Two Issues Managing My Own Leads

For the last couple of weeks, I have been forwarding the bulk of my domain names to domain name-specific inquiry forms on Embrace.com. I am doing this in an effort to induce more sales that may have been lost because the minimum offer amount was set too high on Dan.com and to retain more control over inquiries for future discussions.

In order to send leads to Embrace.com landing pages, I changed the nameservers to default GoDaddy nameservers and set up forwarding to domain-specific landing pages. People can submit an offer or simply leave their contact information.

I have come across two issues managing my own leads. People have reported trouble submitting inquiries to me and people are confusing domain name landing pages with other websites.

I use the Contact Form 7 plugin on Embrace.com. It is a popular WordPress plugin that is used on many websites. When I have tested it, there have been no issues I could see. I appear to receive emails, and it seems to works well. That being said, I have had a couple of people contact me to let me know they had trouble submitting an inquiry. Strangely, one person was able to use the form on the Contact us page when the inquiry form resulted in an error. Both use the same Contact 7 form.

Because a couple of people let me know they encountered issues, it probably means there are  others who couldn’t submit inquiries and did not report it. I imagine someone who wants a domain name badly enough will figure out how to get in touch, especially because there is a phone number prominently listed on the lander and most inventory is listed for sale on GoDaddy. The fact that appears to be an ongoing issue I can’t easily troubleshoot bothers me.

To remedy this, I am going to look for a more robust contact form option. I am also going to work with my developer to do additional testing to see if we can replicate the issue and then fix it. For all I know, people may be entering incorrect email addresses or failing the behind the scenes capatcha. At this point, it is just guessing.

The second issue will be impossible to remedy. People visit one of my domain names and think they are on a different website with products or services. They will use the form to lodge a complaint or ask a question about something unrelated. Sometimes these inquiries are related to a former website on a domain name I now own or the person is looking for something totally unrelated.

I recall that Uniregistry / DomainNameSales.com had a “confused” template people could use when someone was clearly confused with their inquiry. I get a number of these types of inquiries, and I usually reply by telling the person they visited the wrong website. Once they see this, it becomes pretty clear to them.

These are the two biggest issues I am seeing now that I am managing more leads on my own. I will continue to operate this way for the foreseeable future.