If you’re doing outbound marketing to try and sell a domain name, you might want to remove its buy it now landing page first. If you don’t, closing a sale could cost you quite a bit of money.
If you’ve targeted the right prospective buyer(s) for your good domain name, you will generate interest in the domain name. The first thing a buyer might do is visit the domain name to see what’s there. If you have a BIN landing page showing, the buyer might proceed with the purchase without even responding to your email. While this is an okay problem to have, you’ll still end up paying more in commission for this deal.
Let’s say you close a $5,000 domain name sale via outbound. If you have the domain name parked with Dan.com, Afternic, or Sedo nameservers (for example), you’ll pay the full sale commission even though you did the work to get the buyer. Had the buyer replied to your email and agreed to a deal, you could have imported the lead at Dan.com for a 5% commission or used Escrow.com and paid a fee based on the sale price.
If you’re doing outbound on a sale where that commission gap is substantial, you might consider changing it to a make offer or other general inquiry landing page. You might also consider raising the price just in case, but that could backfire if prospects opt to visit the domain name and get turned off by the high BIN price.
On more than one occasion, I closed a deal and ended up paying more than I should have paid because the buyer hit the BIN button. Sometimes I will leave the landing page up intentionally and use the time sensitive nature of the offer and first come first serve mentality as a means of inducing a deal, understanding that I will pay a higher commission % if the deal closes via the landing page.
Coincidentally, Shane Cultra alluded to something similar earlier today. I say it’s coincidental because he posted this about an hour ago, and I emailed myself a reminder to write about this topic earlier this morning while driving my son to school. I appreciate how easy Dan.com has made it for buyers to transact, but when I bring the buyer and negotiated a deal successfully, paying 15% or more in commission is not reasonable.
I had my mistakes for a long time when sending outbound email when I had domains in BIN.
Changing with the intuition that something was not right and sending landing pages by email with making an offer, I was also helped by a post I read by Doron Vermmat that I found on a website.