Domain sales & cold outreach

[seemly]

Over the course of more than 12 months, I've been having a conversation with a member on t'other forum about cold email outreach. The conversation has had many extended breaks between responses, but it got me thinking.

They stated that they'd sent around 10 cold emails for each of the 50 keyword domains they were looking to sell. All domains were priced between £300-£400, so nothing outside the realms of doable.

The target audience was businesses that were paying for exact match Google ads, or were ranking well on Google page 1. They decided against contacting Ltd companies with related business or product names based on the above lack of feedback.

Thoughts that instantly popped up in my head:​

A few things to ponder based on the above might be:

1. Do you mass mail the same template, or do you customise as much as possible for the target recipient?
2. Were you contacting the right person?
3. Were any keywords in the email triggering them being flagged for spam?
4. Did you have any way of tracking email delivery and open rates?
5. Did you have a follow up process? If so, what did it look like?
6. If they are already successful in Google, why would they need/want a new domain?

It would be good to get a better understanding of the above points, as cold outreach should really be part of the plan for a successful domainer (I'd imagine). I'm not (a successful domainer), so I couldn't say... but it sounds sensible.

Seeds of thought, or questions to pose to potential buyers:​

Maybe having a publicly available web resource that provides a bunch of useful articles on the benefit of keyword related domains for business, how they can be used, and a comparison of various marketing scenarios, and how the image of professionalism is impacted when using things like:

1. non-cctld domains for UK targeted business.
2. Hyphenated domains.
3. Non-keyword rich domains.
4. Using generic yahoo/gmail instead of company domain email addresses.
5. Longer domains with greater than x characters performance vs shorter snappier, more targeted options.
6. Benefit of keyword domains vs brandables, when, and why.

Should we crowdsource a collection of cold outreach tips for domainers?​

Maybe a crowdsourced collection of articles from the collective experience found here (and members yet to sign up) could come up with things that over a period of time proved to categorically work, why, and how you came to that conclusion.

Maybe articles containing content such as:

1. Different ways of sourcing the right point of contact.
2. Impactful subject lines.
3. How to write a successful email opening line.
4. How to successfully close an email, enticing the potential buyer to want to reply.
5. The psychology of a sale - Words and phrases to avoid.
6. How to avoid triggering spam.
7. Are HTML or plain text emails more performant in cold outreach?
8. Is there such a thing as "one email sales template to rule them all"?

Please share your thoughts, ideas, experiences.​

It would be good to get feedback from people that have had regular success with cold outreach.

It would also be good to see responses from people that completely avoid cold outreach, but have still somehow managed to make a success from trading in UK domains for an extended period of time.

Alternatively, maybe this whole post is boring AF, and I should wind my neck in.

 

[Kaleido]

Brilliant post Chris. Perhaps post it in this thread so we get things bubbling.