Sometimes, days, weeks, or even months go by without a domain sale. It can be discouraging. Sometimes it’s because there are no buyers currently interested in your names. Sometimes, its because they don’t know your names are available. Sometimes, its just not the right fit for someone due to timing, price point, or other circumstances of life.
When it comes to domaining, I run two strategies concurrently. I have some names in my portfolio that I’ve invested money in and I hang on to and wait for offers to come in. Sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t. Regardless, these are names I plan to hold on to for the long haul. There are other names I have that I’ve hand registered thinking they will be of value to someone and I look for the quick, low dollar sale. Sometimes these offers come in through the marketplaces and often times I target the buyers with outbound emails.
Typically, my strategy for this second group is to find potential buyers and send them an email based on one of my domain email templates. I often target a price in the low $x,xxx range and hope for the best. If it sells, that’s great. If it doesn’t, I may hang on to it for a few years and see what happens. But at some point, I’ll decide not to renew the name if it hasn’t had any interest.
Recently, I have tried listing some names on NameLiquidate to see if I could offload them. I have had a little success but typically the names make it down into the bargain bin and I get the minimum $9 or maybe nothing. Neither case offers me the funds to have covered even the renewal fee for the couple of years I may have held the name. It’s a net loss.
This past Friday, I decided to try a new approach. I figured that as long as I plan on dropping these names, I would try one more outbound email strategy. I wrote up a new domain name sale email template stating that I was not planning on renewing the name and offering it for $199. I sent out about 10-15 targeted emails for each of the three different domain names. I’ve added this template to the collection of email templates for domaining.
Hours passed but within the same day, I had an interested party for each of the names. The sales went like this:
- Domain1 – Buyer negotiated down to $100
- Domain2 – Buyer negotiated down to $150
- Domain3 – Buyer paid full asking price of $199
Although these are low dollar sales, I am very pleased with the results. These are names I was otherwise planning on taking a loss on, dropping them completely. I’ve stated before that the wording and specific message in your email makes a big difference in making or breaking a sale. This new template is working well for me and I plan to spend much of this week repeating the exercise with some of my other domain names.
