8 steps to get an offline business to sign up for web design and SEO

8 steps to get an offline business to sign up for web design and SEO

When it comes to getting an offline business into the online world, it can be pretty difficult.  Getting an offline business to sign up for website design or SEO can be a tough thing to do, but it's possible.  If you've ever tried talking to a business who isn't online already, you know the difficulties there is trying to convince them to sign up with you and your services.  

I've talked with plenty of offline business owners and I know for a fact that it's a different conversation than with most potential clients I have.  Basically you have to talk to them like they don't know what a website is and show them the importance.  If showing them proof of success doesn't work, throw discounts at them as well as free services until they sign up.  Obviously you can't give away too much because you have to get paid for your time, but give away what is easy for you to finish up quickly so you can get paid for the good stuff

I've written down 8 steps in order to get them to sign up.  If they're still not willing to sign up after all 8 steps, then it will likely be impossible to get them to no matter what you do.

8 steps to get offline business's to sign
up for web design and SEO

Step 1: Contact them via email
With every campaign you run to get new clients on board, you'll always want to email them first.  In the emails you can't sound spammy because your emails will likely get deleted.  Just go over why you think it would be a good idea for them to sign up with you in order to get a better design and some more traffic to their website from the search engines.  Let them know that you are a paid service but the traffic they will get to their new design will be free.  They won't have to pay for any clicks through adwords or bing ads, sometimes this is an easy way to get them on board because they see the word "free" lol.

I would say to send them 2 or 3 emails and if you don't get a response, move on to step 2.


Step 2: Contact them via snail mail
Snail mail still works well if you do it right.  The method I like to use is adding 2 dice to the envelope along with what I emailed them.  I will type out the email in a font that looks like it was handwritten, just so I can save some time   If you're doing a massive amount of these each week it could take a lot of time to do the snail mail method because you'll have to set up and seal every envelope, but if you were doing less than 50 a week you shouldn't feel too burdened.

Snail mail with the dice in the envelope method usually will cost a little more for each letter because it's an awkward shaped piece of mail.  Adding the dice to the letter will get people wondering what is actually in the letter and that will increase your open rates

You might not get a great response from this, but you should try it out anyway just to see what happens.  Usually you can get a few monthly subscriptions this way and that will easily pay for the following months of snail mail methods


Step 3: Contact them with a phone call
When it comes to marketing, if you're not calling your prospects after a few emails and snail mail then you're just giving up.  Give them a call and let them know that you've been trying to contact them via email and actually mail.  They might remember you and they also might hang up immediately lol, but stick with it and you can usually get a few sign ups at this point.

Go over what you can do for the, but don't talk about the price until they're interested in signing up or they ask how much it costs.  Tell them your lowest price if they ask, and not the pricing you think would be best for them.  After they agree to sign up, get them on board and start the lowest priced work.  After a month or two of SEO (hopefully the design is done already) you will be able to tell them it's working well, but you think it would be better if they increase the campaign budget to get a bigger bang for their buck.


Step 4: Show them proof of success
If you are on the phone with them and they are still on the fence, ask them for their email and you can send them proof.  Be sure to let them know that you're not adding them to a list of any sort, you're just sending them some proof that they can look at to see the work you've done.  

You won't be able to send out some super technical report because 99% of people won't know what they're looking at.  Send them a basic ranking report with some screenshots of keywords you were tracking that skyrocketed after an SEO campaign.  The screenshots can just be of a low difficulty keyword that jumped, the client won't know the difference lol


Step 5: Give then "Discounts"
If you've got them to the point where they are going to sign up but say no anyway, throw a discount at them.  People love discounts and if they're on the fence with the original price, they'll likely sign up for the discounted price.  Be sure they're going to be paying monthly and they will be grandfathered into that price unless they want to upgrade later on.  Obviously you'll pitch them a larger package in a few months to see if they're sign up for something better, which puts more money in your pocket.


Step 6: Offer them a payment plan over 1 year
Usually there are a lot of web design and SEO companies that will ask for a full years payment or full design payment up front.  What you can do is offer them a payment plan for the work done.  You will either have them sign a contract and let them host the design, or host the design yourself until month 12 is over and you can transfer the file to wherever the client wants or they can stick with you for hosting.  You won't be hosting it yourself, just put it on your favorite hosting platform and pay for it each month lol.  As for SEO, you would want to get a 1 year contract for this because you can't expect them to keep paying month to month when they don't really see the benefit in it.  I've had plenty of clients unsubscribe at 80 days when I told them it would take a minimum of 3 months to see any rankings increase lol.


Step 7: Offer them free hosting and server management
People who don't have business websites don't usually know how hosting works.  They know it's not super expensive, but they also don't know how to set any of that up.  You can also say you'll manage everything for free, but this is just the hosting company doing the work for you which you don't really have to pay for lol.  Saying you'll offer free server management is just a nice thing to hear of you're the client because it makes it sound like you're doing a lot for them, for free


Step 8: Offer them free on page optimization
Now if they're signing up for SEO, you'll have to do on page optimization regardless of what the client says.  This is because you can't have a good SEO campaign without doing proper on page optimization.  If you say you'll optimize their pages for free, you're actually just telling them something you had planned on doing anyway lol.




In Conclusion:
There are plenty of ways to get a client to sign up for web design and SEO, you just have to think outside the box slightly.  If the client is still not willing to sign up after step 8, they're likely never going to sign up.  If you've gotten a client to sign up after step 8, without giving away everything for free, I want to know lol



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Thanks!

Razzy