A couple of weeks ago, BusinessWeek ran an article about RyanAir. I was surprised to read that about 10% of the company's $3 billion+ annual sales comes from commissions on rental cars, hotel rooms, ski packages, travel insurance, etc. that it advertises on its website. $332 million between March 2005 and March 2006! A 36% increase over the previous year! Can you believe it?
In contrast, when you sign up for any service at 1&1 or GoDaddy, the only marketing messages you'll see are for the company's other products. Why is that?
For instance, might it make sense to offer domain registration customers theirname.com t-shirts? If someone activated your photo album tool, maybe they'd be interested in photo printing? And if they lived in Chicago, you could show them flight deals from Midway and O'Hare? At the very least, you could build an Amazon aStore; the folks at TypePad did. I've met more than a few new dedicated server owners who'd benefit from a good sysadmin reference book.
Just think: RyanAir is an airline, yet it manages to generate ~$1.80 from each website visitor - whether or not they become customers. Since 1&1 and GoDaddy are in the business of enabling Internet success, shouldn't they be able to match RyanAir's performance? And if you, too, are in the hosting business, shouldn't you?
PS - I just remembered that GoDaddy recently signed Danica Patrick as their new spokesperson. Maybe they'll leverage the deal to sell some miniature GoDaddy race cars?
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