Sales Tip: Look at the Left Side of the Email Address

It is important to know who is inquiring about one of your domain names. There are many good ways to track down the identity of a prospective buyer or someone who inquired about a domain name, and I want to share what might be a less intuitive method in case you don’t have luck using other methods.

Look at the left side of the email address and perform a Google search for that. For instance, if the email address is MrDomainer999@yahoo.com, you will want to search for “MrDomainer999.” If the person used that moniker as a nickname, forum handle, website comment, or something else, you may be able to identify the prospect.

Oftentimes, people use personal email addresses instead of corporate emails to inquire about domain names. The email addresses might not have much of a search engine “footprint,” and searching the full email address might not yield any results. The left side of the email address might be more identifiable and that can be helpful in finding out who is inquiring about a domain name.

Obviously this is not going to work all the time. Many people don’t have email addresses that utilize a nickname. Others may create fictional email addresses like JohnSmith5555555@gmail.com to thwart an attempt at identifying the buyer. However, if other methods have failed, you might as well give this one a shot just in case there are search engine results that can help.

I use DomainNameSales.com for lead tracking on many of my domain names that I am interested in selling. DNS has several options that make it easier to identify who inquired about a particular domain name. There aren’t any methods that are 100% accurate in tracking down the owner of an email address. It is a good idea to exhaust every method that is available, and this may be something that can help identify who is inquiring about a domain name.