.TEL Sunrise is just around the corner. We’re now taking Sunrise pre-orders via the RWI as mentioned last week. Also as promised, we have details for you about the exclusive webinar for OpenSRS Resellers that we’ve arranged with Lars Jensen, Global Sales Director, Telnic Limited.
Joining Lars will be Adam Eisner, Product Manager, Domains, OpenSRS. Together they will get you up to speed on .TEL and make sure that you have all the information you need if you are planning to participate in Sunrise and Landrush. At the end of the webinar presentation, there will be a question and answer session for you to ask any questions you might have, and get answers straight from the source.
Prepare and Profit from .TEL
Join us online on Wednesday, November 26th, 2008 at 1:00 P.M. EST (Convert to my time zone).
We’re using GoToWebinar for this online webinar. GoToWebinar is easy to use and will allow you to participate in the webinar in any modern web browser on either Microsoft Windows or Apple OS X.
Since OpenSRS launched back in 1999, we’ve offered a couple of ways for our resellers to sell domain names and related services. First, there is the Reseller Web Interface (RWI) which provides a browser-based sales and management interface. Second, there is our Application Programming Interface (API) that allows resellers to integrate domain sales and management into their own systems.
Starting today, we’re ready to tell you about a third way to sell through OpenSRS – a hosted storefront.
We’re rolling out our new OpenSRS Storefront solution as a “technology preview” in advance of its official launch in a few weeks. If you want to roll up your sleeves and try it out, later today, there will be a link in the RWI for you that will provision a ‘live’ working Storefront interface. You can also try Storefront in the Horizon Test Environment – it’s there already.
We’ve put together a list of frequently asked questions that will, we hope, answer most of the questions you might have about how Storefront works.
There are a few things that distinguish the OpenSRS Storefront from competing hosted reseller-in-a-box offerings. The Internet has changed dramatically over the past few years with the arrival of what has become known as “Web 2.0.” Our Storefront really reflects those changes.
Back in 1999, people looking to buy domain names were generally fairly tech-savvy individuals who knew how to code HTML or manage their own server. Or they were companies with IT departments that could make sure that the website that new domain name was pointing to worked properly.
Today, anyone and everyone wants to be online. Tools like hosted blogs, photo sharing sites and MySpace deliver on the promise of making it easy to establish and maintain an online identity. Our Storefront further extends this and makes it easy for everyone to find, buy, own and manage their own domain name, regardless of technical experience.
It’s really a domain name sales site for the Web 2.0 age and we think it represents the way domain names will be sold in the coming years.
Here’s a look at the end-user experience:
For current Resellers, there’s no fee to pay, or contract to sign. Just click the link in the RWI, when it appears later today, and your storefront will be created and you’ll be able to start customizing it right away.
We expect that many of you will want to see for yourself what Storefront looks like on the back end. To get you started, we have a screencast showing how to get your Storefront provisioned, and what you’ll find once you log into the Storefront Manager.
We’ll have more information on Storefront in the coming weeks.
For Resellers with customers looking to secure their .TEL domains during the Sunrise period for registered trademark holders, we are now taking pre-orders via the Reseller Web Interface (RWI).
You’ll see the “.tel Sunrise Early Domain Registration for Registered Trademark Holders” in the Domain Registration Administration section of the RWI as soon as you log in. Submitting a sunrise pre-order is easy, but you will require supporting documentation to prove that the Registrant is a registered trademark holder for the domain being applied for.
Also of note is that we’re working with Telnic to offer an exclusive webinar for OpenSRS Resellers with Lars Jensen, Global Sales Director, Telnic Ltd. to help you better understand .TEL and the opportunity it presents. We’ll have more details about that webinar in the coming days.
In an email we sent to all Resellers on Friday, we provided information on how you can get your own .TEL domain to try out during the Sunrise period free of charge. That includes access to the management interface that gives you the ability to add and change contact information for your .TEL domain and provides you with a way to better understand the product and how to market it to you customers.
Lots more information on .TEL is available from Telnic.org.
There’s a very innovative new generic Top-Level Domain (gTLD) on the way called .TEL. OpenSRS will be participating fully in the launch of .TEL beginning with sunrise pre-orders (more on that in the next few days) and culminating with the official start of general availability on March 24th, 2009.
.TEL is quite different from any other domain extension. All the information for a .TEL domain is stored directly within the Domain Name System (DNS). When a user enters a .TEL domain into their browser, mobile phone or any other Internet device, DNS is queried and rather than returning an IP address that maps a website to the domain name, the DNS entry provides the stored data directly, formatted for whatever device is being used.
In many cases, users can then click on a contact method and immediately initiate a connection (including voice calls, SMS, Skype, email…) to the .TEL domain holder.
I could try to explain the concept and how the back-end data management control panel works, but this video of Justin Hayward, Communications Director, and Henri Asseily, CSO/CTO, both of Telnic Ltd. from the 2008 Demo Conference does a far better job:
A list of 10 reasons companies should get their .TEL domain is available as a PDF download. Also included in this document are the requirements for the various stages of the .TEL launch, from Sunrise to landrush and general availability.
As mentioned above, we’ll have more on the .TEL launch and how it will work for OpenSRS Resellers in the next few days.
As mentioned in the previous posting, we’re in the midst of rolling out a new release of OpenSRS Email Service. The most visible of the changes that will be promoted to the live service next week is the end-user spam management settings page. To help you out, I’ve prepared a short screencast to show you what the end-user experience will be.
The underlying philosophy behind the statistics functions inside the OpenSRS Email Service is to provide the most flexibility possible. Rather than providing a small subset of stats to all users inside the Mail Administration Center (MAC), it was thought that our users would be better served by providing a full, extensive stats package, allowing you to take that raw stats data and manipulate or analyze it in whatever ways you like.
You’re free to take all that data, downloaded as .csv files and then import it into your own databases or spreadsheets (Microsoft Excel can read these files, for instance) and mash it up in whatever way that you wish. If you want to know what percentage of users prefer webmail, it’s in there. If you want to spot trends in how often users are logging in to check for mail, it’s in there.
You can even have those stats sent to you daily so you can create a system to automatically update and track usage across your email customer/user base.
We think that the stats engine inside OpenSRS Email satisfies the requirements of a wide range of potential users and uses, from support staff who need an easy way to see a particular user’s account activity, to the executive at a large ISP who wants to know how customers are accessing email.
But as I said, we wanted to provide flexibility for all customers and while that type of stats collection and distribution might work well for some of our larger customers, we also realize that some of our customers will want an easy way to look at certain stats without having to do any complex data mining. So we built in some simple, automatic graphing features for some of the most widely used of the stats we collect.
Inside the MAC, depending on your admin level, you can view stats for things like total logins, broken down across the various login types (POP, IMAP and webmail). You can view a range of stats for your entire company, or for a single domain, and even for a single user. You can see visually if a user hasn’t accessed their email in a long time or if there was a sudden spike in outgoing mail from a specific account or domain indicating a possible abuse situation. You can monitor things like quota usage and get a better understanding of how your customers use the email service.
To better explain the stats features within the MAC, we put together a quick screencast that shows some of the functionality that’s available to you:
Scenario: You have a customer who wishes to transfer their domain name from GoDaddy to OpenSRS (into your Reseller account). Good news! But despite the best efforts of the customer, GoDaddy blocks the transfer and the customer ends up stuck at GoDaddy for another year.
It happens a lot and the reason is a simple one: GoDaddy institutes a 60-day lock on domains if the domain holder makes a change to the administrative email contact. GoDaddy claims to do this for the protection of its users, but the lock policy has the added benefit to GoDaddy of locking the domain down for two months.
So, if a user decides to move out of GoDaddy less than two months before the domain name in question expires, and then updates their administrative email information to ensure that they can receive and approve the transfer requests, they have inadvertently locked themselves into GoDaddy and will be forced to renew the domain with them (which puts another 60-day lock on the domain, by the way).
How to help customers get out of GoDaddy
Education is the key.
Explain the transfer process: Make sure you fully explain the transfer process. Explain that there will be emails sent to the email account of the listed administrative contact that require action for the transfer to succeed. Explain that they should remove the administrative lock before attempting to transfer the domain. Explain how the EPP code works, and perhaps even show the user where to find it in the GoDaddy interface. GoDaddy provides a guide to unlocking domains here.
Explain the GoDaddy lock policy: Be up front and ask the customer if that email contact is up to date. If not, explain to them what GoDaddy will do when they update it. Tell the customer that you are trying to make sure the transfer is successful and ensure that they are only changing that administrative contact if it is absolutely necessary (e.g. they don’t have access to that email account anymore).
What is ICANN Doing?
Tucows/OpenSRS is active in ICANN and we’re strongly in favour of domain name portability. We continue to work at the ICANN level to get this problem solved. ICANN has issued a statement on the practice of putting a lock in place on a WHOIS change saying clearly, “A registrant change to Whois information is not a valid reason to deny a transfer request.”
For a lot of our Resellers, GoDaddy probably represents the single largest competitor in the domains and hosting area. These recent price increases announced by GoDaddy signal an opportunity for you. Now is the time to aggressively take on GoDaddy and do a little customer education and drive sales.
.NET and .ORG domain names now set domain buyers back $15.19 when they buy them from GoDaddy. Consider that the Registry cost on .NET is going up to $4.98, and .ORG is going up to $6.75 in a few months time, then contrast that with what Go Daddy is now charging. Do the math – take that registry fee, add the ICANN fee, then the OpenSRS Management Fee to see what your wholesale cost is. When I add that up, I get $8.18 for .NET domains and $9.95 for .ORG domains – considerably less than GoDaddy even when you add a healthy margin.
Still convinced that GoDaddy is a low-cost domain seller? Let’s look at .COM from GoDaddy. Yes, they will give you the first year for $1.99 (plus ICANN fee) or the first year of a transfer in for $6.99, but after that, a .COM renewal is $10.19 when you include the ICANN fee of 20 cents. Reality doesn’t match the perception.
That’s where you need to focus – on perception. The public has a perception about GoDaddy thanks to some incredibly expensive and thorough marketing. The goal of those Superbowl ads was to convince the public that GoDaddy had the cheapest domains. And it worked.
How to take on GoDaddy
Use a multi-pronged approach: address the price perception, focus on service, and provide an alternative.
1. The price perception. Be up-front about your pricing and show where you beat GoDaddy on price. Take advantage of our domain promotions to run promotions of your own. Consider that it might make sense to offer certain domains as a loss leader for other services if it makes sense. Get the word out – GoDaddy is not cheaper than everyone else.
2. Focus on service. Offer top-notch customer service and brag about it on your homepage. Customers look for more than price and service is one way you can win them over.
3. Provide an alternative. NASCAR and babes in bikinis might be appealing to some, but not everyone wants to be associated with a company like GoDaddy. Target the types of customers that would be offended, or put off by the GoDaddy style of marketing.
It can be easy to throw up your hands and throw in the towel when faced with a competitor like GoDaddy. But everyone loves an underdog. Be the independent coffee shop that opens up down the street from Starbucks, or the rookie ball player facing off against the veteran pitcher in a clutch situation.
GoDaddy has provided the opening with these recent price hikes. Take advantage and take back customers.
We’ll have more on this next week – specifically on making sure you are doing everything to help your new customers transfer out of GoDaddy.
One of the easiest things to overlook when you start thinking about how to grow your business is writing.
Sure, you need to have the kind of products and services that prospective customers are after, be it a hosting plan with all the bells and whistles, or fully-featured, high-speed Internet access. But beyond your product or service, you need to make sure that you are effectively conveying that information to each prospective customer.
Who are you selling to?
To do a good job writing for your customers, you first need to know who they are. For example, if you are primarily targeting fairly tech-savvy users with a hosting plan, it might be acceptable to use terms like terabytes, or Linux, or MySQL. But if you are selling services to people who aren’t plugged in when it comes to hosting, then you’ll need to adapt your writing to ensure that you aren’t baffling them with words that sound like a foreign language to them. You may instead choose to use words like plenty of storage, secure web servers and blog-ready databases.
Similarly, you should make sure that you don’t make any assumptions about the level of knowledge of your users. And that goes both ways. Don’t assume that your customers are fully versed in the terminology and technology of the Internet. But at the same time, make sure you don’t treat them as idiots either.
Think of the geek and your grandmother
You might want to serve up multiple versions of the same information with a link from the version for “normal people” to a version for “geeks”. It can be as easy as putting a simple subheading with something like, “I’m up to speed on this stuff, give me the techie version” that links to a specs page.
For example, OpenDNS, a provider of third-party DNS service, caters to both groups on their page. Those with a solid knowledge of DNS and routers are after one thing – the IP addresses to plug in to their router. OpenDNS understands their audience and on the “Getting Started” page, they simple provide what they call “The Straight Dope” – the two IP addresses of their DNS servers.
But for those who need some hand holding (in other words, the average person), OpenDNS takes the time to explain their service and how to configure it in plain English. They provide pictures of the routers they have instructions for, and screenshots that help users configure things to use the OpenDNS service.
The golden opportunity
There’s a real opportunity for both hosting companies, and also for ISPs, to grab market share by being friendly and approachable in a way that really stands out from the crowd. As more and more people start looking to simply establish a presence online, it becomes even more important to tailor your service offerings and marketing to increasingly less technologically-inclined customers.
Take a look at your website and marketing materials from the perspective of the non-tech. Better yet, have someone who doesn’t understand the business read through your website and provide feedback. Is what you are selling clear? Does it make sense to the average user as well as the Internet expert? Is you pricing clear and understandable? Do you clearly explain why you are a better choice than the competition?
Your website is probably the single most important marketing tool you have. Make sure that the writing is effective and clear and that it serves the broadest section of potential customers.
Years ago, I worked at a fast-food restaurant where up-selling was a requirement for the staff taking the orders. I was constantly amazed at how many people would be easily convinced to add a dessert item to their order, or to up-size to a larger drink simply because I offered it to them when they were already at the cash with money in their hands.
In his recent HostingCon presentation, Adam Eisner, our Domains Product Manager talked about how important it is to offer a full range of related services in addition to domain names. I thought I’d expand on Adam’s point a bit today and address how up- and cross-selling can help you compete with that 100-pound gorilla named Go Daddy.
A lot of people are under the impression that Go Daddy built a huge business by undercutting the competition on price. While $1.99 .COM domain names might make it seem like that’s indeed the case, a look at the fine print shows otherwise. Like many hosting providers, Go Daddy offers that price only when you buy a non-domain service from them at the same time.
They’re really playing a “bundled services” game and using the domain name as a loss leader to get folks in the door. A look at their signup pages demonstrates this nicely. Once you complete the initial domain search, it’s an impressive, continuous stream of additional services and “features” that all add to the total bill.
If you aren’t offering things like a wide variety of generic and country-code TLD’s and SSL certificates, email boxes and premium domain names, you’re leaving money on the table. Even worse, as Adam pointed out at HostingCon, is when customers start looking for additional services and find them not with you, but with the competition.
As the fast-food restaurants discovered, it’s a whole lot easier to get more of a customer’s money when they already have their wallet open. Go Daddy does this exceptionally well, but there’s absolutely no reason why you can’t beat them at their own game.
Offer that .NET/.BIZ/.INFO/.TV equivalent at checkout (and make sure you tell the customer why they need multiple domains). Offer the ccTLD version when the customer registers the .COM. Offer email inboxes to go with the domain name. Offer an SSL digital certificate (it could be a small business person registering a name for an eCommerce site). Use our Name Suggestion tool to offer up similar names. Use Premium Names to offer customers an even better name than the one they searched for. Think about ways up-sell and cross-sell and see what happens to your bottom line.
.TEL Sunrise is just around the corner. We’re now taking Sunrise pre-orders via the RWI as mentioned last week. Also as promised, we have details for you about the exclusive webinar for OpenSRS Resellers that we’ve arranged with Lars Jensen, Global Sales Director, Telnic Limited.
For a lot of our Resellers, GoDaddy probably represents the single largest competitor in the domains and hosting area. These recent price increases announced by GoDaddy signal an opportunity for you. Now is the time to aggressively take on GoDaddy and do a little customer education and drive sales.
Years ago, I worked at a fast-food restaurant where up-selling was a requirement for the staff taking the orders. I was constantly amazed at how many people would be easily convinced to add a dessert item to their order, or to up-size to a larger drink simply because I offered it to them when they were already at the cash with money in their hands.