.tel domains: how your business can benefit
Registration will be open to all on June 1, and all eligible names will be available for registration from 15:00 BST.
With more than 300,000 .tel domains registered at the time of writing, Telnic remains the seventh-largest registry operator under ICANN management. In 2010, .tel registrations increased by 10 percent year on year and customers are now spread across more than 180 countries worldwide.
The world of marketing communications has undergone a seismic shift over the past two years since the .tel domain launched in general availability. One needs only to look at advertising billboards in cities all over the world to see brands advertising ‘Find us on Facebook’ instead of putting a link to their corporate or marketing website. Brand crises are generated and addressed in real-time through Twitter.
Group buying on sites such as Groupon is valued in the tens of billions pre-IPO, and social location-sharing applications are driving custom through check-ins and discounts for ‘mayors’ of locations. Marketing has, simply put, been turned on its head; the community is in control and, as marketing expert Seth Godin says, your brand is defined by the worst voice of the company.
For Telnic and the .tel, the above position is a huge opportunity and one that brand owners should embrace.
For very little investment, brands have an instant hub from which to promote all of the ways they can be contacted, to any device, and directly (in some instances) into the address book of the mobile user. In this age of openness, if a brand is not signposting all of the ways that it can be contacted, they’re missing out on making it incredibly easy for customers to engage—whether it’s to praise the organisation or complain.
Dell has shown the power of engaging with disgruntled customers, a lesson learned from bitter experience. It has now transformed its customer service through Twitter and in turn generated significant revenue from this communication channel.
All the evidence points to the fact that jumping on one single platform to perform all of the requirements that a successful brand needs to in order to win customers won’t work. After all, when the party moves on, as MySpace has found to its cost, there’s a whole host of work involved in changing platform, as well as questions regarding legal ownership of content. Who, for example, owns content on Facebook? Not the user, it would seem.
With the increasing uncertainty over what the ‘next big thing’ is, the fragmentation of platforms, the battle for readers between traditional and social search, brands need to cover their bases. The only truly open platform today is the web, where the owner of a domain can control what they publish and to whom.
For an average $15 per year with no additional hosting, development or maintenance costs, a .tel can provide significant benefits to an organisation’s customer services operations, marketing and communications teams.
It’s an instant mobile presence, so customers on Pay As You Go mobile contracts (around 60 percent of mobile subscribers in the UK, for example), have quick and low-cost access to the information they want on their mobile devices. The customer experience of using a .tel domain and working your way through an automated call centre are light years apart.
Because information can be updated ‘on the fly’ through mobile applications for the iPhone and Android, a .tel can provide real-time information delivery, whether that be offers running over a lunchtime through to crisis information for product recalls or emergency contact information.
Additionally, as information can be structured in a hierarchical way, brands from GDF Suez (http://gdfsuez.tel/) through to PEAK Sport Egypt (http://peaksport.tel) can benefit from a simple way for people to navigate how to find them, all in a lightweight and optimised way.
Using a .tel behind a QR code in advertising campaigns provides both the ability for information to be added after the campaign has launched as well as providing the customer with a choice of ways of interacting. With the iPad 2 having a camera, it’s not just mobile devices that will be QR code aware, so consider the choices. Additionally, if a QR code is used on printed materials, the ability of people to rediscover it at a later date is redundant if the information is long out of date.
Much has changed in terms of additional functionality since launch. We have added new templates, more branding options, Google Analytics tracking tools and the ability to add related content and image-based ad banners to further promote your own products, services or announcements. A .tel domain can be up and running and working for you in five minutes, without any additional investment and no technical wizardry required—something that can’t be said for other traditional domain names.
George Moen (http://georgemoen.tel), CEO of the expanding Blenz Canadian Coffee Company (http://blenzcoffee.tel), was an early advocate of .tel and states that he never runs marketing campaigns without considering .tel to be at the heart of them.
As a sponsor of gold-winning Olympic snowboarding athlete Maelle Ricker, Blenz understands that picking the right choices for brand promotion is crucial and, Moen says, .tel is no exception to that. That visibility works for every profession, from Guinness World Recordholding sword-swallowers (http://danmeyer.tel) to other professions used to the cut and thrust of doing business (http://rickfarrowlaw.tel).
If your organisation has .tel domains languishing in its portfolio with no information in them, now is the time to engage your marketing and customer relations department, get their existing online investments listed there and increasing the return on investment that social media can bring by delivering more eyeballs and discoverability.
Justin Hayward is the business development director at Telnic Limited. He can be contacted at: jhayward@telnic.org
