Would You Like an Apple Pie With That?
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.