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How to Win by Treating Your Customers as Members

August 13, 2020

Guest author: Jeffrey Sass, CMO, .CLUB Domains

There is a reason American Express made the phrase “Membership has its privileges” famous. The brand had the right idea to focus on the benefits of membership to attract and retain customers. We are tribal by nature. It is in our DNA to want to belong to a community — to be a part of something bigger than ourselves. It is why clubs of all kinds have been around for thousands of years. It is why we choose to live in neighborhoods, communities and cities.

Being part of a community has never been easier or more powerful than it is today thanks to the Internet, and more specifically, thanks to the millions of websites on the so-called worldwide web. When you choose a domain name, hosting plan, and set up your own online presence, whether for business or personal use, you are joining one of the largest clubs ever – the club of website owners. And as a website owner, you are in a very unique and powerful position to attract visitors and customers, and create your own online community around your interests, your passions, your products, or services.

There is a growing trend for eCommerce businesses to focus on memberships and subscriptions. According to a February 2018 report by McKinsey & Company, “The subscription e-commerce market has grown by more than 100 percent a year over the past five years. The largest such retailers generated more than $2.6 billion in sales in 2016, up from a mere $57 million in 2011.”

And that trend continues. It makes perfect sense for eCommerce businesses and online sites of all types to treat their visitors and customers as members. Every eCommerce platform and most content-driven websites encourage visitors to establish an account and log in when they visit. If people are going to give you their name and email address, they are effectively joining your club. Your visitors and customers are members of your club, so treat them as such. Offer them the “privileges” that Amex espouses. Make them feel special for joining your community. There are a number of ways this can be done, and here are a few simple ones:

Share exclusive content that only members receive.
If you sell something, offer members special deals, and early access to new products or services. Occasionally include some added-value items in their orders for free as a member benefit.
Make sure your support team makes every interaction with a member memorable, putting the member’s needs first.
Encourage members to provide feedback and testimonials, and reward them for doing so — and LISTEN to them and let them know their feedback is appreciated.
Shine a light on your members in your Social Media marketing (as appropriate).

In general, just imagine how you would want to be treated as a member of a club, and treat your visitors and customers the same way. Just as you enjoy feeling wanted and appreciated, so will your visitors and customers when they feel like they are a member of your “club.”

And, if you are looking for a domain name that truly expresses the community of your website or business, a domain ending in .CLUB may be a great choice. You’d be joining the countless other creative businesses and individuals that have chosen .CLUB for their online home. Take for example, Firstleaf.club, a company that has built a large community around wine by offering a customized wine club experience.

Unlike most wine clubs where every member is sent the same selection of wines, Firstleaf chooses your wines based on your personalized profile, and lets you rate the wines you receive. Then they customize future orders just for you, based on your likes and dislikes. As a result, Firstleaf has consistently been rated among the top wine clubs and has been featured in articles in Forbes, Huffington Post, Newsweek, Entertainment Tonight, NBC News, and many more. Clearly, the personalized treatment they give their members is leading to great success.

So, as you think about growing your online community and retaining and re-engaging your customers, think about them as members of your club. You don’t have to be as big as American Express to show your customers and fans that, indeed, membership has its privileges.

Is. CLUB a good fit for you or your customers?

.CLUB has many uses outside of eCommerce, and its potential for subscription-based retailers is really intriguing. Plus, you can now get .CLUB on promotion for just $6. If you’re interested in exploring some other creative domain options, check Enom’s our full TLD lineup.

A Great Domain for Freelancers and Entrepreneurs? Try .ME

June 22, 2020

Featured, Fun, Industry Insight

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Today, personal websites function as a calling card that can help your customers showcase an online portfolio, house their resume or blog, and find creative ways to establish their personal brand.

.ME is a great option for entrepreneurs, hobbyists, and professionals looking to do any of the above. And as more and more of these potential customers hop online, adding .ME to your lineup is a no-brainer.

Why you should add .ME to your TLD lineup

.ME is easy to market

.ME simply makes sense for “about me” pages, online portfolios, freelance business websites, and professional profile pages. Plus, the .ME registry provides tons of resources for those looking to build a personal brand — content that you can draw from in your marketing efforts.

.ME has big market potential

Having a stand-out online presence is becoming increasingly critical for freelancers and professionals looking to showcase their work or grow their businesses. .ME gives you a great option to offer this growing segment. There are no restrictions for the TLD, and “Me” is a word commonly understood by non-English speakers, which gives it a broad, global appeal.

It’s competitively priced (and currently on sale!)

.ME is competitively priced against popular legacy TLDs (.COM, . NET, .BIZ and .ORG), and right now, you can take advantage of $10 promo pricing.

.ME is a solid .COM alternative

Some people are able to snag theirfirstandlastname.com, but the vast majority of us don’t have a terribly unique moniker. .ME provides a short, fresh alternative when your customer’s .COM is taken.

.ME domains are memorable

We all want our websites to stand out and stick in the minds of our visitors. .ME has a novelty factor that causes people to take note. Plus, most of us would agree that websites that feel personal are often more memorable. What’s more personal that .ME?

.ME shows solid customer stickiness

.ME has a high renewal rate. The majority of .ME registrants hold their registration for many years. Customer stickiness can be further improved by combining the domain purchase with value-added services, like SSL and Email.

Marketing .ME domains to your customers

Getting creative with .ME domain names

Website owners can use their .ME to create a space that says “this is who am I and what I want people to know about me.” Some .ME registrants demonstrate the value of simply using their name alone, like medical illustrator, chinamimichaels.me. Others opt for a playful approach that takes advantage of keywords, like UK blogger, thelondoner.me.

In both cases, .ME supports the site owner’s goal of telling their story and presenting their work in a professional, yet unique and individual way.

But .ME is also employed in more surprising ways by big names like PayPal. Check out their creative use of paypal.me to simplify transactions for their users.

.ME resources you can use

The .ME team actively helps new freelancers, recent grads and small businesses to get online and stay connected to the world. Transitioning from a full-time job or directly from the classroom to a freelance career can be stressful, and often these customers spend a lot of time researching their next steps.

The .ME blog is full of resources and advice on personal branding and how to launch a freelance career. Whether it’s tips on choosing the right domain or which elements to include in a freelance portfolio, the .ME blog is full of content that can be used to help support your customers.

Bandzoogle: website builder for musicians

June 1, 2020

Featured, Fun, Industry Insight, Resellers

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Bandzoogle CEO Stacey Bedfor plays guitar in her home.

Stacey Bedford, CEO of Bandzoogle

The Enom team has enough musically inclined members to form at least two in-house rock bands, so we’re geeking out pretty hard about highlighting Bandzoogle on our blog. The Montreal-based SaaS company calls itself the easiest all-in-one professional website platform for musicians and bands. They target a unique vertical, one that their team is hugely passionate about, and they really know their customers: their platform is very much created for musicians, by musicians.

Here, Bandzoogle CEO, Stacey Bedford, provides some insight into how and why they’ve been so successful in supporting their customers and steadily growing the company.

What features are you most proud of? Which do the musicians that use your platform rave about?

Bandzoogle's Technical Support Manager, Adam, sits in his at-home production studio.

Bandzoogle’s Technical Support Manager, Adam, is also a music producer.

Commission-free direct-to-fan sales tools. Bandzoogle provides musicians with the eCommerce tools necessary to sell anything you can imagine: digital goods like albums, singles, EPs, song sheets, tickets, download codes or videos; physical goods like merch, CDs, or vinyl; and services like music lessons. You can even sell recurring subscriptions by tier and set up a crowdfunding campaign or preorders.

Bandzoogle does not take a cut of any sales, and we have a SaaS model. This is just one component of the tools we offer as an all-in-one platform. Regardless of our robust toolset, our members absolutely adore our customer support team. They’re your band’s roadie, your web tech. Our response time and quality of support is the best on the planet. Best of all, most of our team members are musicians.

How are you supporting your artists during COVID-19?

Within the first month of the pandemic, our team launched commission-free live streaming ticket sales, event ticket refunds, a tip jar feature, transaction history exports and filtering, and a comprehensive guide to musician resources during a pandemic. Every week, our team meets to discuss what has changed in the last week and how we can help. We have quickly adapted our processes to stay on top of artists’ needs.

To what does Bandzoogle attribute your success?

There are a few things I can note here as being key to our success. As you can see, we are constantly building new features and designs that are relevant to artists today. But more than that, we always put our staff and members’ needs first. We have grown into a sizable company but we’ve never strayed from our core values.

At Bandzoogle, our members can expect a very high level of service and an honest partner. It is a streamlined set of pro features, but you’re dealing with a small family vibe.

Lastly, we’re fully bootstrapped— we’ve never taken external funding, and we’ve always made decisions on our own terms, without putting a focus on turning profits. Doing the right thing by our members has resulted in great success.

How do you build an artist community and connect with your customers?

We do a lot of proactive outreach with our customers. This includes webinars, free website reviews (even for non-members), member meetups in different cities, and you’ll also see some of us at different music tech events. We are a small team with a big reach. Part of that reach includes teaming up with other music verticals that hold the same strong values, like CD Baby, Bandsintown, Bandcamp, Soundcloud, and ASCAP.

Meaningful relationships with ethical music businesses are important to our business model; as a business, you won’t get very far if you don’t venture off the island. Building bridges is important to grow your artist community and connect with your customers.

What have been your major milestones as a company?

The Bandzoogle team poses for a group photo at one of their annual retreats.

An otherwise remote team, the Bandzoogle staff gets together for annual retreats.

Our members’ success is our success: last month, our members hit 62 million dollars in commission-free sales. In May, we also grew to 50,000 paid active users, with additional thousands of active trial members on any given day. Another huge milestone was growing our executive team. We have a fairly flat organizational chart, but we promoted Colin Mitchell to CTO and Dave Cool to VP of Strategic partnerships. We are leading this incredible group of individuals and for me, it’s a huge win to be able to foster so much professional growth within our small team of 29.

Are there any .COM alternatives that you guys like or that resonate with musicians?

As bricks and mortar stores become less pertinent, .COM TLDs have become a scarce resource. You’ll see many artists soon find out that long-winded .COMs leave too much room for user error, and alternative TLDs can be less costly and easier to remember.

Because of this, we see many artists branching out and using .ROCKS, .BAND, and some old, trusted, but still available, .ORG and .NET options for their band. Bandzoogle plans include many TLD options across all 3 plans, from $9.95 to $14.95 per month.

Are there any exciting plans for the future you’d like to share?

I can tell you that the world is changing rapidly, and, for any business, finding a way to monetize globally is paramount today. We’ll see so many advancements in the tools available to both businesses and artists over the next year, it’ll be a different landscape. Businesses that are adaptable will do well, but it’s about to be a wild ride.

Avoiding COVID-19 Cyberattacks with Security Best-Practices

April 28, 2020

Advice, Featured, SSL

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security lock and credit cards on keyboard

Most of us that work in Tech are familiar with security best-practices, but for many people, including your customers, being thrust into working remotely and conducting more daily activity online can bring with it security risks. Now is a great time to support your customers with tips on how to stay secure online and avoid COVID-related cyberattacks.

We’ve partnered with one of our trusted Security providers, Digicert, to provide you content that can be easily recycled and shared with your customers.

Staying safe online, during COVID-19 and beyond

The ugly reality is that cybercriminals will exploit any vulnerability they can find. During the COVID-19 pandemic, many people are increasingly active on social media, email, apps and SMS (texting) as we look to stay connected with one another and alert to new information. Some malicious parties are taking advantage of this by using these technologies as a means to distribute malware. Often, these scams involve fraudsters impersonating healthcare officials or organizations.

What can you do to stay safe?

1. Be suspicious of emails and messages about COVID-19 by:

Inspecting the subject line and sender. If you don’t know the sender, or the subject line seems odd, don’t open the message and most importantly, do not click on any links.
Subject lines about a cure or vaccine for COVID-19 are most definitely scams. Don’t open the message.

2. Look for common signs of fraudulent emails. These include:

Poor grammar or spelling
Poor design
Unreliable contact information
No Terms and Conditions provided
Deals that seem too good to be true
Suspicious forms of payment (like sending money to a random PayPal account or paying with cryptocurrency)

3. Don’t download unknown email attachments

For example, the map below — made to look similar to a legitimate map created by Johns Hopkins University — was circulated by scammers via email. The map often included links to malicious sites disguised as official communication.

4. Get familiar with known scams related to COVID-19

The Canadian Anti-Fraud centre is keeping an up-to-date list of known scams, and we encourage you to check for similar resources being provided by your local government.

5. Keep your browser up-to-date and watch for security indicators

One easy way to protect yourself is to ensure you’re using the latest available version of your browser. We also recommend checking that the websites you are browsing are encrypted with SSL.

Digicert has a great guide on how to identify authorized sites. This is particularly important if you are providing any kind of personal information or making a financial transaction.

6. Always check for additional trust indicators

Asking yourself a few of the following questions can help you better determine whether a website is trustworthy:

Do they have Terms and Conditions or a return policy listed?
Do they have a secure site seal?
Are there grammar and spelling mistakes?
Do they have reviews?
Do they have a social media following?
Is there contact information listed in case you need to get in touch with the company about your order?
If you arrive at a website via a link contained in an email, take extra care sure to make sure the site you’re on is the company’s official website – not an imposter.

Questions like these do not guarantee that a site isn’t a scam, but they are helpful guides in determining whether or not you should trust a site.

The reality is, it’s impossible to completely safeguard against online threats. But just like handwashing and social distancing offer a basic line of defence against COVID-19, the best-practices outlined above will help protect you and minimize risk online during these challenging times.

Tucows Celebrates 20 Years in the Domain Industry

January 22, 2020

Featured, Fun

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As of this month, our parent company, Tucows, has officially been in the domains business for 20 years. They introduced OpenSRS (Enom’s then-rival, now-sister company) in 2000, not long after Enom was born. Tucows lifers share a lot of nostalgia for this era; though Tucows has grown to become the largest wholesale registrar and ventured successfully into Fibre Internet and Mobile, a unique fondness for OpenSRS’ early years remains. So what made those early years so cool? Michael Goldstein, Director of Marketing at the time, laid it out for us:

I am intentionally googling none of my recollections about the early days of OpenSRS so they will almost certainly be romanticized, exaggerated or just plain wrong. A few themes jump out at me.

We felt like we were part of a revolution

In a little corner of the world, Network Solutions was an evil empire. A government-sanctioned monopoly was getting fat and greedy and the product that they controlled (domain names) was quickly becoming more crucial to many millions more end-users around the globe. The channel (Web hosts, ISPs, IT consultants) was overcharged and underappreciated. We believed so strongly that these managed service providers (as we liked to call them at the time) knew the end users best and would take the best care of them if they just got the tools and pricing they needed.

It was fun to be a hero to that very narrow target. It was fun to offer a 70% price break from what Network Solutions was charging. It was fun to witness hypergrowth. In fact, you could argue that our unspoken tagline, “OpenSRS, we’re not Network Solutions!” was so successful, Tucows has really just imitated that same model and re-lived that sort of revolution again and again. Hover, we’re not GoDaddy! Ting, we’re not AT&T or Comcast!

We really enjoyed ourselves

When trends and forces are all delivering customers to your doorstep, it’s pretty easy to think you are clever. We ran magazine ads that said, “You can get a lesser product, lousy service and a bad attitude. But it’ll cost 3 times more.” (Oh, fun fact! Andy Berndt, the guy who wrote that ad for us as a freelance copywriter, is now in charge of all creative output at Google as founder and Managing Director of their internal Creative Lab. He also played Duke basketball for a season as a walk on.)

We couldn’t get enough cow references

We built the .MOO top-level domain to demonstrate our registry management solution. I also personally gave away two cows at ISPCon in San Diego to celebrate our two-millionth (I think!) domain name registration. The prize was actually a choice between two cows, a year supply of milk or the cash equivalent. We bet heavily on the winner taking the cash.

I rented the cows from a nearby dairy farmer for just one hour and paraded them across the plaza outside the conference center to chants of Who Let The Cows Out! (If that reference isn’t immediately familiar to you, I’m not going to explain it.) If I remember right, we intended to also highlight the winning registered domain name in our promotional materials and media outreach but chose not to because it was pretty shockingly pornographic (like the thousand domains registered before and after it). Good times.

We weren’t thinking about 25 million domains

Everything we did was done to quickly solve a problem or seize an opportunity. We listened well. We hustled. But we never expected that we would be using the things we built twenty years later. We certainly never imagined that we would eventually acquire and integrate half the other challengers that launched at the same time we did. Now we’re all growneded up. We are building an integrated platform that can accommodate over 25 million domain names and over 40,000 managed service providers (or whatever we call them these days) around the world. We proudly offer a huge selection of TLDs, from .ABOGADO to .ZONE. We talk about scale and efficiency. We brainstorm and measure site usability. I think we ultimately do a better job for our customers today than we did back then. I don’t think we’ll ever be quite as cool .

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How to Win by Treating Your Customers as Members

Is. CLUB a good fit for you or your customers?

A Great Domain for Freelancers and Entrepreneurs? Try .ME