"Can I export my LinkedIn contacts?" has a short answer: yes, LinkedIn gives you a CSV of your first degree connections from the settings page, and it arrives by email in about ten minutes. The longer answer is the reason this guide exists. The file has seven columns, most of the email addresses are blank, it never includes anyone you are not connected to, and it goes stale the week after you download it. Whether it is useful depends on what you want to do with it.
Everything below was checked against LinkedIn's own help pages on October 3, 2026, and against a fresh export from a working account.
How do I export my LinkedIn contacts?
Short answer: on LinkedIn desktop, click Me, then Settings & Privacy, then Data privacy, then Get a copy of your data. Pick Connections and click Request archive. LinkedIn emails a download link within about ten minutes; the zip contains Connections.csv with seven columns: First Name, Last Name, URL, Email Address, Company, Position and Connected On. Email addresses appear only for connections who allowed it in their privacy settings, which in practice is a minority, and there are no phone numbers, no second degree contacts and no Sales Navigator lead lists. To get the contacts into a CRM you either import the CSV (HubSpot, Pipedrive, Zoho and Salesforce all accept it, with the dedupe rules covered below) or save the people you actually work with one at a time from their profile with a Chrome extension such as Ln2CRM, which also pulls the fields the CSV lacks and keeps the record current.
Step by step: download your LinkedIn connections as a CSV
The export lives in the privacy settings, not in the My Network page, which is why people miss it. It works on desktop only; the mobile apps do not offer it.
- Click the Me icon at the top of LinkedIn and choose Settings & Privacy.
- In the left menu open Data privacy. Under "How LinkedIn uses your data" click Get a copy of your data (some accounts see it labelled Download your data).
- Choose what to export. The fast option is to tick the specific category Connections. The slow option is "Download larger data archive", which also includes messages, invitations, profile fields, account history and the data LinkedIn infers about you.
- Click Request archive. LinkedIn sends a link to your primary email address: within about ten minutes for a specific category, within 24 hours for the larger archive. The link stays live for 72 hours.
- Download and unzip. The connections file is
Connections.csv. In the larger archive it sits next to files such asmessages.csv,Invitations.csvandProfile.csv. - Clean the top of the file.
Connections.csvopens with a few "Notes:" rows explaining why emails are missing, before the real header row. Delete them, so that the first row readsFirst Name,Last Name,URL,Email Address,Company,Position,Connected On. Every CRM importer that "cannot find the columns" is tripping over those rows.
LinkedIn does not notify your connections when you export, and the export does not count against any limit. You can request it as often as you like.
What is inside Connections.csv, and what is not
| Column | What you get | Caveat |
|---|---|---|
| First Name, Last Name | As written on the profile | Names with Chinese, Japanese, Hebrew and other extended character sets can come through garbled; LinkedIn says the CSV and vCard formats do not support them |
| URL | The public profile URL, for example linkedin.com/in/jane-doe | This is the most valuable column: it is unique per person and does not change when they change jobs, so it is the right key for deduplication |
| Email Address | Only for connections who allow others to download their email | Usually blank for most rows; this is a privacy setting on their side, not a bug on yours |
| Company, Position | Current employer and title at the moment of export | A snapshot: titles drift within months and the file never updates |
| Connected On | The date you connected | Useful for tagging "network" versus "prospects" in the CRM |
What the file does not contain: phone numbers, location, headline, industry, company size, company website, the LinkedIn member ID, any second or third degree contact, people you follow, Sales Navigator saved leads and lists, and any history of your conversation with the person. In short, it is a list of names with a link, which is enough to seed a CRM and not enough to sell from.
Why are the emails missing?
Each member decides, under Settings, Data privacy, "Who can see or download your email address", whether connections may download their email in a data export. Most people have never looked at that setting and many profiles were created after LinkedIn tightened the default, so a typical export shows an email for a small share of rows. There is no setting on your side that changes this. Tools that promise to "export emails from LinkedIn" are not reading LinkedIn; they match the name and company against their own databases, which is a different product with its own accuracy and compliance questions.
Export LinkedIn contacts to Excel or Google Sheets
There is no separate "export to Excel" button; the CSV is the export. Two practical notes:
- Google Sheets: File, Import, Upload, and it handles UTF 8 names correctly. Delete the Notes rows first or tell the importer to skip them.
- Excel: double clicking the CSV often mangles accented and non Latin names. Use Data, From Text/CSV, set File Origin to 65001: Unicode (UTF 8), and Excel reads it cleanly. Save as .xlsx if you want to add columns.
Once it is in a sheet, add three columns before any CRM import: a Source column ("LinkedIn export 2026-10"), a Segment column (prospect, customer, partner, personal) and a Keep flag. A network of 2,000 connections usually contains a few hundred people worth a CRM record. Importing all of them is how CRMs fill up with recruiters and former classmates.
Can you export Sales Navigator lead lists?
No, not natively. Sales Navigator has no export button for saved leads, lead lists or search results on any tier, and the connections export above only covers first degree connections, not the leads you saved. The only official route for getting Sales Navigator data into a system is the CRM Sync on the Advanced Plus tier, which is sold by quote and works with Salesforce, HubSpot and Microsoft Dynamics; the Sales Navigator pricing guide has the numbers. Scraper extensions that pull lists out of Sales Navigator exist, but they operate against LinkedIn's terms and account restrictions do happen. The practical alternative for most teams is saving each lead to the CRM from the lead page as you work the list, which is what the one at a time section describes. If you are cancelling a seat, note that saved leads stay visible but frozen for 90 days after cancellation and then disappear; the Sales Navigator alternatives guide has the full cancellation checklist.
How to import the CSV into your CRM without duplicates
Every major CRM imports a CSV. The differences are in how each one decides that two rows are the same person, and that is where a LinkedIn export goes wrong, because most rows have no email.
| CRM | Where | Dedupes on | What to do with a LinkedIn export |
|---|---|---|---|
| HubSpot | Contacts, Import, File from computer | Email address (and record ID) | Rows without an email are always created as new contacts, so a second import of the same file doubles them. Import once, and map URL to a custom "LinkedIn URL" property. Details in importing LinkedIn contacts into HubSpot. |
| Pipedrive | Leads or Contacts, Import data, From a spreadsheet | Your choice of matching fields during import (name, email, phone, organization) | Create a custom person field "LinkedIn URL" first and map URL to it; match on that field for later imports. Company goes to Organization, Position to Job title. The Pipedrive integration guide covers the field setup. |
| Zoho CRM | Leads or Contacts, Import, From file | Email, or a field you choose, with skip or overwrite options | Map URL to a LinkedIn URL field and choose it as the duplicate check field; Zoho then lets you skip or overwrite matches on every later import. See the Zoho integration guide. |
| Salesforce | Data Import Wizard, Leads or Contacts | Name and email for Contacts, name and email or company for Leads | Decide Lead versus Contact before importing, add a LinkedIn URL field and map it. The wizard handles up to 50,000 rows. Walkthrough in importing LinkedIn contacts into Salesforce. |
Three rules that apply to all four:
- Keep the URL column and give it a field. It is the only reliable key for a LinkedIn person. Everything that happens later on LinkedIn, including the extension workflow below, matches on it.
- Import once, from a filtered sheet. Not the whole network, and never the same file twice.
- Tag the import. A source value such as "LinkedIn export 2026-10" lets you find and fix the batch later.
The problem with a one time export
A CSV is a photograph. The day you take it, Company and Position are right. Six months later a quarter of your prospects have changed titles, a few have changed companies, and your CRM still shows the old ones, because nothing connects the record back to LinkedIn. You also captured only the fields LinkedIn chose to give you, with no conversation history, no notes and no way to tell which of the 2,000 rows are live opportunities.
The second problem is scope. The export covers people you are already connected to. Prospecting is mostly about people you are not connected to yet: the second degree contact you found in search, the Sales Navigator lead, the person who replied to a post. None of them will ever appear in Connections.csv.
The other way: save LinkedIn contacts to your CRM one at a time, with full data
This is where a Chrome extension earns its place, and where we should say plainly that Ln2CRM is ours. It runs on the LinkedIn profile page, on regular LinkedIn and inside Sales Navigator, and talks to Pipedrive, HubSpot, Zoho or Salesforce through the CRM's own API. For the export question specifically, it changes four things:
- It tells you whether the person is already in the CRM before you do anything, matching on the LinkedIn URL first, then name and company, so the duplicates problem disappears at the source. That badge sits on every profile and search result you open.
- It saves the fields the CSV does not have: headline, location, current company with its LinkedIn page and website, job title, and the email or phone if the person shows them in their contact info. You can correct any field before it is written.
- It works for people you are not connected to, because it reads the profile you are looking at, not your connections list. That includes Sales Navigator lead pages, with no Advanced Plus seat.
- It keeps the record current. When someone's title or company on LinkedIn no longer matches the CRM, the extension flags the difference on the profile and updates the CRM in one click. The same panel adds notes and tasks and syncs the LinkedIn conversation with timestamps, so the record has history, not just a name.
| Question | CSV export from LinkedIn | Ln2CRM extension |
|---|---|---|
| Who is covered | First degree connections only | Anyone whose profile you open, including second degree and Sales Navigator leads |
| Fields | Name, URL, company, position, connected date; email for a minority | Name, URL, headline, title, company and company page, location, visible email and phone, plus notes, tasks and messages |
| Duplicates | Your problem at import time | Checked on the page before saving, by LinkedIn URL |
| Freshness | Snapshot, never updated | Flagged and updated when the profile changes |
| Sales Navigator | Not covered | Works on lead and account pages |
| Speed for 2,000 people | Ten minutes | Not the tool for bulk; it is for the people you actually work |
| Cost | Free | Free tier; Base $13 a month billed yearly, Pro $23 (pricing) |
Which one should you use?
Both, in this order. Export once to seed the CRM with the part of your existing network that belongs there, filtered in a sheet and tagged as an import, with the URL column mapped to a LinkedIn URL field. Then stop exporting and switch to saving people from the profile as you work: the extension recognises the imported records by that same URL, so the two methods meet cleanly instead of colliding. Teams that skip the first step lose their warm network; teams that only ever export end up with a CRM full of strangers and stale titles.
Exporting all your LinkedIn data: backup, GDPR or leaving LinkedIn
The larger data archive from the same settings page is the complete export: profile, positions, education, skills, connections, invitations sent and received, messages, comments, reactions, saved items, ad targeting data and the categories LinkedIn infers about you. It arrives within 24 hours (LinkedIn quotes up to 48 hours for some categories) and the link lasts 72 hours. It is the file to request before closing an account, because the data is gone once the account is closed, and it is the simplest way to exercise a data access request under GDPR or the CCPA. Members in the EU, EEA and Switzerland can also pull their data programmatically through LinkedIn's Member Data Portability API, which is aimed at developers rather than end users.