While building ecommerce websites can be profitable for freelance web developers, many new freelancers struggle to learn how to get ecommerce clients.
If you want to find ecommerce clients, stop blindly sending cold emails. Instead, follow these steps to start building your ecommerce client roster.
Step 1: Build Your Online Presence and Portfolio
Whether you’re building blogs or ecommerce sites, prospective clients want to see samples of your work. Freelancers often neglect their own websites. Who can blame them? Paying gigs take precedence over non-paid work. But, if you want to find more ecommerce clients, you’ll need a professional-looking website and portfolio with ecommerce examples.
To attract more ecommerce clients, consider adding ecommerce-specific content. From case studies to blogs, add content to demonstrate your expertise and provide helpful resources to people wanting to open an ecommerce store.
Step 2: Market Yourself to Ecommerce Clients
After setting up your online presence, you can use your site and content to market yourself and find ecommerce clients. Consider using social media, paid advertisements, and freelance platforms to market your services.
Social Media
Use the portfolio examples, case studies, and content from your website to update your social media profiles. Your social network can be an excellent resource for potential clients. Even if someone isn’t looking to start an ecommerce business, they might know someone who needs help and can make an introduction for you.
Paid Advertising
From search to social media, digital advertising offers an affordable and easy way to find ecommerce clients. Advertisers face fierce competition for keywords related to ecommerce website building. You can decrease your advertising costs and increase conversions by focusing on a specific niche such as a location or type of ecommerce store.
Freelancing Platforms
Many ecommerce business owners look for web developers on freelancing platforms as an alternative to hiring an ecommerce agency.
Freelancing platforms for ecommerce website projects include:
Some freelancing platforms charge freelancers a commission, so you’ll want to check the terms and adjust your pricing accordingly.
Lots of client sites?
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Step 3: Nurture Leads and Close Deals
Not every visitor to your website or freelancing profile will be ready to start a project. Learning to nurture your leads helps you build a solid pipeline of potential projects.
Lead nurturing ideas include:
Email Campaigns. Set up an email newsletter or implement drip campaigns to keep prospects engaged. A regular email update can keep your name top-of-mind when prospects decide they’re ready to begin a project.
Retargeting. Retargeting ads help you stay in front of prospects wherever they go on the internet. If you’ve ever looked for something on Amazon and then your social feeds suddenly have several ads for that item, you’re familiar with retargeting. Put it to work for your business. Consider highlighting how you can solve major pain points for ecommerce business owners. Time to launch is a significant concern for many people. Use your retargeting ads to illustrate how fast you can build a site.
Personal Outreach. Personalization goes a long way in making prospects feel like you understand their business. After you’ve launched a new site or solved a problem for a client, consider sending personalized emails to some of the prospects in your pipeline. For example, if the new site you built for a client reduced their cart abandonment rate, email prospects a link to the site. Write something like, “We helped XYZ company increase conversion and decrease cart abandonment. What problem can we help you solve?”
Step 4: Deliver Top-Performing Sites
One of the best ways to grow your ecommerce website clientele is to deliver great sites quickly. From proprietary systems like Shopify or BigCommerce to open source solutions like WooCommerce, ecommerce business owners have choices for self-service ecommerce platforms. But most business owners don’t want to take the time to learn them. As a freelance developer, you can deliver value to clients by building sites quickly and making them easy for clients to update.
Word-of-mouth advertising is a freelancer’s best friend. Ask your clients for referrals. Referral projects often close faster because the client who recommended you can vouch for your skills and services.
How to Get Ecommerce Clients with Nexcess
Figuring out how to get ecommerce clients is only half the battle. You also need to build great sites. Nexcess helps freelancers build stellar WooCommerce sites for their clients with:
Premium Tools. A curated group of plugins and tools help you create a better, modern, and unique site.
Fast Themes. Your Managed WordPress planincludes a selection of premium themes that are easy to customize and won’t slow down your site.
Sales Monitoring. All Managed WooCommerce plans have Sales Performance Monitor – allowing you to monitors your store's sales against historical performance and find out when sales start to trend downward.
Check out our Managed WooCommerce plans to get started today.
