Copyright Bill Communications Jan 2001| [Headnote] |
| Picking the right URL can make or break sales and marketing efforts |
AS INTERNET NAMES go Maim-narketing.com is a little bit bland. And Kimberly McCall knew it. So when the freelance marketer wanted to change the online name of her brick-andmortar company, McCallMedia & Marketing Inc., she searched for a moniker that would entice more clients. And her eventual pick? Marketingangel.com-an auspicious URL that glorified her skills.
The name worked. "I went from twenty hits a day to five hundred or six hundred" says McCall, who launched her Web site in 1998. Her new site name has garnered her higher profits (from at least a 50 percent rise in service inquiries) and site hits that have risen 600 percent.
In today's burgeoning world of ecommerce, picking the right domain name is crucial. Choose the wrong name and the results can be disastrous. Take the case of Soma.com. Executives behind the online apothecary thought the name was brilliant: the Latin word for body. But the clever moniker was lost on most people. After a year of pitiful sales, Soma, the first site of its kind, shut down, and left the cyber market open for brick-and-mortar giants Walgreens, 
Rite Aid, and others to take over (Soma was purchased by CVS).
Web sites work if the name conveys familiarity, says market researcher Andrew Greenberg of Greenberg Qualitative Research. "That's the reason sites like Drugstore.com have an edge," he says. That's also why it's important to purchase all possible versions of your URL. Names purchased by porn sites, for example, are common (witness Whitehouse.com). Legal battles to reclaim a name can run $15,000 or more, says Chris Bura, president of Alldomains.com, a firm that sells domain names. Registering nine domain names for $35 apiece is less costly than the legal fees you'll need to get a name back that you didn't originally feel the need to buy, Bura says.
A company should also be easy to find-with keywords customers can type that speak directly to the products or services an organization offers. With business-to-business sites, experts say that companies can take risks with their names, because there are fewer business-to-business than consumer sites to choose from. BravoGifts.com changed its Web name to a made-up word, Bravanta.com, to reflect a wider range of incentive management services, not just employee gifts. Executives say the name, a hybrid of "bravo" and "advantage," projects the company's promise: a job well done. They also wanted a name that would fall at the beginning of the alphabet, and, possibly, the search engine. The change, says Allyson Campa, Bravanta's CEO, is likely to generate $35 million in revenue.
Fabricated names are popular because they're easy to create and can sum up a company's mission. With 15 million domain names already registered, according to domain registration Web site Network Solutions, and most of the English language tapped, invented words are likely to increase. But companies should be wary of URLs that are too long (more than a dozen letters).
Choosing a name that customers don't identify with can also make it hard for them to find that business on the Web and that means a loss in sales. Robert Gorman, CEO of Officelinks, a Rocky Hill, New Jersey-based online Web site consultancy, says that unless a company is testing a new product line, it's best to transfer a company's well-established name online.
| [Sidebar] |
| DETERMINING A DOMAIN NAME |
| [Sidebar] |
| * Keep it simple: Names that are familiar, recognizable, and easy to spell make finding them much easier for customers searching the Web. |
| * Don't keep them guessing: A name should make sense right away, and give people a good sense of what a company does. |
| * Make sure it resonates: Pick a word that's fun to say and likely to stick in people's minds. |
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