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Right now I'm sitting behind my desk at a top 100 company, and quite frankly I started to hate my corporate job. I feel like it is killing my soul everyday.

I have always dreamed of owning my business, and the best thing I am good at is designing and developing websites. I have already created a website to present my new web studio and I started to send emails to a few business owners inviting them to create a website at a very good price.

The frustrating thing is that I never heard from a single one of them. I don't know what I'm doing wrong.

Could you share your experience prospecting new clients in a business similar to mine?

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This question has been migrated per approval from this question on Meta. – justkt Jun 28 '11 at 16:36
Email is a terribly ineffective way to sell professional services like website creation. You might want to ask a different question, like "What are effective ways to market my services as a website creator?" – Bob Murphy Jun 28 '11 at 17:47

migrated from writers.stackexchange.com Jun 28 '11 at 16:36

2 Answers

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The "I will design your website, cheap!" email is so commonly received by business owners that they probably consider this spam.

Your question is larger than just email -- it's sales in general. Sales is easy: people buy from people whom they like. So the question becomes: how to make friends with people who need websites created.

That's a broad question. One good start is the book How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie. Every bookstore in the world will have a copy of this somewhere.

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For a direct mail advertisement, that's physical mail sent through the Post Office, 2-3% is considered a good response rate. That means 97+% of your prospects just throw your ad in the trash. With e-mail, chances are very good that anything that looks remotely like an advertisement will not even reach the recipient, and it is trivial to delete any ads that do get through. So I would not expect any response at all to "a few" cold e-mails. You might do better with phone calls, actually.

If you posted the e-mail you're sending here, you can probably get it critiqued, but I would still be surprised if you can succeed with this avenue of advertising.

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hey kindall, thank you for your answer. – user327843 Jun 28 '11 at 12:38
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Actually 1% is a very good response rate for direct mail (through the post office). For email, 0.1% might be more likely. – Joel Spolsky♦ Jun 28 '11 at 18:03

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