For a subscription-based e-commerce company looking to establish brand identity, your site’s domain name isn’t just the first thing that visitors see; it’s also an invaluable piece of real estate.
A memorable domain name not only helps consumers find your products or services long after seeing your ad, but also serves as an effective tool for marketing. With new domains like .shop and .club now popping up in Google search results right alongside established dot-com domains, e-commerce retailers big and small are enjoying the perks. You can use new domains in a dedicated, primary fashion or as logical shortcuts to an e-commerce section of your website.
As long as the internet is around, a unique domain can help build your brand.
Building Trust, Relevancy, and Loyalty
In e-commerce, trust and credibility are more essential than ever, but it goes beyond PR. Many brands are rolling out their own brand-name domain extensions as a clear way to assure consumers that they are visiting authentic brand websites. That’s why the Marriott hotel chain is launching .marriott: to prevent consumers from being bamboozled by phishing scammers with similar domains.
For e-commerce brands chasing after relevancy, unique domain names can also align more closely with what they’re offering consumers. Amazon, for example, uses its new domain extension prime.club to direct visitors to its Prime membership sign-up page and amazon.blackfriday to redirect visitors to its Black Friday deals.
Moreover, for those sites seeking a human touch, a .me extension offers a serious feel-good factor. For instance, at Raise.me, students in ninth grade and above can earn points, or“dollars,” for good grades, advanced courses, and extracurricular activities. They can then trade these “dollars” in for scholarship cash at individual colleges. One student, Abby Saxastar, raised $80,000 to fully cover her tuition at Florida’s Stetson University. The Raise.me name accurately captures the way this site is helping students succeed.
Energizing Informed Consumers
A purely generic domain extension doesn’t give an indication of what consumers may expect to find. Coffee.com could be anything related to coffee, from a Wikipedia-type page about the beverage to a site for facts about beans or growers. In fact, coffee.com is owned by the Peet’s Coffee chain and points to its main website. On the other hand, if they’re clicking on coffee.club, coffee.store, coffee.shop, or coffee.news, they won’t have to guess.
That was the thinking of Bill McClure, who roasts and sells more than 100,000 pounds of coffee a year from his warehouse in Fort Smith, Arkansas. McClure uses coffee.club for his subscription-based program aimed at improving the lives of fair-trade coffee farmers. He is paying $100,000 for the unique domain name over 10 years, interest-free, and this investment in the right side of the dot is reaping rewards for his brand identity.
McClure uses email to let existing and potential customers know about coffee.club in a cost-effective way, and built a search engine strategy to maximize its visibility. He also worked with get.club and other .clubs in noncompetitive businesses to get the word out and cross-market to its total customer base of 180,000 via its www.coffee.org site and www.CW-USA.com. Coffee.club also utilizes its coffee.org Facebook page to spread the news to its 251,000 fans. To date, McClure estimates his acquisition cost per customer to be about $16.
If you’re looking to draw qualified customers to your online store, the more your domain name tells them about what to expect, the more likely it is that those visitors are going to be pre-qualified. Half your work will be done before they even start shopping.
.Club Domaincs LLC operates the top-level domain .Club, designed for “clubs, associations, teams, loyalty programs, fan clubs, and anyone with a passion interested in a memorable, descriptive domain name.”
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