Educating Customers and Boosting Sales

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Educating Customers and Boosting Sales Posted: 27 Aug 2010 07:54 AM PDT It's sometimes easy to forget that domain names aren't something that the average person is familiar with. Working in the hosting or Internet industry, understanding how different domain extensions work work is just part of daily life. For those familiar with how domains are bought and sold, the concept of premium domain names and the domain name aftermarket is fairly basic. But for the general public, these things can be confusing – they often have no clue that they can easily buy a .co or .us domain name, or that they might be able to get a perfect domain name for their business through the domain name aftermarket. To help educate customers, we created a pair of example videos that explain in simple terms exactly what the different domain name extenstions are and also what premium names are. Have a look:   Help Your Customers Buy From You! We talk a lot about offering suggestions to your customers using our Name Suggest domain search API rather than just offering a yes/no answer with domain availability. It really provides a boost to sales if you pair those results with some information to help potential customers make sense of the different kinds of results that are presented when they do their domain searches. It's something that's not all that difficult to create and build into a search results page, but it can really pay off in terms of improved conversion rates on domain searches, and the purchase of associated services like hosting or email. Take a look at the videos and think about some of the different things you can do on your own site to help educate and guide your customers (both potential and current) through your specific sales processes.

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Enter our Service Guy Postcard Contest and become famous!

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Enter our Service Guy Postcard Contest and become famous! Posted: 26 Aug 2010 09:38 AM PDT We recently decided that we ought to have some nice postcards to send to our resellers, but the problem is that we don’t have enough designs for them. In the spirit of Community, we thought we’d reach out to you, our resellers, and ask for your help in exchange for the opportunity for your creativity to be forever immortalized in an OpenSRS Postcard! All you have to do is snap a photo of Service Guy and submit it. We’ll choose the best five for our postcards, and your photography skills will become renowned across the globe as your beautiful designs circulate. Sounds great! How do I enter? Entering is easy: Take a photo of your OpenSRS Service Guy in a creative setting (see our example shots for inspiration) Upload your image in a postcard-size format. Minimum size: 6 in x 4.25 in at 300dpi (1875 x 1275 pixels) Add your photo to the Flickr group OpenSRS Service Guy Fan Club Let us know by tweeting "Here’s my entry for the @OpenSRS postcard photo contest: [link to photo]" Alternatively, if you don’t have a Twitter account, you can leave a comment below too. The contest will be open until September 30. At the end, we’ll take the top 5 photos and turn them into OpenSRS postcards. We’ll give you the credit, of course. In addition, the best designer will receive a nifty OpenSRS Crumpler laptop bag, valued at $120! Winners will be notified by email or Twitter, and will be announced on the blog. We’re looking forward to seeing your entries! I need some inspiration! Here are two photos we liked; there are lots more in the Service Guy Fan Club on Flickr.

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GeoTrust is the SSL Brand of Choice for the Top Million Sites Online

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GeoTrust is the SSL Brand of Choice for the Top Million Sites Online Posted: 24 Aug 2010 06:28 AM PDT A recent survey of SSL certificate use by Netcraft, referenced against the top million sites online (as tallied by Alexa), revealed that GeoTrust SSL certificates continue to be the most widely used choice of the one million top websites on the Internet. The comparison looked at the Alexa 1 Million and counted publically facing SSL certificates. They found over 35,000 GeoTrust SSL certificates amongst the 165,000 total certificates found. GeoTrust led all certificate authorities, with the nearest competitor alomost 10,000 certificates behind. GeoTrust points to the data as proof that more users look to GeoTrust as the low-cost SSL certificate provider of choice to secure and encrypt data transmitted over the Internet. With increasing competition in the low-end of the SSL market, GeoTrust continues to provide cost-effective solutions for a variety of different requirements. From QuickSSL, through True BusinessID with or without Extended Validation, there is a GeoTrust-branded certificate to satisfy any buyer. If you have an OpenSRS Reseller account, then you are also automatically able to sell SSL certificates from GeoTrust (and also thawte and VeriSign). For more information visit our GeoTrust SSL information page.

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“No Hassle Renewals” at Hover plus 2 more

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• “No Hassle Renewals” at Hover
• The OpenSRS Quarterly for 2010-Q2 is Now Available
• .ORG Surpasses 8.5 Million Domains

“No Hassle Renewals” at Hover Posted: 24 Aug 2010 07:52 AM PDT Here’s another discovery we made at Hover that you can consider implementing. Renewals were our number one support issue, accounting for 36% of support tickets opened. A lot of those calls and emails came from customers (or friends, relatives, colleagues and assistants of customers) that could not sign in to their account. So, we developed a renewal process that no longer required folks to sign in. Now we are getting fewer support calls and we are solving renewal-related problems much more quickly. You can read the more complete story here. If you have any questions about how we did this or need any help with implementation, please feel free to email me directly at mgoldstein@tucows.com.

The OpenSRS Quarterly for 2010-Q2 is Now Available Posted: 23 Aug 2010 01:52 PM PDT After the positive feedback we received from our first quarter report, we're excited to announce that our OpenSRS Quarterly for 2010-Q2 is now available for download. Have you found yourself wondering how your own own performance indicators measure up against other OpenSRS resellers? Key performance metrics like renewal rates by quarter, new registrations and transfers in and out have long been providing valuable insight to service providers like yours. With over 10,000 domain name, email and SSL resellers in over 100 countries, from small Web designers to giant Web hosts and Internet Service Providers, OpenSRS has a unique perspective into industry data and trends. The OpenSRS Quarterly report is meant to provide you, our reseller, with data you can use to benchmark your own performance and make informed decisions. We've analyzed the data across our entire base to provide you with valuable insight. You'll even find fun facts like the ratio of domains that contain the word 'rules' versus 'sucks' and the conclusion to the age old battle of cats versus dogs. We expect this report to be just the beginning of a conversation within your organization, with your team and maybe even with other OpenSRS resellers about best practices and how we can work together to help you succeed. If you're an OpenSRS reseller, click here to request this report electronically. Happy Selling!

.ORG Surpasses 8.5 Million Domains Posted: 23 Aug 2010 11:17 AM PDT The latest edition of the bi-annual .org domain name report, "The Dashboard," is now available. Public Internet Registry (PIR), the operator of the .org domain extension released the report, which showed 7.6% growth in the .org domain in the first half of 2010. That's twice the growth compared to 2009 and signals continued strength in the .org extension. Some other figures of interest: The growth of .org in the first half of 2010 outpaced both .com and .net over the same period. New creates for .org showed 16.5% growth, on par with both .com and .net. 77.1% of organizations renewed their .org domains for one to three years, an increase of 4% over 2009. North America and the European Union continued to represent the regions with the most .org registrations. China showed growth of 4% in the first half of 2010. With over 8.5 million .org domains registered, .org is the third largest generic top-level domain (gTLD), behind .com and .net. You can always download the latest version of the "The Dashboard" from PIR's website at http://pir.org/news/dashboard

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Tucows or Not Tucows

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Tucows or Not Tucows Posted: 20 Aug 2010 10:36 AM PDT Our new Tucows badge program has inspired some great discussions and debates (both internally and with our resellers!). I want to quickly contribute some more thoughts on evaluating whether this program makes sense for you. The big idea here is to let your customers and prospects know that a domain name registered with you is better than a domain name registered elsewhere, that it comes with more honest, generous policies. You do have two perfectly good ways to do this. You can use our name and our promise. You benefit from some Tucows brand recognition and favorability. You potentially (depending on how big you are) align yourself with a larger entity, which brings some reassurances of stability and security. You leave it up to us to develop and maintain content about the differences in domain name management and to fight some battles with registrar competitors for you. You might even be able to blame a few customer issues on us if they come up. The risk here is that your customers say, “Wait, you’re not managing our domain name? There are multiple parties involved? I’m not sure that’s so comforting to me.” The second approach is you can imitate what we’ve done in the Tucows Promise but keep the focus on yourself. In fact, you can probably offer a longer list of benefits than we did since we were limited to policies that would be universal to all our resellers. You keep things simple and highlight a more intimate relationship, the one you have with your customers. There are a couple of risks here too. Your customers could say, “I know a little something about domain names and the key players in the domain name world and you’re not one of them.” Or they could say, “Hey, I see that Tucows is listed as my registrar. Why are you trying to pretend you’re managing this domain name yourself?” In the end, the benefits of differentiating your domain name offering are great and the risks with either approach are pretty minimal. Above all, we encourage you to attack the notion that it does not matter who manages your domain name. If our program is useful to you, great. If it helps you simply craft your own messaging, that’s great too. Please keep the feedback coming.

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Four Million .nl Domains

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Four Million .nl Domains Posted: 20 Aug 2010 06:45 AM PDT This week the total number of .nl domain names in existence hit the four million mark for the first time, according to SIDN, the .nl Registry. That puts .nl in fourth place in terms of ccTLDs for total registrations behind .de, .uk and .cn. Curiously, .nl actually leads all ccTLDs when you look at total registrations compared to the population of the country. In the case of .nl, there is one .nl domain for every four people in the Netherlands. If you aren’t selling .nl domains, perhaps some of the stats around .nl domains will get you thinking about it: Since the .nl domain was created, a total of about 5.1 million unique domain names have been registered. Of these, roughly 1.1 million are no longer registered leaving just over 4 million .nl domains. Within the Netherlands, .nl has a 72% share of the domain name market. Next comes .com with 14%, then .eu with 8%. Over the last twelve months, the .nl domain has grown by almost 13%. The use of domain names to create personalized e-mail addresses increased by 25%. In the Netherlands, 38 people in every 100 have broadband internet access – more than anywhere else in the world. The average .nl domain name is 13 characters long, but the most common length is 11 characters. OpenSRS is .nl accredited and we recently rewrote our connection to the .nl registry to take advantage of the new EPP interface. For resellers who are .nl accredited themselves, you may not know that our OpenSRS Registrar Service platform offers a hosted solution to manage .nl domains using your existing accreditation. Of course, OpenSRS Domain Service offers an easy way to manage .nl domains for those who aren’t accredited. .nl domains are priced at $8USD/domain year and anyone can register a .nl domain, regardless of where they live.

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Tucows Domains Badges and the Tucows Domain Promise

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Tucows Domains Badges and the Tucows Domain Promise Posted: 19 Aug 2010 05:37 AM PDT It’s no secret that there is a perception amongst the domain name buying public that all domain names are the same, that they all come with the same basic policies and conditions and that the only way to differentiate between them is price. We know that simply is not true. Issues like privacy, ownership disputes, and censorship are all important considerations for domain registrants, and we want to make sure the domain buying public understands what their chosen domain provider stands for. As a company, Tucows has a number of values we strive to maintain. We also recognize that you, our Resellers, share many of these same values and that many of you chose to partner with Tucows not merely because of the platform, or the services we offer, but also because you wanted to work with a company that shared your beliefs and values. The simple fact that you sell domains managed by Tucows affords your customers a number of benefits and protections. It speaks to your commitment to customer service, and to making sure that your customers have the best domain ownership experience possible. That raises an important question: Do your customers and prospects know and understand the advantages available to them as a result of your decision to offer domains managed by Tucows? Tucows Domains Badges To that end, we have put together a new badge program that you can use to tell your site visitors that you sell domain names managed by Tucows. Of course, this is an optional program. Like everything we do, it’s reseller friendly. If you don’t want to expose our involvement, that’s up to you and it’s absolutely fine with us. The badges link  to our Tucows Promise, which highlights for Registrants some of the key benefits of having domain names managed by Tucows, and by extension, of working with companies like yours that sell Tucows domains. The Tucows Promise lives within our shiny new Tucows Domains Help Site, which offers answers to common Registrant questions (and mostly refers them back to their provider). You can visit the badge program page to get started. It’s a simple process – grab the badge size and language you wish to use, agree to the terms and conditions, and then install the badge on your website. We have developed badges in English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese and translated the Domain Promise into each of these languages. For those using the older “Tucows Authorized Reseller” badges, please make the switch over to these new badges. Why Tucows, not OpenSRS? We get a lot of understandable questions about our use of the OpenSRS and Tucows brands. OpenSRS is our reseller services group. Yet we are offering resellers icons that announce “Domains managed by Tucows” and drive end users to a Tucows-branded site. What’s up with that? It is actually another attempt at reseller friendliness. The idea is to create a clean distinction between messages to end users and messages to resellers.  Tucows is the registrar.  (It is the name of our company.) It is the brand that end users inevitably discover when they look at their Whois record. It is also a brand that many end users know and love from our software libraries. By avoiding any mention of OpenSRS in end user-facing messages, we avoid end users wandering into places (like the OpenSRS site) where we talk about control panels, TLD releases, wholesale prices and other stuff that will confuse them. We also reduce the chance that your users will try to buy anything from us directly. The Tucows Domain Promise is a rare conversion of the two brands.  But it’s still clean. OpenSRS resellers can boast to end users that you offer domains managed by Tucows. It’s no different than using OpenSRS as your platform and boasting VeriSign SSL products to your end users. Tucows Domain becomes a product that embodies integrity and honesty, thus differentiating the domain name product you offer from those offered by less principled providers. We’d love to hear your feedback about the program. Drop us a line in the comments here or in the OpenSRS Forums.

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