Cold outbound domain sales – keep it short or dive into the details?

There’s always been a lot of good debates about how to give yourself the best chance of selling a domain name when you’re reaching out to a potential buyer directly. Of course, like most things in life, there’s no one answer that works all the time and I’ve found people are typically divided into two camps:

  1. Keep it short and sweet otherwise the potential buyer will ignore you
  2. Do a deeper dive to tell the potential buyer why buying your domain name will benefit their business

I used to do cold outbound on my domains, but I haven’t done it too much over the years. Early on I was big into outbound but once I started a company I had a lot less time and that went out the window. The only exception to this is that I do tend to do outbound on my inbounds, i.e. if someone made an offer on a name and we never agreed on price, I do try to follow-up with them some number of months later. I shared a bit about three domains I sold to people who had previously made inbound offers last week. But for this post, I’m talking about good old cold outbound via either email or LinkedIn.

Given how long it’s been since I’ve done cold outbound I’m not a good person to share advice, I’m not really sure what works or what doesn’t. My gut tells me that keeping it short and sweet is the way to go. The reason I lean towards Camp #1 is because I know how much email people get these days, so getting an email from someone you don’t know that requires a lot of reading is probably a no-go.

That being said, I could also see why you might need to do a little selling, not everyone understand the incredible value that a good domain name can bring to their business. I have had long discussions with a lot of my friends who are starting companies or run companies now that just don’t understand why they’d spend more than $10 on a domain. Usually, after I do a deeper dive, they get it, but it takes some time.

So I’m interested to hear from my readers who do sell domains via cold outbound, what works best for you?

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton