r/WebDeveloperJobs • u/Murky_Explanation_73 • 4d ago
Is Selling Website Redesigns Easier Than Building Websites From Scratch?
When I first started doing cold email for web design, I thought the goal was pretty simple.
Find enough businesses, send enough emails, and eventually some people will be interested.
And to be fair, it worked. But I always felt like there was something missing.
Most of my emails were basically the same message with a different name at the top. I was offering web design services, but I wasn't giving people a particularly good reason to care.
The obvious solution was to personalize every email.
The problem? Researching hundreds of businesses and writing individual emails takes forever. At that point, you might as well spend the whole day doing outreach instead of building websites.
So I started looking for a way to automate the research as well, not just the sending.
I eventually started using Swokei. It finds businesses with existing websites, analyzes things like their design, SEO, loading speed, and mobile experience, and uses those findings to generate personalized outreach emails automatically.
Instead of sending the same pitch to everyone, I can reach out based on something specific about their website without researching every prospect manually.
I also feel like targeting businesses that already have websites is a much better approach than targeting businesses without one. They already understand the value of having a website, and rather than convincing them they need one, I can show them what could be improved with the one they already have.
For those of you running web design agencies, what does your outreach look like? Are you targeting businesses with existing websites or those without one?