LinkedIn will hand you a spreadsheet of every first-degree connection you have, free, from a settings menu most sellers never open. Learning how to export LinkedIn connections takes about six clicks; the parts the quick tutorials skip are why the email column comes back mostly empty, and what a seller should do with a file full of people who already said yes to them once. This guide covers the native export step by step, the opt-in catch to understand before you request the archive, the compliant route to business emails, and the message that reopens a dormant connection without burning it.
The playbook here comes from operating volume, not from reading other people’s roundups. Our parent agency, Referral Program Pros, has booked more than 7,000 meetings across 4,000+ outbound campaigns, and a striking share of the fastest wins in those campaigns came from lists like this one: people the seller already knew. GTM Bud is that agency playbook turned into software, backed by a written guarantee of 5 percent positive replies on LinkedIn, 1.5 percent on email, or a full refund.
One sourcing note. LinkedIn’s own help pages could not be fetched directly while researching this piece, so platform behavior below is attributed to the 2026 guides that relay it, and several of those guides are written by enrichment vendors with a product to sell, Clay, Dropcontact, SalesQL, and Bardeen among them. That provenance is flagged where it matters, and figures that could not be pinned to a named source were dropped.
How to export LinkedIn connections, step by step
You export LinkedIn connections from Settings & Privacy, under Data privacy, using the Get a copy of your data tool. LinkedIn builds the file on its own servers and emails you a download link, so the export is sanctioned, free, and available on every account type, including free accounts. Guides from Draftly, La Growth Machine, Cleverly, and Linked API all document the same flow in 2026: you can request just the connections file, which usually arrives within minutes, or the larger archive of everything LinkedIn holds on you, which the same guides place at up to 24 hours and occasionally longer. The output is a Connections.csv listing every first-degree connection you have. There is no route to second-degree contacts or anyone else’s network here; LinkedIn’s help text, as relayed by The Bricks and Bardeen, limits the export to your own first-degree connections.
The exact clicks:
- Click the Me icon under your profile photo and choose Settings & Privacy.
- Open Data privacy in the left-hand menu.
- Under How LinkedIn uses your data, click Get a copy of your data.
- Pick the option to select something in particular and tick Connections, or choose the larger archive if you also want messages and profile history.
- Click Request archive and confirm your password if prompted.
- Watch your email for LinkedIn’s download link, grab the ZIP, and open Connections.csv in a spreadsheet.
What lands in the file is thinner than most people expect. The columns that both The Bricks’ and Linked API’s guides corroborate are First Name, Last Name, Email Address, Company, Position, and Connected On, with Linked API’s 2026 guide also listing a profile URL column. No phone numbers, no location, no message history. Two columns deserve a closer look: Connected On, which quietly turns the file into a timeline of your network, and Email Address, which is where the surprise lives.
Why are most of the email addresses missing?
Most email cells in a LinkedIn connections export are empty because LinkedIn only includes an address when that specific connection opted in to sharing it. The control belongs to the connection, not to you: a setting under Visibility called Who can see or download your email address decides whether their address travels into other people’s exports, and the export guides that document it, CloudSponge’s, Reply.io’s, and Clay’s among them, consistently report that the download permission is off by default. Reply.io and Clay are outreach and enrichment vendors, so they profit from the gap they describe, but the mechanics match the setting text LinkedIn shows every member. Nothing you toggle on your side fills the column, and there is no supported way to recover the missing addresses from LinkedIn itself. Expect a mostly blank column with a scattering of personal addresses from people who joined years ago and never revisited the setting.
Knowing this before you request the archive changes how you plan. If verified business emails were the entire point, the native export alone will disappoint you, and the enrichment step below belongs in the plan from the start. But for a seller, the empty column matters less than it seems, because the warmest channel to these people was never email. It is the LinkedIn message thread they opened the day they accepted you.
Which export route fits which job?
The native file is one of three ways sellers get LinkedIn data into a spreadsheet, and they solve different problems. This article covers the first and third rows; pulling search results out of Sales Navigator is its own problem with its own account-risk spectrum, mapped end to end in our guide to how to export leads from Sales Navigator.
| Route | What you get | Limits |
|---|---|---|
| Native connections CSV | Every first-degree connection: name, company, position, connected date | Emails only for opted-in connections; no second-degree contacts; sparse fields |
| Sales Navigator export tools | Search results beyond your network, usually with enrichment bolted on | No native button on any tier; extraction tools operate against LinkedIn’s user agreement and carry account risk |
| Enrichment upload to a vendor (Dropcontact, SalesQL, Clay) | Business emails appended to your exported CSV from the vendor’s own data | Coverage of 50 to 80 percent by Dropcontact’s own claim; paid per contact; found addresses still need verification |
How do you get business emails for your connections?
The route to business emails is enrichment: upload the Connections.csv to an email-finding service and let it append addresses from its own data sources. Dropcontact’s help center documents this exact flow, taking LinkedIn’s native export as the input file, and claims a 50 to 80 percent find rate from a name and company alone, a figure worth repeating only with its provenance attached, because it is the vendor’s own number. SalesQL offers CSV enrichment on its paid plans, and Voila Norbert and Clay run the same play with different data sources and pricing. Whichever vendor you pick, verify the found addresses before any campaign sees them, since enrichment data ranges from current to years stale.
Now the part the vendor guides soft-pedal. Uploading a file LinkedIn gave you is not scraping: nothing touches your LinkedIn session, and the export itself is a sanctioned feature. The prohibited territory starts where tools act on LinkedIn for you. Browser extensions that walk profile pages to harvest contact data are exactly the automated collection LinkedIn’s user agreement bans, and the penalty lands on your account as a restriction, mechanics our guide to whether LinkedIn automation is safe covers in depth. There is also a privacy question that does not vanish because an address is findable: a business email appended by a vendor is still personal data in most jurisdictions, so the lawful-basis homework you would do for any cold list applies here too, GDPR included. Enrichment buys you a channel, not a permission slip.
If you would rather not own the enrichment stack at all, automated lead generation from GTM Bud sources and enriches leads outside your LinkedIn session entirely, which removes the vendor-shopping and the session-risk questions in one move.
Your first-degree network is the warmest list you never work
A first-degree export is a list where the hardest step of LinkedIn outreach, the accepted connection request, is already done. That changes the math on every constraint that governs cold outreach. Messages to existing connections do not draw from the roughly 100 invitations per week that most accounts carry, so your volume is governed by messaging discipline rather than the invitation ceiling. Browsing your own connections page does not count against the commercial use limit either, per the LinkedIn help documentation covered in our commercial use limit guide, so working this list costs a free account none of its metered searches. And the Connected On column tells you exactly who went quiet and when. Across the 4,000+ campaigns our agency has run, reconnection lists built from lapsed first-degree relationships consistently outperform their cold equivalents, for the unglamorous reason that recognition beats novelty in a crowded inbox.
No seller sits on more of this asset than an account executive. Years of deals mean years of connections: champions who changed jobs, evaluators who chose a competitor, prospects who ghosted at proposal stage. Most of them are in your export, timestamped. If you carry a self-sourced pipeline number and no SDR support, this file is the first list to work, and working it on your own account between demos is exactly the motion AI LinkedIn outreach for account executives is built around. The 30-minute daily routine that pairs with it is in our self-sourced pipeline guide for AEs.
What should you actually send a dormant connection?
A re-opener, not a pitch. The message that works references the relationship that actually existed, acknowledges the gap, and makes one small ask; the message that burns the list treats 2,000 warm contacts as a cold audience with better open rates. The skeleton our agency runs on reconnection campaigns:
- Open with the real context. “We spoke when you were evaluating [category] at [previous company]” beats any opening-line generator, because only you two share that memory.
- Name the gap honestly. “It has been about two years” reads as human; pretending the conversation never paused reads as automated.
- Give the one-sentence update that justifies the message. What changed on your side that is relevant to their world, not your full release notes.
- Ask something small. A question they can answer from their phone. The meeting request belongs two messages later, after they have re-engaged.
Pace it like outreach, because it is outreach: spread sends across days, let follow-ups breathe, and stop the sequence the instant someone replies, since a follow-up after a reply is a spam report waiting to happen. That stop-on-reply discipline is the core job of properly built LinkedIn DM automation. One caveat for sellers whose account has been as dormant as their connections: an account that sent nothing for months should ramp its activity back up before messaging at volume, the week-by-week discipline our LinkedIn account warm-up guide maps in full.
Frequently asked questions about exporting LinkedIn connections
How long does a LinkedIn connections export take?
Minutes to 24 hours. Requesting only the connections file through the select-something-in-particular option is the fast path, while the full archive takes up to 24 hours per the 2026 guides from Draftly and Linked API, with some guides reporting occasional longer waits. LinkedIn emails the download link to the address on your account, and the ZIP contains Connections.csv.
Can you export second-degree contacts or someone else’s connections?
No. The native export covers only your own first-degree connections; LinkedIn’s help text, relayed by The Bricks and Bardeen, states that contacts outside your first degree cannot be exported. Reaching beyond your network means search-based prospecting, and getting those results out is a different problem with different risk, covered in our guide to exporting leads from Sales Navigator, linked earlier in this article.
Is exporting your LinkedIn connections against LinkedIn’s rules?
No. The data archive is a feature LinkedIn built, it runs on LinkedIn’s servers, and downloading your own file is sanctioned on every account type. The line sits at automated collection: extensions and bots that harvest data from LinkedIn pages violate the user agreement and risk restriction, per the policies covered in our automation safety guide, linked earlier in this article. Uploading your exported file elsewhere happens entirely outside your LinkedIn session.
How do you let your connections download your email address?
Open Settings & Privacy, go to Visibility, and find Who can see or download your email address. It holds two controls: who can see the address on your profile, and a separate toggle allowing connections to download it in their data exports, reported off by default by the guides that document the setting, CloudSponge’s among them. Turning it on changes what others can export about you; it never fills the blanks in your own file.
Can you upload the connections CSV straight into an outreach tool?
Yes, most platforms accept a CSV import, but clean it first: deduplicate against open opportunities and current customers, drop the former colleagues you already talk to, and segment by the Connected On date so a two-year-dormant contact gets a different opener than last month’s connection. A platform running LinkedIn outreach automation can then message the list as first-degree connections, skipping the invitation step entirely.
Turn the export into booked meetings
The honest summary of how to export LinkedIn connections fits in three lines. The CSV is six clicks away under Settings & Privacy and arrives within a day, usually much faster. The email column only fills for connections who opted in, so business emails come from enrichment vendors, bought with verification homework and an honest look at the privacy obligations. And the file’s real value was never the emails: it is a timestamped list of people who already said yes to you once, which makes it the highest-trust outbound list a seller owns.
What remains is the sending motion: a re-opener that references the real relationship, paced follow-ups, and a hard stop the moment someone replies. That is the part GTM Bud runs for you, on your own account and inside its limits, with the guarantee in writing: 5 percent positive replies on LinkedIn, 1.5 percent on email, or a full refund. If your next quarter depends on pipeline you source yourself, start with AI LinkedIn outreach for account executives and put the warmest list you own to work.