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As a web designer it is absolutely essential that you have your own website. A website can help you to show your portfolio to clients via email without sending attachments along with it. Seeing a link to a website is much more preferable than downloading JPG or PDF attachments. Having clients go look at a website instead of an email is also a great way to market your custom web design skills with some hard working copy. Having great copy of your website will help you gain new clients. One quick and inexpensive way to market yourself is by printing some mailer postcards at the same time you print your business cards. Sending out a custom designed postcard is a great way to show off your creative talents and get noticed by people who want to hire your type of services. Executives are more familiar with receiving emails from scouting freelancers these days. It would be more impressive and memorable for them to receive a postcard advertising your freelance services instead. When designing your postcard, you want your best visuals on one side, and then on the other side, write something about the benefits your clients will receive by using your services. Remember to include all of your contact information. Research which kind of companies might want to hire a freelance designer and design your postcards to target those companies. Keep in mind that larger corporations with multiple departments will have more work for you to do that is lucrative and on-going than a small or medium-sized company. It is possible that one big company could be your client for life and could end up paying all of your bills. Search for all the big companies in your area and prepare a spreadsheet of contacts, including names, titles, email addresses, mail addresses and telephone numbers. Key sales and marketing contacts are the people you want to be sending your postcards to. If you want any success in gaining new clients, it is important to follow a rigid marketing strategy. About a week after sending out your postcards to all the contacts in your spreadsheet, send those same contacts a personalized email asking if they are in need a freelance designer and request a meeting to discuss your offer. Include a link to your website in that email so contacts can look at your portfolio. When sending emails to prospective clients, make sure you always personalize them and send them one at a time. Do not send one generic email to all of your contacts at the same time. Keep your emails short and polite, asking for permission to meet with them or send some samples of your work. Do not attach any visuals in the first email because it will immediately be deleted as spam. You will also want to set up an automatic email signature so prospective clients can quickly access your contact information. If a contact does request to see some of your samples, follow up the next day with a phone call asking them for feedback on your work. A successful pitching meeting is well prepared and focused on the client. Before any meeting, examine the company’s website so you know what kind of work your contact most likely need from you. Tailor your portfolio to show the most relevant work first. When your meeting is over, ask for more contacts from other departments within the company and hand out plenty of business cards. Once you get home, send a thank you email to your contact, reminding them of your availability. You’ll find that prospective clients often say things like “I have no projects at the moment, but I’ll keep you in mind”. Don’t get frustrated, and certainly don’t beg for work on the phone. Just make a note in your database to keep track of responses, then send reminder emails to contacts every month, just so they really do keep you in mind. Give them a phone call every couple of months; sooner or later they will give you work.
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