I Like Contact Forms When Doing Outbound Sales

I haven’t been doing a whole lot of outbound marketing to sell domain names this year, primarily due to the pandemic and economic fallout that resulted. When I do outbound marketing to sell domain names, it is for my “inventory quality” assets that are relatively easy to replace. I have selectively picked up my outbound efforts a bit since the beginning of the month, and I want to share a tip.

To give a bit of background on my outbound marketing efforts, I can share that I primarily find leads via related Google searches and via the lead generation tool at Dropping.pro. Instead of just looking for email addresses and aiming for the cannon approach, I try to take a nuanced approach and find someone specific at a company. I then try to find their email address or the email convention for the company.

Oftentimes while searching for someone specific at a company, I will come across small or medium sized businesses and startups. These are typically my primary target audience as they tend to be able to make decisions and close deals quickly without much red tape.

When I can’t find a targeted email address at a company, I look for a contact form. Many websites have these forms, and they are usually found via a “contact us” link or something along those lines. Oftentimes the contact link is in the website header, but I have also found the footer to be a good place to check.

The contact form is a good way to ensure deliverability, in my opinion, for two reasons:

• Emails sent via the website’s servers rather than third party email servers.
• Contact form emails are typically monitored by an employee and/pr principal.

I do not fill out extensive contact forms that are clearly lead generation. For instance, I am not going to fill out an event planner’s contact form and select “wedding” and the dates, just to send an outbound sales email. I don’t like receiving a sales email on my lead gen form, and I don’t think someone else would either. I also pay attention to disclaimers. If the website requests no outbound solicitations, I respect that request. I generally stick to sending emails via general contact us forms.

The volume of emails I send is so low I do not track email opens, deliverability, sell through rate, or anything else really. I take the one shot approach where I send one email and don’t usually follow up. If the prospect doesn’t respond, that’s it. They either get the value proposition of the domain name I am selling or they don’t.

Sending emails via contact form has been an effective way for me to get in touch with prospective buyers, and when I can’t find a well targeted email address, the contact form is my preferred method of contact.