How to Sell Squarespace to Your Clients
In the world of professional web design, choosing the right website building platform is paramount. As technology evolves, clients expect websites that not only captivate their target audience but also perform seamlessly. Enter Squarespace–a versatile, intuitive, and feature-rich web design platform that revolutionizes the way you bring your clients’ visions to life.
Squarespace is one of the most powerful platforms for website designers. But how do you convince your clients to choose Squarespace over other platforms? From its user-friendly interface and robust features to its commitment to aesthetics and functionality, Squarespace boasts many benefits that make it an invaluable tool in a web designer’s arsenal.
Understanding your client’s needs and goals
Before diving into Squarespace’s capabilities, you’ll want to get to know each client’s goals. This will help you address the benefits of Squarespace that meet their most pressing needs. Demonstrating that you’ve taken the time to understand their business and its challenges builds trust. Clients are more likely to partner with a web designer who shows a genuine interest in helping them achieve their goals.
As you prepare what to share with each client, use these four points as your framework:
1. Stay client-focused
When you explain the benefits of Squarespace, take a client-centered approach. Try to understand their pain points and objectives, so that you can offer solutions that directly address their challenges. When you emphasize how the platform will make things better for them, you establish yourself as an effective problem solver.
2. Understand the client
What industry is your client in? Who is your client’s target audience? What will visitors expect from the site? What are your client’s goals? What do the best-performing sites in their industry look like? Understanding their goals is essential to knowing what benefits of Squarespace will best resonate with them. When you can demonstrate that Squarespace is the right platform to meet their specific needs, your sales pitch is more convincing.
3. Emphasize versatility
Squarespace is extremely versatile, meaning it can benefit various industries with different goals. Let your client know that with Squarespace, they have options, and you’ll guide them on what to include and what to bypass.
4. Powerful and intuitive
Squarespace may seem intimidating to a first-timer. Point out that while the platform is powerful enough for designers to build an eye-catching site, it’s intuitive enough for clients to manage themselves. This is an important point to remind clients when selling Squarespace as your platform of choice.
The benefits of using Squarespace
As a website designer, you may already know what makes Squarespace the best, all-in-one platform for designing beautiful and functional websites. Your client, however, may not be as familiar with Squarespace and its capabilities. Start the conversation by going over these top benefits:
Intuitive user interface (UI)
Effortless to manage
Beautiful, customizable templates and pre-built layouts
Responsive design
Capability to sell products, publish blog posts, and launch courses
Integrated email marketing
Built-in mobile experience to match the website style
Built-in analytics
Excellent customer support
Unlimited hosting
These features empower your client to have a beautiful website that gives them all the tools they need to scale and update their website anytime. Plus, no coding or formal design education are required.
Showcasing Squarespace’s design capabilities
Once you understand your client's needs and goals, you can dive more deeply into aspects of the platform that are most relevant to them. Design plays a significant role in capturing the attention of visitors and retaining their interest. Squarespace’s design tools enable web designers to create visually appealing websites, ensuring that visitors are engaged and more likely to convert into customers (or take other desired actions). It’s important to tout Squarespace’s design capabilities when pitching the platform to clients.
Here are some key points about Squarespace to consider:
1. Includes customizable layouts
Squarespace websites are fully customizable, empowering web designers to customize templates extensively or build a site from scratch. This means a website can be tailored to reflect the client’s unique brand, helping your client stand out from their competition.
2. Has a user-friendly interface
Squarespace empowers creative freedom while offering a user-friendly interface. To leave clients feeling confident long after a project is completed, craft a client offboarding plan that includes training time. This makes your clients feel more comfortable and supported as they become familiar with the platform under your guidance.
3. Boasts efficient styling
Global styling helps you create consistent design elements throughout your client’s entire website. This ensures that colors, fonts, spacing, and other visual aspects remain uniform, which is crucial for establishing and maintaining a strong, cohesive brand identity. It is especially useful if your client wants to update their branding down the line.
4. Builds brand personality
There are many design tools available that your client may not be aware of, including custom color palettes, free images, built-in photo editing, animation options, and more. All of these exist to support both you and your client during the design process (and after a project is completed).
Once you’ve covered these points, you’ll want to share examples so your clients can visualize the depth and breadth of the Squarespace. Share past projects from your portfolio of beautiful Squarespace-built sites, highlighting your approach and any tools, features, or products you used to achieve the final state. To make it resonate with the client, communicate anything you’d do differently to personalize their site while referencing past projects.
Talking about Squarespace’s user-friendly interface
Designers love Squarespace because it’s straightforward to pick up, even for beginners. But clients may be concerned about their own ability to update and maintain their website when you’ve completed and stepped away from the project. Fortunately, Squarespace gives them everything they need to manage the site themselves.
Show your client that after you’ve completed the site and they’ve begun to manage it, the platform makes it simple to update and scale.
1. Timely updates
Clients can make immediate content updates, respond to market changes, and run promotions or campaigns swiftly without depending on external assistance. This is particularly important in industries where responsiveness and timely content changes are critical. With saved sections and Squarespace’s drag-and-drop editor, Fluid Engine, it’s possible to add new pages and sections and update information as their business expands.
2. Content management
Clients often need to update website content regularly. A user-friendly interface empowers them to manage their content, such as adding blog posts, updating product listings, or changing images, without requiring constant assistance from you (or losing the look and feel of your original design). This independence saves time and resources.
3. Reduced maintenance costs
When clients can manage certain aspects of their websites themselves, it reduces the ongoing maintenance costs associated with hiring web designers for minor content updates. Clients can then allocate their budget for more significant design or development tasks.
4. Scalability
Squarespace is great for small- to medium-sized businesses (and even Enterprise companies). As your client’s business grows, their site can keep up, too. Squarespace sites can accommodate increased traffic and content as businesses expand, creating a smooth experience for visitors. This helps your client’s business adapt to changing market demands without costly disruptions. Scalability also empowers your client to explore new opportunities and markets, supporting diversification and growth.
After going over these benefits, share stories about past clients who previously had no web design experience but now successfully use Squarespace to manage their sites. Pair these anecdotes with any testimonials you’ve received.
Pro tip: If your potential clients are still not convinced they can use Squarespace, encourage them to start a trial. Ask them to play around with the platform and offer to walk them through some of the key features that they would interact with in the future.
Highlighting ongoing support
With Squarespace’s award-winning customer support, clients can feel assured that they have access to reliable help in case they encounter any issues with their website. This is invaluable, especially when launching a new website, or managing an existing one. You can remind them that there is no issue too big or too small that the customer support team can’t address.
Additional support comes in the form of integrations and features, such as the following:
1. Unlimited hosting
With unlimited hosting, clients don’t need to worry about resource limitations as their website grows. This scalability makes it possible for their website to handle increased traffic, data, and content without additional costs or technical challenges.
2. Duplication features
Squarespace pages and entire sites can be duplicated. This means you and your clients can create reusable templates and designs for pages, blog posts, email campaigns, products, and more. This feature streamlines the design and content creation process, saving both you and your client time. Down the line, clients can rely on Squarespace’s duplication capabilities to scale their business and add new products or content to their site.
Reaching audiences anywhere, on any device
Out of the box, Squarespace is mobile-friendly and has a suite of SEO capabilities, making it a great choice for businesses of all industries and sizes. Its built-in responsiveness and flexibility to design beautiful websites for every screen size make it an attractive (and efficient) choice for professional web designers and their clients. The following are helpful tips when it comes to understanding and explaining mobile-friendly design and SEO:
1. Squarespace sites are responsive
Websites need to look good and function well on a variety of devices and screen sizes. Squarespace’s built-in features automatically adapt websites to different screen sizes, no coding required.
2. Squarespace sites are mobile-friendly
Mobile responsiveness has become table stakes for customers interacting with a business online. Squarespace enables designers to create two responsive layouts for their client’s website, one for desktop and one for mobile.
3. Squarespace sites have built-in SEO
Beautiful websites also need to be discoverable. Squarespace websites are SEO-ready for all major search engines as soon as they’re launched. Built-in SEO tools make publishing SEO-friendly websites seamless, without the need for plugins.
Sharing cost-effectiveness
Squarespace offers competitive pricing plans, making it accessible for businesses and individuals with varying budget constraints. The following are some key points to highlight when discussing Squarespace’s value.
1. Different plans for different needs
Squarespace offers different pricing options to meet different needs. Plus, each plan has a great set of benefits. For instance, Commerce plans have a 0% transaction fee to support your client’s ecommerce business.
2. No hidden costs
Squarespace’s pricing is transparent with no hidden costs. Clients can accurately budget their web design project and ongoing hosting expenses, reducing the risk of unexpected fees.
3. All-in-one solution
Squarespace provides an all-in-one solution that includes unlimited hosting, design tools, and content management. The platform eliminates the need for clients to source and pay for separate services, simplifying the process and reducing costs associated with third-party integrations and support.
Check out Squarespace’s features list and integrations for a full breakdown of premier tools like Acuity Scheduling, Email Campaigns, Courses, and more Digital Products.
4. Built-in security
Squarespace’s hosting comes with built-in security features. This includes regular updates, SSL certification, and DDoS protection. Clients can trust that their website is secure and protected against cyber threats.
Additionally, Squarespace sites are stored on our servers, so your clients don’t need to worry about backups or dedicated hosting headaches. Squarespace provides automated daily backups and data recovery options, minimizing the risk of data loss due to accidental deletions or technical failures.
Pro tip: Circle members save 20% on new annual subscriptions and online store subscriptions, as well as 20% off annual subscriptions for Email Campaigns, Digital Products, and Acuity Scheduling. If you’re a Circle member, you’ll want to tell your clients how they can also save money by working with you.
Not yet a Circle member? Join today.
Highlighting client success stories
Show prospective clients how your work as a Squarespace website creator has made a positive difference for your past clients. Before-and-after case studies are powerful for establishing social proof and can help clients visualize what it means to have a Squarespace website.
Have you taken a mediocre website and, through your skills and the Squarespace platform, transformed it into something more attractive, responsive, effective, and user-friendly? Show it off as evidence of the amazing things you can do with Squarespace.
Overcoming common objections
Even after you’ve gone over all the features and benefits, you may still encounter objections or concerns about the platform. The best way to face these is by preparing ahead of time. The following are common objections clients have about Squarespace, as well as responses you can use to address their concerns.
Client’s objection: “Other platforms offer more customization.”
Your response: ”Squarespace templates are just the starting point for developing beautiful websites. Squarespace offers a vast library of templates in a wide range of styles, but that’s only the beginning of the process. As a professional web designer who regularly uses Squarespace, I can unlock the platform’s full potential to fulfill your business’s needs and make your site look and feel how you want it to.”
Client’s objection: “I’m concerned I won’t have enough control over SEO.”
Your response: “Squarespace offers built-in SEO tools. Squarespace automatically generates sitemaps, supports 301 redirects, and offers features like clean URLs, mobile responsiveness, and fast loading times, all of which are essential for SEO. Plus, as your web designer, I can take things a step further by helping you customize titles, meta descriptions, and URLs to ensure your website is best positioned for search engines.”
Client’s objection: “It’s too expensive.”
Your response: “Squarespace offers pricing plans to fit different budgets, including lower-cost options for Personal Plans. When considering costs, it’s important to also factor in the cost of hosting, security, and maintenance, which Squarespace provides, making the platform more cost-effective in the long run.”
Client’s objection: “It’s too complicated for me to manage.”
Your response: “Squarespace is known for its user-friendly interface, and it doesn’t require coding or technical skills. In addition to comprehensive tutorials and webinars, I have an offboarding process that is designed to support you as you become more familiar with the platform. Additionally, Squarespace has an award-winning customer support team that’s ready to lend a helping hand whenever you need it. ”
Client’s objection: “There aren’t enough integration options.”
Your response: “There are a range of third-party integrations that we can use to customize your website. The platform also boasts a suite of integrated tools, including Email Campaigns, Acuity Scheduling, Digital Products, and more.”
Client’s objection: “I don’t like the limitations on ecommerce functionality.”
Your response: “Squarespace offers robust ecommerce features, including inventory management, secure payment processing, customizable product pages, and integrated marketing tools. Another perk to Squarespace’s ecommerce functionality is that the platform doesn’t charge transaction fees on its Business and Commerce plans.”
When it comes to selling your web design services, you may encounter clients who aren’t familiar with Squarespace. As the all-in-one platform becomes part of your sales pitch, remind them that Squarespace benefits businesses of all sizes with its user-friendly interface, suite of world-class features, and marketing tools that support their growth. When in doubt, showing them what’s possible through past projects is a powerful approach to earning their business and establishing yourself as a go-to web professional.
Want more?
Check out Squarespace Circle, Squarespace’s program for professional designers. Along with exclusive content, discounts, and other perks, Circle brings professionals together from all across the globe to exchange advice while connecting with new clients and collaborators.
