Dotster targets young users with new product
Vancouver-based Internet domain provider Dotster wants to pimp your e-mail.
That’s right. Dotster is launching a new product in hopes of tapping the young Internet savvy market.
"We looked around and realized that no one was marketing domains specifically at young people," said Dotster Vice President of Marketing George Decarlo. "We’re looking at users that are fourteen to fifteen years old on up to maybe nineteen."
Decarlo said the domain name industry as a whole tends to target an age group between 19 and 50, and widely ignores the younger market – a market full of active internet users.
The company this month launched Pimped Email, designed as sort of a "gateway" Internet site for people new to the game.
"What we’re offering is a place where young people can start small and get to know domain management and get to know domain ownership," Decarlo said.
The product allows users to take any existing e-mail account and, as Dotster puts it, pimp it. Users purchase a domain name for $7.95 and then visit an online control panel, where they label their existing e-mail accounts – whatever company they may be with – and apply their personalized touches to such accounts based on their new online domain.
"For example, if your name is Stephanie, you could choose e-mail accounts like "Stephanie at Stephanierocks.com or Stephanieisthebomb.com," Decarlo said. He hopes the new product will show young people the value of using the Internet as a marketing or networking tool.
"Later, when these customers are looking around for a Web host, they don’t have to look very far. The entire pimped e-mail product is designed to be compatible with the Dotster control panel, so with the click of a button they can go from being a Pimped Email Internet newbie to being an Internet businessman or an Internet businesswoman, and then they can really just sort of take the training wheels off and go from there."
Dotster’s new angle toward young people may be driven by the recent wild success of Myspace.com, a company that allows users to set up their own personal Web site for social networking purposes. With its success, many companies, musical acts and even the United States Military have opened MySpace accounts. Pimped e-mail and the subsequent domain connected to it is a fair answer to the success of Myspace.
"We realized that we already have a product that people can use and that people would want to use, they just don’t know how to go about it," Decarlo said. And what we’ve done here is we’ve taken a product that we’ve always sold and we’ve cut the price down, and made it accessible to everyone."
Decarlo said with sheer number of e-mail users, the Pimped Email product could become as big as downloadable ring tones, which became a multimillion dollar industry a few years ago.
"The fact is, it’s just as easy to download a ringtone on your cellphone as it is to go to pimpedemail.com and customize your e-mail address," Decarlo said. "This could blow up into the next big thing. And we’re just really really excited to see what this does."
