keepyour.co.uk renewals campaign
Nominet, the .uk registry, today announced the start of its www.keepyour.co.uk renewals campaign which will be running in print and online throughout August and September.
The focus of the campaign is to raise renewal rates by encouraging registrants to think about the value of their domain name.
It seems co.uk domains are becoming increasingly valuable – for instance, we reported in February how Cruises.co.uk had sold for £560,000. If you are interested, you can find recent .uk sales on DomainPrices.co.uk.
It is also important to look beyond the simple ‘real estate’ value of the name itself and consider the value in terms of traffic your domain name has before you can let it expire. If you forget to renew your domain, your visitors have nowhere to go other than your competitor’s site.
With this in mind, our 123-reg control panel allows you to easily manage your .uk renewals. Simply follow this path:
Login > Domain Renewals > Select domains > Renew
We also have auto-renew turned on by default in your account and we allow you to view your domains as a list to monitor expiry dates so you stay online as long as you want to.
With over 1 million .uk domains on our systems we fully support Nominet in this campaign and encourage you to love your .uk!
On August 11th, 2008 at 2:43 pm
As you fully support Nominet in this campaign, will you change your systems to allow .uk domains to be renewed up to six months in advance? Currently this is only possible for domains falling due in the next 90 days.
If you go to the new keepyour.co.uk web site and enter a domain name which is within six months of expiry, the next page says:
Your domain could do with a bit of love.
You’ll need to do it within the next six months.
You can do this now by clicking here.
It then provides a screen where you can find out who your registrar is. I am a reseller and I register domains for my clients using your service. I am concerned that my clients will use this new web site and then get confused and think I have been remiss in not renewing their domain soon enough, or will approach you to try to renew the domain, leading to a lot of unnecessary administrative work for no extra income either to you or to me.
The new website tells people that they can renew their domains up to six months in advance. While this is nothing new, publicising it so widely is new and I think you should align your procedures with Nominet’s.
I also think you should allow the international domains to be renewed up to six months in advance as this could head off some of the letters from Domain Registry of America and similar companies.
On August 12th, 2008 at 10:44 am
Hi Roger,
Thanks for commenting. I do see what you mean; it’s true that there’s a bit of a disparity between what the keepyour.co.uk site says and the way our control panel works.
We’ll have a look into this to see what we can do to change the control panel so you can renew up to 6 months in advance.
In the meantime, we still think the message to renew as soon as you can is a good one, and you can still renew up to 90 days ahead through our control panel.
I’m sure you already know about our auto-renew option too - using this does ensure that domains are renewed automatically.