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.

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.

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!

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

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).

Click here to visit the Tucows Domains Badges page to get started.

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 convergence 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.

To help out, we’re presenting a webinar on August 26th, 2010. Adam Eisner, who heads up our domains business here at OpenSRS will take you through six tangible strategies that you can use to differentiate yourself in a crowded environment. He’ll bring you real-world examples along with data from our Reseller base that will provide you with practical ways to fuel growth and attract new customers.

As with all of our webinars, it’s free to attend and everyone is welcome. We’ll hold a pair of sessions on August 26th at 9am and 2pm EDT (that’s 1300 and 1800 UTC) to accommodate attendees in different time zones. Register today so you don’t forget. And, keep in mind that registering ensures that you’ll automatically get an email with a link to the archive after the webinar ends, so even if you can’t make it to the live event, it does make sense to click the link below and signup.

Register Here

We want to make it easier for your customers to transfer their domains from other registrars to you. To help you out, we took a complete look at the domain transfer processes of the top ten competitor registrars — 1&1, Go Daddy, Joker, MelbourneIT, Moniker, Namecat, Namecheap, Network Solutions, Register.com and Web.com.

Screencasts for Resellers

Using that research, we’ve created a series of PDFs, with screenshots, that will help registrants successfully complete their transfers to you.

“Preparing your Domain to Transfer” includes step-by-step documentation, with accompanying screenshots for each of the top ten registrars. Here’s the PDF for GoDaddy as an example:

Transferring a GoDaddy Domain

Maximize your Transfers-In

Using these tools, you can assist your customers in ensuring a successful domain transfer. Your customers will learn the 4 basic steps required to prepare a domain for transfer:

• Ensuring WHOIS contact information is correct
• Making required WHOIS privacy changes
• Unlocking the domain so it can be transferred
• Obtaining the transfer authorization code for the domain

All of the content is white-labeled and ready for you to add your own Reseller branding to share with your customers.

Available for Download Today

To download the complete set in PDF format go to our Transfers-In marketing resources downloads page.

On Your Site

The easiest thing you can do is add some messaging to your homepage (or the beginning of your domain search path) to let users know that .CO domain names are now available through your service. But success will mostly likely be driven by how you integrate .CO into your search results. Customers in the online world are a finicky bunch. Button placement, colors, menus and user interface all play a critical role in determining how much of a consumer’s hard-earned money you will earn. We mocked up a sample search result page to give you an idea where we think you could see results.

Identify .CO domain names as “NEW.” It may also be wise to have a help button a registrant can click on in order to learn about .CO and why it’s a great choice for their business. They key is to reinforce (.com-like) universality and credibility.

Place available .CO domain names at or near the top to grab a registrant’s attention and encourage them to act. (It is actually always a good rule to give better real estate to results that are available than result that are not.) If .CO is buried too low or even behind a “more options” link,  the customer might never even consider it.

Suggest a two year registration. (This is actually a suggestion for all domain names.) When the default is one year, most customers will register for one year. When the default is two, it is surprising how many customers will register for two years. So, a good suggestion might be to start with a two year offer (perhaps with a discount), but make sure it is very clear how to change the term to one year.

In Other Communications

Besides having your front-end tuned to convert, another important step is to communicate the .CO news directly to your customers. An effective way to do this is through an opt-in email marketing campaign. Assuming you have an email list of customers, here are some suggestions that have produced results for our resellers in past TLD launches:

• Don’t assume your customers know about .CO. Sending a simple email about the availability of this new TLD could be enough to drive additional business.

• You could perform a batch check on your customers’ current domains and see which .CO equivalents are available. Many customers will want to protect their name across all generic TLDs. For example: “Dear customer, we notice that you have companyxyz.com…we want to advise you that companyxyz.co is now also available….”

• If you have the data, you can also look through past unsuccessful domain searches and reach out to customers where the exact-match .CO domain is now available.

• In your marketing messages, it might be worthwhile to note that Google (and presumably other search engines) will be treating .CO domain names as generic TLDs. (This addresses fears that a .CO name will only get SEO results in Colombia!). You might also mention that the .CO registry is spending significant marketing dollars to make sure Internet users (your customers’ visitors) will know and respect .CO when they see it.

We will continue to monitor what folks are doing and what seems to be working to share with the network.

Please let us know if you have ideas or questions.

With more than 10,000 domain resellers in over 100 countries, from small Web designers to giant Web hosts, we think we have a unique perspective into the data and trends behind the domain name business.

The OpenSRS Quarterly report is our first attempt at providing 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 percentage of renewals that took place during the 40-day grace period. Some of these numbers might even surprise you.

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!

We were really pleased to have Bob Angus, Product Marketing Manager at VeriSign join us via the web to present “Get the Sale: Overcoming Four Common Objections When Selling SSL”.

Bob provided some really good, practical tactics and strategies that will help you sell smarter and move more SSL units.

He covered everything from how to figure out whether the potential customer is ready to buy, to how to use some basic stats and resources to sell EV and other higher margin SSL products.

Based on the lively Q&A session that followed, it was clear that our Resellers are hungry to sell more and are looking for the tools that they can use to do just that. Bob’s presentation provided some of those tools and tactics, and attendees went away equiped with at least two or three things that they could put to immediate use to counter competitors and tackle those common questions buyers might have.

Archive Video is Available Now

We did record the entire session including an informative question and answer session. That video and the accompanying PDF of the presentation slides is available now.

→ View the archive

(if you registered for the event at GotoWebinar, you should already have received the link to the archived version via email).