WebGrow, Inc., is offering for sale a portfolio of domain names pertaining to the insurance market in India that would confer an ongoing, powerful strategic advantage and revenue generator to any insurance provider that deploys them effectively.

We have engaged the services of [Name of Domain Name Brokerage] as a broker to negotiate the sale on our behalf.  Please direct all communications through them.

This document presents the domains and also their advantages to an insurance provider.

Thank you.

— Keith Borden, Co-Owner
     WebGrow, Inc.

We have two groups of domains, totaling 222 Indian Insurance domains in all:

• Domain names for types of insurance:  48 .IN domains and 11 .COM domains, for a total of 59 domains covering up to 48 types of insurance. (That's 48 types based on keywords. The actual number of types is less because some keywords represent the same type.)
• Insurance domain names for places:  83 .IN domains and 80 .COM domains, for a total of 163 domains covering 95 geographical areas in India:

• All of India’s 28 states
• All of India’s 8 union territories (either the whole territory or its parts)
• 70% of India’s 20 largest cities
• 26 of the largest cities in each state or union territory
• 33 of the state or union territory capitals
• The national capital, New Delhi.

With over 1.3 billion people, India is the world’s second-most populous country, and is expected to be the most populous by 2030.

Companies selling insurance in India, which could therefore profit from purchasing these domains, include not only Indian companies themselves, but also often their international partners.  We see names like Prudential, Cigna, Liberty [Mutual] and MetLife.

Business domain names matter for several reasons.

• Customers notice the domain names of websites they go to, especially if they type the name in, or if the name is made prominent in an ad or on the site itself.
• They especially notice a domain name they’re sent to, in a radio, TV or print ad (instead of by a link they can just click on).
• They easily remember a name that fits what they’re looking for — PunjabInsurance.IN (if they’re looking for insurance in Punjab), or FloodInsurance.IN (if they’re looking for flood insurance). They may even make a guess and just type the name in the browser.
• The right domain name helps inspire confidence and trust (see below).
• If a competitor owned a good domain, they could use it to take business away from you. It’s good to own the domain to just prevent them from doing that, and even better for you to use it to take business away from them.

The .COM and .IN insurance domain names in this set offer several powerful advantages.

• The .COM extension — the first extension used commercialy —suggests either an American or a global company focus, and has the highest trust and prestige globally.

Ø However, it doesn’t guarntee service in India, or products and services adapted to India. But that concern goes away for “geo” domains, e.g., rajkotinsurance.com.

• The .IN extension signifies an Indian company, implying high relevance in that country.  Together, .IN and .COM are the two most important domain extensions to own in India.

• An “exact match” domain name — that is, one which exactly matches what the customer is looking for — assures the customer immediately that they’ve landed in the right place.
• An exact match domain with a major extension — either .COM, or the local country’s extension (.IN India) — signals that you own the territory, that is, you were quick enough, smart enough or big enough to capture the preeminent domain for that market.
• A major-entension, exact-match geo domain (e.g., punjabinsurance.in) not only promises relevance (if the customer is in that region), but also inspires confidence by suggesting that it’s the official insurance website for that region.
• There are particular advantages to owning these domains as a set (see below).

The .COM and .IN domains we are offering provide keyword coverage for many types of insurance and almost all of India’s states and territories, as well as many of its major cities. 

This is exclusive coverage, especially for the .IN domains, the official extension for India.  Only one company can acquire ownership of these domains — you or a competitor — and that company will have an ongoing commanding advantage selling insurance to the Indian market.

The advantages of deploying a set of domains, rather than a single site, are many.

• Each site tells customers they’re in exactly the right place for what they’re looking for.
• Each site can be customized with both images and text to match its unique focus.
• Each site can link to all the others in a tightly integrated network, making customer navigation among them easy or seamless while impressing with your broad reach.
• The mutual linking in a tightly integrated network will help enormously with SEO, since the traffic to each site will boost the search engine ranking of all the sites.
• The marketing strength of the website network makes it harder and more costly for a competitor to break through and compete effectively in any part of this broad market.

These network advantages make it imperative that all these domains be kept together as a set.  Deployed as an integrated set, the domains will become strongly synergistic: the whole will be much, much greater than the sum of its parts.

Ø  We will not break up the set by selling some domains to one company, some to another.  This assures you that we won’t dilute the advantage of owning them — or the disadvantage of not owning them. 

The full advantage will go to one buyer.

The full disadvantage will go to all of that buyer’s competitors.

All insurance providers in India could benefit, but only one will.  All the rest will be hurt.

Frankly, any one or two of these domains, by themselves, would be something you could probably afford to ignore.  But not the set.  The set covers too much ground. It’s a must-have.

But what if you don’t offer all the types or serve all of the regions in the set?

• Owning the set gives you leverage to profitably partner with companies that do.
• Owning the set allows you to profitably leverage it in the areas you do serve.
• Owning the set creates spaces for you to expand into, at any time in the future.
• If a competitor owns the set, they may use it to take business away from you … forever.

But what about managing so many sites?

Systems like Multisite and MainWP allow you to manage multiple WordPress sites from a single dashboard, although each does it differently and the differences matter.  You can make changes on selected sites or all sites simultaneously.  Managing multiple sites should not be an obstacle.

But what about branding?

You can use your company name, logo and colors across all the sites, simultaneously keeping your branding and building the understanding that your brand has a broad reach.

Owning this set of domains would  …

• Help a leading insurance provider consolidate their lead and cut off the competition. 
• Give a mid-level player a unique, permanent asset to leverage against the market leaders. 
• Give a foreign investor a huge leg up in this giant market.
• Create new market space for your company to grow into more easily.
• Give you a permanent competitive edge that can’t be duplicated, protection for the future.

In a competitive bidding situation, how much should you be prepared to pay for this domain set?

You might think to turn to domain appraisal services for answers.  They could appraise each of the domains, add them up and give you a number for the total.  A sophisticated service might even add in something for the synergistic effect of a set.  This seems like an obvious approach.

But it would be a major mistake.  It’s important to understand why the appraisal services would get it wrong, so you don’t lose the set to a more savvy competitor.

Domain appraisal sites valuate domains based on sales of domains they consider similar.  But who bought those other domains?  And for what purpose?

There are two types of domain buyers:

• Domain investors (“domainers”):  Parties (like WebGrow) that purchase domains
  as an investment, hoping to resell them at a profit — often to other domainers.
• End users:  Parties (in this case, insurance companies) that purchase domains
  to use as an integral part of their business.

Since domainers are buying to resell, they try to buy at bargain prices.  These push the average market price for similar domains downward, and that affects appraisal service valuations.

What appraisal services don’t take into account, and can’t, is all the factors that contribute to the profit potential of this domain set for your company if you own it, as well as the loss potential for your company if a competitor owns it instead.

Only your own company has the information necessary to estimate these two factors, which are unique to your company because they are different for every company.  How could they not be?

Savvy end users valuate domains on a different basis.  They ask two critical questions:

• How much additional profit can I expect to make if I deploy this asset effectively?
• How much business can I expect to lose if a competitor deploys this asset effectively?

So for an end user, the criteria by which domainers valuate domains, as well as any appraisals based on market prices, are completely irrelevant.  Instead, all that’s relevant is an estimation of the impact that owning the domains, or not owning them, could have on their business.

For more on valuating domain names, please see articles 13-23 in the author’s Linkedin article series, What Businesses Need to Know about Domaining:

In writing this overview — for the benefit of a select audience, for a very specific purpose —  I made my best effort to be accurate and objective within the confines of brevity.  Please forgive any distortions or biases which nevertheless inadvertently found their way into my words.  I encourage you to do your own research, to correct any inaccuracies or biases herein. 

Putting “India” at the end, when available, was considered better than at the beginning, since putting it at the beginning could suggest a service of India rather than just in India.