- Impasto automatically verifies and cleans up contact information that is extracted from LinkedIn. To clean up the information in Expandi, you can additionally use filters and blacklists.
- Impasto and Expandi show detailed information about your campaigns with the number of sent campaigns, clicks, and replies.
- You can integrate Impasto and Expandi with any CRM.
- Both services include a limit control section where you can choose between default and custom daily limits for your actions on LinkedIn.
- Expandi has an inbox where you can check your replies. At the moment, Impasto does not have this feature but plans to release it soon.
- The same goes for the warmup mode, where the system automatically prepares your profile for bulk messaging by making it trustworthy in the eyes of LinkedIn algorithms.
- As we said before, Expandi includes automatic features for email outreach. With Impasto, you can export the scraped LinkedIn information and use it with a third-party professional email service, such as Aweber.
Impasto interface
Now is time to test the user interfaces of both services to see if they are user-friendly.
The Impasto interface is very straightforward. You can connect multiple accounts with the Impasto panel by adding your LinkedIn profile cookies.
Your personal profile information is not required.
Once you add your profiles, set up daily limits and working hours for your campaigns.
The default limits are related with your current SSI (Social Selling Index).
Working hours are tailored to the time zone of your prospects, so you need to specify it.
Then, create your campaign in four steps:
- Name your campaign
- Add your message sequence with personalization
- Choose your way of contact search
- Wait for contact verification and start your campaign.
That is it. After your campaign is started, you can monitor it directly in the contact list section or by addressing it to the analytics dashboard.
Expandi interface
To test Expandi, we tried its free trial. However, it was quite a challenging experience.
Why? The signup requires connecting a LinkedIn account via adding credentials, plus, it is necessary to add credit card information.
Finally, after we added all the required information, Expandi stuck on connecting with the added LinkedIn account.
Anyway, what is inside?
Similar to Impasto, in Expandi, you need to specify daily LinkedIn limits and time settings before you start your campaign.
After connecting your account with Expandi, you will access its features.
To start searching for contact information, choose between search options and paste the desired LinkedIn search URL.
Once you have a contact list, you can choose a campaign instance from the list available in the service.
Follow the steps recommended for your campaign type.
The range of Expandi features is vast, so we do not describe them in detail. The main point is that the Expandi interface is complex, and if you want to use this tool, get ready to learn from servise articles and help sections.
Impasto vs Expandi Pricing
The Impasto pricing includes two options. You can purchase access to its automation tool without requesting consulting services. In this case, prices start from $49. The final cost depends on the number of accounts to connect with Impasto.
The pricing for consulting services starts from $80.
The Expandi pricing starts from $99 per month for the Business plan. However, if you need to use multiple accounts and assign roles to your employees, you have to upgrade to the Agency plan with the custom price.
Conclusions
What makes Impasto.io better than Expandi?
- Impasto.io is very easy to use, while Expandi requires some time to get familiar with the service.
- You do not need to give your LinkedIn account credentials to Impasto and can delete added accounts at any time. Expandi makes it complicated to add accounts: it requires entering your credentials and credit card information.
- Impasto offers an individual approach to your campaigns by providing consulting services that are focused on your current objectives. With Expandi, you are left to run campaigns at your discretion.
- In Impasto, you have hyper-personalization features out of the box, while in Expandi, you would pay an extra fee for personalizing images for your campaigns.
- Impasto has a unique built-in scoring feature for monitoring prospects behavior while receiving your messages.
- You can easily add multiple LinkedIn accounts to Impasto and run multiple campaigns from a single place. With Expandi, this is possible for agencies for higher prices.
In which fields Expandi outperforms Impasto?
- Expandi includes smart sequences that let you build custom campaigns with different actions.
- With Expandi, you can add email follow-ups to your campaigns, whereas with Impasto, you may use the scraped LinkedIn data to run email campaigns via third-party services.
- Expandi offers multiple campaign types for sales, recruitment, and fundraising.