So we took our own advice and integrated premium domains in the Hover search results in early August.

The design approach was a bit different than anything else we had seen in the industry. Rather than break these domains out into some distinct section of results, we simply included them in one long list of available domains. That seems more consistent with the way we shop for products and services that will ultimately play the same role. “I can have this low-end brand for $15 or that deluxe model for $2,400.”

Check out the search results for sandwich.com (in a new tab, so you can get to the shocking results below!). A roll over the star explains that this is a premium domain. A click goes to a detailed page with a video.

The results are shocking. We have sold 29 premium domains in 4 months at an average price of $1,530.

(I also have to mention that just about anybody reading this post has a better base for premium domains than Hover does. About 20% of Hover customers claim to use their domains for business purposes.)

So to put that in the context of your own business, that is 1 premium domain sold for every 853 new available domains (“regular domains”) registered. Said differently, we have collected $1.79 in gross premium domains revenue for every new available domain registered. With your 10% commission, that would be an extra $.18 in margin for every new domain name you register.

For us, that starts to look like real money.

Plus, our customers are thrilled with their new domain names. And, not surprisingly, almost all of them are renewing these domains far into the future and buying additional services on them. Makes sense. These are heavily invested customers. (I am not claiming causality there, stats geeks. The premium domains do not make them more serious about their businesses. But they certainly get them even more excited about their businesses and make other expenses seem less steep by comparison!)

Finally, this has been mostly passive stuff so far. We have not yet begun to really sell these domains. We are just starting to have fun with database marketing. Imagine looking at every organization name among your base to see if any exact matches are available as premium domains. Imagine just looking at every domain name that has a hyphen in it (a classic compromise) and finding the exact same domain name without the hyphen available as a premium domain. As always, we would love to pull these sort of lists for you so you can reach out to these customers with a killer pitch. (By the way, you do not even need to implement the API to do this.) Please let us know if you are interested in these sorts of efforts.

So, in conclusion, once in a while, we are right. And when we are, I will always tell you about it.

Sell premium domains!

And I end up saying, “We do have that! #@!!%! We posted it on the blog five times and emailed you like thirty.” And they say, “OK, calm down, I’m just asking…” And I say, “You’re just asking?! Let me ask you this…” And they say, “Stop pushing me.”

Anyway, since apparently we are reseller friendly, I have been asked to apologize and politely remind you that we have wonderful marketing resources and capabilities you should take advantage of.

Want to make it easy as possible for customers to transfer more domains to you?
We have white label videos and tutorials to help them transfer away from your top competitors.

Want to educate your customers about the value of contact privacy?
Check out our white label video and PDF on the benefits of revealing less in their Whois records.

Want to help your customers understand that it does, in fact, matter who manages your domain name?
We have Tucows Domains badges and a Tucows Domains Promise that you can link to.

We have marketing kits for TLDs, SSL brands and goMobi. We have end user tutorials on configuring our email service with the leading mobile devices. We have tons of end user documentation and videos that we can help you brand as your own. We can help you segment your own mailing lists for transfer campaigns or name-based promotions. See anything you like going on at Hover? We can help you replicate it. Have another marketing challenge that you think we might be able to help with? Ask us.

We are not trying to turn ourselves into retailers. We also understand that the resources listed above will likely not help you solve your most pressing business problems. But we have 11,000 resellers that do have some challenges and needs in common. Many of you do not have the resources that we do. If there are opportunities to find efficiencies and to make your jobs a little easier, we want to do that.

So, please use what we have and please let us know if there is anything else we can do to help. Damn it.

So what do you do when a competitor messes up big? Maybe they have a huge outage. Maybe they get caught up in a legal battle. Maybe a senior employee ends up strangling a giraffe to death. Or just smacking around a monkey.

It is really tempting to call attention to the situation and position yourself as the antidote.

Just a few warnings:

• Remember that you had your own mess ups in the past and will likely have them in the future. You will have outages. Maybe you once kicked a pigeon. Avoid inviting scrutiny and retaliation that will ultimately hurt you.

• Be careful not to appear too opportunistic. If you suddenly start donating 10% of your revenues to save porcupines, it might seem more exploitative than generous. Maybe not. Sometimes the outrage is so great and the opportunity is so right. Also, honesty, creativity and humor can go a long way. Just be aware of the risk.

• Stay on message. You work hard to stand for something. Great service. Innovation. Reliability. If you leap to a very different message because it’s trending on Twitter, you could sacrifice clarity and you might not be playing to your own strengths.

Having said all that, a competitor’s stumble is certainly an opportunity to step up your game. Their customers are going to come looking for alternatives. Make it simple for people to switch. Pound home the benefits of your service. Do all the things you likely do anyway. Just think about using this as an excuse to do them a bit better.

Does everyone know how a Superbowl box pool works?

You have a grid like this. There are 100 boxes available. Participants generally claim boxes by writing their names in them. In this case, I will put your logos in the boxes. Once all the boxes have been claimed, we pick numbers 0-9 at random and put them in that order along the top. Then we pick 0-9 at random again and put them in that order along the side.

Those numbers indicate what score would  produce a victory for the owner of each box. If you have Pittsburgh 3, Green Bay 4, for example, you would be a winner with a score of Pittsburgh 23 – Green Bay 14, Pittsburgh 3 – Green Bay 24 or any other other score that ends in those two digits. Winners are generally declared at the end of each quarter.

Now, here’s how you get yourself a box.

Send me evidence of the following at mgoldstein@tucows.com:

• .CO highlighted in some way on your domains page
• .CO as one of the top two TLDs presented in your search results
• Some sort of flag or highlight on .CO in your search results
• A promotional .CO price
• A campaign to your customers about .CO

Each one of these earns you one box.

Also send me a company logo so I can put it in each of your boxes.

I will post the populated grid by Friday prior to the Superbowl so you know what numbers you have. Watch the game on Sunday, February 6 to see if you win. Watch your sales on Monday, February 7 to see if you win again.

Winners of the first and third quarters get authentic OpenSRS fake sports team t-shirts and $50 Amazon.com gift cards. The halftime winner gets a t-shirt and a $100 gift card. The final score winner (whether that’s the end of regulation or overtime) gets a t-shirt, a $200 gift card and a Service Guy collectible action figure.

Let us know if anyone has any questions. Good luck!

On February 6, Go Daddy will promote .CO in their Superbowl commercial.

We will no doubt be left pondering the connection between .CO, car racing and cleavage. But one thing is certain. Demand for .CO will go up.

Tens of millions of Internet users and publishers will become aware of .CO for the first time. Millions who were already aware of it will now regard it as more credible. Many will come to your front doors looking for it or at least more willing to consider it than they were before.

This is the upside of having a competitor like Go Daddy. There are times when they will subsidize our marketing efforts and help drive our businesses.

So, what can you do to capitalize on this opportunity?

• First, just make sure it is clear that you offer .CO. Put a .CO banner on your domains page. Move .CO results up in your search results. Maybe flag them with a NEW banner. (“As seen on TV” is probably a bit cheesy.) Reach out to your base with the message that the domain name they couldn’t get in .COM is likely available in .CO. Check out some of our marketing suggestions from when .CO first launched.

• Offer your own “what” and “why” around .CO. The Go Daddy spot will likely leave consumers titillated but slightly confused. Explain in the most honest, helpful way that .CO is simply a great alternative to .COM. Internet users are getting more comfortable with it. Google acknowledges it as a global (generic) domain. And, most importantly, it offers millions of great available domain names.

• Consider taking advantage of our promotion to offer a small limited-time discount. I am not encouraging you to try to compete with GoDaddy on price. You already know not to do that. A price promotion just creates a bit of “do this now”. And, with the promotion, you can achieve this without even eating into your margins.

Every once in a while, external forces push some business in your direction. I think this will be one of those situations. (By the way, I also think Pittsburgh will top Green Bay 24-7, propelled by a defense that returns two turnovers for touchdowns.) Please let us know if there is anything we can do to help you make the most of it.

A key strategic question in any service business is where to play along the spectrum from managed service (or full service) to self service. This is particularly true with Web services, which can be either particularly sophisticated (necessitating full service) or particularly simple (enabling self service).

The answer, as always, will be driven by what your customers need and what you are good at. It will also be influenced by your competitive landscape, your resources, your cost of goods and other business considerations.

The OpenSRS Business

I’ll use OpenSRS as an example. We have a big, talented team of engineers and I think we develop pretty usable solutions. Our resellers are also about as capable as they come. But a couple of other factors nudge us more toward managed relationships.

The services we offer are quite sophisticated and quite critical. Registries keep on tweaking their platforms. Spammers keep on spamming. And millions of websites and mailboxes depend on us to run smoothly. It is inevitable that we are going to have to help resellers through our responses and iterations and that they are going to come to us with custom problems and questions. Plus, it’s tough to differentiate ourselves from our competition based on product alone when the product attribute our resellers seem to rank highest is “doesn’t fail”.

So, while we are indeed hard at work on a profoundly more usable control panel, a more flexible API and more robust documentation, we staff a whole bunch of support people, account managers and communications folks and, ultimately, make our living offering superior service.

Although even at that end of the spectrum, we go from lower touch relationships like our Storefront program to higher touch ones like a large email migration, led by our professional services team. So, our resellers can get as much or little as they need from us. And we manage to achieve both the volume and the blended profit margin we need to have a healthy business.

The Web Design Business

Our upcoming launch of goMobi, the do-it-yourself tool for building a mobile website, has me thinking about the web design business in this context.

Web design, like any creative service, is historically as managed as it gets. Clients are paying for talent and ideas. Fees tend to be hourly, reinforcing the fact that the product is human.

But web design is evolving in an interesting way.

The traditional desktop website is still a wonderful vehicle for creativity, beauty, entertainment, provocation and emotion. It can perform valuable functions and it can position a brand. And no template can do what a talented designer can to bring a brand to life or engage a visitor.

The mobile website, however, has moved in a different direction. Thanks largely to the influence of the iPhone, users are showing a strong preference for mobile websites that offer pure function and speed. Icons and buttons. The goal, at least for websites (as opposed to more playful apps), is to navigate as easily as possible and get the information you need.

We think this creates a business opportunity for web designers. It offers an obvious place to draw the line between managed service and self service. “I can build you a beautiful desktop site and you can build yourself an effective mobile site (for less than you would expect).” Maybe there’s some training tacked on. Maybe there’s even some demand for a “supported self service” model. In general, clients spend their money appropriately and get what they need from each channel. Designers continue to make money on desktop sites while they’re awake and now they can make money on mobile sites while they’re asleep.

Web designers will always make their living on talent, ideas and full service. But mobile creates demand for a new kind of website, goMobi has a great self service solution and designers are in a unique position to deliver it to market.

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 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.

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.

This is the first in that “series.”

We recently launched a very simple domain name promotion to encourage our current customers to register their own names (firstnamelastname.com) and put them to immediate use. We suggested available TLDs, offered tips on complementary services, highlighted real examples and extended a 15% discount off our standard domain name pricing.

The results were outstanding. We sent an email that got a 33.3% open rate and an 8.9% click-through-rate among opens. 14% of those who clicked purchased. 43% of those who purchased attached an email service. These metrics all surpassed our past marketing efforts. (You might have even tighter customer relationships and enjoy better open rates, CTRs and conversions. You can therefore assume your numbers would look even better.)

The links below offer everything you should need to repeat this promotion, including a much more detailed breakdown of what we did (from database query to subject header test to coding the links in the email) and the zipped up HTML email that we sent. You can take a look at the landing page here. We have also added these materials to our new marketing resources section.

If you are an OpenSRS reseller, swipe, borrow and steal anything you want. That’s the idea. (If you are not an OpenSRS reseller, don’t!) If you have any questions at all or want some help on the implementation, let us know.

Click here to download the detailed case study (.pdf)

Click here to download the HTML email (.zip)

Click here to see the landing page