- Impact
- 1,877
Well, I have been receiving a number of DMs from people asking how they could initiate outbound, what is it, how it works, and things around that. Here is my attempt to help you in this journey and try to answer some of it.
What is outbound?
An outbound is a way of marketing in which instead of the buyer reaching out to you for your domain names, naming a price, or pressing BIN, you reach out to the 'potential' buyers, show them what you are selling, why do you think it is valuable for them and how this can help their business.
This is contradictory to inbound where the end-users or business owners come to you for the domain name.
Why outbound?
There are 350 million + domain names registered across the world. Only a handful of domain names would be good. The rest would be average or not so good.
From that perspective, the buyer may not come after average names because either they do not know about it or they are not looking for it. The only way to sell those names is for you to reach out to the 'potential' buyers and put your name across to them.
Not only that, since your name is average, you have to convince them why owning your domain name could be valuable to them, in a language that they understand.
How do you do it?
I am not going to be very detailed on this front (that may be a discussion for another day) but here is how it works:
Reaching out to prospects can be done in multiple ways. This could be a combination of one or more of these channels:
a) Email outbound - Email outbound is typically done by finding out who the potential buyer is, getting their email ids, and then sending out emails to those buyers by actively reaching out to them.
For example, if you own VegasDrive.com, (mock negotiation for which we are doing here), you would:
1) Google terms like 'Vegas Drive', 'car rental service in Vegas', 'Vegas Car Rentals' and so on, and then, find out the top 50 search results, who could be your potential lead and shortlist them.
2) Then you would go to their website and gather their email address for the reach out. There are tools in the market as well and you can use them to gather leads directly (hunter.io and some others. People here may know better tools for lead generation).
3) Write an email to the prospects telling them that you own a certain name and selling it for so and so $. And this is how the domain name may benefit their business.
If they are interested, negotiate and sell.
b) LinkedIn and social Media - While LinkedIn seems to be the best source of outbound when it comes to social media, I have heard people sell through Insta and Facebook as well. But sometimes, it may not be worth the effort. So, LinkedIn is much more professional, targeted, and easier to operate. How do you sell on LinkedIn?
1) Find out the prospective businesses for your domain name, on Google.
2) Look for those businesses on LinkedIn. Find their owners.
3) Send out a message directly to the decision maker telling them about your domain name and the benefits.
4) If they are interested, negotiate and sell
c) Phone Call - While I have not tried cold calling and selling domain names, I have heard that some people are good at it and they have done this as well. I am not sure about the success rate of this method because people don't like receiving calls and believing some strangers, some may have cracked it and it is better they share their experience (since I do not know much about this).
I can expand more on the first 2 topics as we move along if you are interested, but here is a post for newbies to understand. Please share any experience that you had, tools, learnings, and anything else that can make us guide each other in our quest to succeeding at domain investment and flipping.
Do let me know if you want me to cover something specific in future posts.
What is outbound?
An outbound is a way of marketing in which instead of the buyer reaching out to you for your domain names, naming a price, or pressing BIN, you reach out to the 'potential' buyers, show them what you are selling, why do you think it is valuable for them and how this can help their business.
This is contradictory to inbound where the end-users or business owners come to you for the domain name.
Why outbound?
There are 350 million + domain names registered across the world. Only a handful of domain names would be good. The rest would be average or not so good.
From that perspective, the buyer may not come after average names because either they do not know about it or they are not looking for it. The only way to sell those names is for you to reach out to the 'potential' buyers and put your name across to them.
Not only that, since your name is average, you have to convince them why owning your domain name could be valuable to them, in a language that they understand.
How do you do it?
I am not going to be very detailed on this front (that may be a discussion for another day) but here is how it works:
Reaching out to prospects can be done in multiple ways. This could be a combination of one or more of these channels:
a) Email outbound - Email outbound is typically done by finding out who the potential buyer is, getting their email ids, and then sending out emails to those buyers by actively reaching out to them.
For example, if you own VegasDrive.com, (mock negotiation for which we are doing here), you would:
1) Google terms like 'Vegas Drive', 'car rental service in Vegas', 'Vegas Car Rentals' and so on, and then, find out the top 50 search results, who could be your potential lead and shortlist them.
2) Then you would go to their website and gather their email address for the reach out. There are tools in the market as well and you can use them to gather leads directly (hunter.io and some others. People here may know better tools for lead generation).
3) Write an email to the prospects telling them that you own a certain name and selling it for so and so $. And this is how the domain name may benefit their business.
If they are interested, negotiate and sell.
b) LinkedIn and social Media - While LinkedIn seems to be the best source of outbound when it comes to social media, I have heard people sell through Insta and Facebook as well. But sometimes, it may not be worth the effort. So, LinkedIn is much more professional, targeted, and easier to operate. How do you sell on LinkedIn?
1) Find out the prospective businesses for your domain name, on Google.
2) Look for those businesses on LinkedIn. Find their owners.
3) Send out a message directly to the decision maker telling them about your domain name and the benefits.
4) If they are interested, negotiate and sell
c) Phone Call - While I have not tried cold calling and selling domain names, I have heard that some people are good at it and they have done this as well. I am not sure about the success rate of this method because people don't like receiving calls and believing some strangers, some may have cracked it and it is better they share their experience (since I do not know much about this).
I can expand more on the first 2 topics as we move along if you are interested, but here is a post for newbies to understand. Please share any experience that you had, tools, learnings, and anything else that can make us guide each other in our quest to succeeding at domain investment and flipping.
Do let me know if you want me to cover something specific in future posts.