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What Are LinkedIn InMail Credits?
LinkedIn InMail credits are a premium feature that allow you to send direct messages to any LinkedIn member — regardless of whether you're connected. On a free account, your messaging is limited to first-degree connections and people with Open Profiles. InMail removes that constraint entirely: you can reach 2nd and 3rd-degree connections without sending a connection request first.
Credits are allocated monthly based on your subscription plan. Once spent, they're gone until the next billing cycle — unless you trigger a refund through the reply policy (covered below). Each plan also has a maximum credit cap: unused credits roll over month to month up to the cap, then stop accumulating.
How Many InMail Credits Do You Get Per Plan?
The number of monthly InMail credits varies significantly across LinkedIn's plan tiers. Here's the full breakdown — including the rollover caps that determine how many credits you can accumulate before they stop building up:
3 Strategies to Get More InMail Credits (Without Paying Extra)
Exploit the InMail Refund Policy
LinkedIn refunds your InMail credit whenever a recipient responds to your message within 90 days — regardless of whether they accept, decline, or simply reply. This is the most important feature of InMail credits that most users never fully leverage.
The practical implication: if your InMail campaign generates a 40% reply rate, you're effectively running at 60% of the nominal credit cost. At 60% reply rates — achievable with strong targeting and personalisation — your credits recycle fast enough to approach sustainable, high-volume InMail outreach from a fixed monthly allowance.
Higher reply rate = more credits recycled = effectively unlimited InMail capacity from the same monthly allowance.
Send Free InMails to Open Profiles
LinkedIn Premium members can enable "Open Profile" — a setting that allows any LinkedIn user to message them directly without using InMail credits. Sending a message to an Open Profile costs you nothing, regardless of your connection status with that person.
How to identify an Open Profile: Visit the profile, click "More", then select "Message". If the compose box shows "Free Message" instead of the standard InMail prompt, the profile is open and you can message for free. In Sales Navigator, you can filter specifically for Open Profiles using the Spotlight filter in Lead Search — allowing you to build targeted lists of free-to-message prospects.
In a typical target audience, a meaningful percentage of decision-makers will have Open Profiles — particularly those who are actively networking, speaking, or hiring. Filtering for Open Profiles before running your outreach and messaging them first preserves your InMail credits for the prospects who don't have this setting enabled.
Use InMail as a Last Resort — Not a First Touch
The most common InMail mistake is treating credits as a primary outreach channel. With 50 credits per month on Sales Navigator, InMail cannot be the foundation of any serious prospecting strategy. Compared to InMail, you can send 150–200 emails per day from your mailbox and up to 100 LinkedIn messages per day from your account — both at zero incremental cost.
Additionally, InMails are visually flagged in the recipient's LinkedIn messaging interface. Prospects see it immediately as a commercial outreach message — which reduces the naturalness of the interaction compared to a regular connection message from someone they've already encountered.
The optimal sequence for any prospect:
Extract their business email via Apollo, Hunter, or Kaspr and send a personalised cold email. Cheaper and less flagged than InMail for the initial touch.
If no reply to email, send a connection request with a personalised note. Once accepted, follow up with a free direct message — no InMail credit required.
If the connection request goes unanswered for 7–10 days, deploy an InMail as the final attempt. By this point, you've already made two touches — the InMail arrives with some prior context rather than cold. Reserve credits for high-value targets where this final effort is genuinely justified.
Warm up every InMail target before you spend a credit
InMails from familiar names get 2–3× more replies — which means more credits refunded. PowerIn automatically comments on your target prospects' LinkedIn posts before your InMail arrives, so your name is already in their notifications when the message lands. More replies. More refunds. More effective outreach.
How to Write InMails That Get Replies (and Refunds)
Reply rate determines how far your credits go. The anatomy below is the structure that consistently outperforms generic templates — keep everything short, specific, and low-friction.
4–6 words. Reference something specific to the recipient — their company, a recent post, a shared context. Avoid generic triggers like "Quick question", "Partnership opportunity" or "Following up" — these are associated with spam in the recipient's mind and tank open rates.
One sentence referencing a specific, genuine icebreaker. LinkedIn surfaces several in the right-hand panel of the InMail compose interface: the recipient's Twitter/X profile, their website, shared connections, shared Groups, their recent posts, and their published articles. Use one — the specificity signals you've actually looked at their profile.
Structure your body using the RABT template — one of the most effective InMail formats for B2B outreach:
When you send matters as much as what you send. The data on optimal InMail timing consistently points to early morning during the working week:
LinkedIn InMail Credits: Frequently Asked Questions
Do LinkedIn InMail credits roll over to the next month?
Yes — unused InMail credits accumulate month to month, up to a plan-specific cap. Premium Career accumulates up to 15, Premium Business up to 45, Sales Navigator Core up to 150, and Recruiter Lite up to 120. Once you hit the cap, new monthly credits replace expired ones rather than adding to the total.
How do I get InMail credits refunded?
Credits are automatically refunded when a recipient responds to your InMail within 90 days of sending. The response can be an acceptance, a decline, or any direct reply — all three trigger a refund. There's no manual claim process; LinkedIn applies the refund to your account automatically.
Why do I only have 5 InMail credits?
Five credits per month indicates you're on LinkedIn Premium Career — the entry-level premium tier, designed primarily for job seekers rather than sales or outreach. To increase your InMail allowance, upgrade to Premium Business (15 credits) or Sales Navigator Core (50 credits). Both are accessible from the Me menu → Access My Premium → upgrade options.
Can I buy additional InMail credits?
Yes — LinkedIn allows you to purchase individual InMail credits above your monthly allowance at approximately $10 per credit. Before doing this, evaluate whether upgrading your subscription delivers better value: Sales Navigator Core at $100/month gives you 50 credits plus full search access, which often costs less per credit than buying them individually.
What's the InMail response rate?
LinkedIn's data shows InMails achieve an 18–25% response rate on average, compared to roughly 3% for standard cold messages. Up to 85% of InMails are opened by recipients. Response rates vary significantly based on personalisation, subject line quality, and whether the recipient has been pre-warmed through prior LinkedIn engagement — which is where PowerIn's comment-based warm-up strategy has its strongest impact on InMail performance.
What are the character limits for InMail?
InMail subject lines are capped at 200 characters. The message body allows up to 1,900 characters including spaces and punctuation. A dynamic character counter in the lower-right corner of the compose window tracks your count as you type. Practically speaking, the best-performing InMails rarely use more than 150 words in the body — brevity signals confidence and respects the recipient's time.
Make every InMail credit work harder. Warm prospects up first.
The single biggest lever on InMail reply rates is whether the recipient already knows your name. PowerIn builds that familiarity automatically — through AI-personalised comments on your prospects' posts before your InMail arrives. Higher reply rates. More credits refunded. Better ROI from the same monthly allowance.