Today I want to talk about personalized URL’s (PURL’s) and the twist they can add to a traditional direct mail campaign. A PURL is a unique website generated for individual customers, for example johnflame.website.com. It’s a great way to grab your customer’s attention and increase engagement with your mailing. A standard web URL is pretty uninteresting, everybody’s seen them day after day and the appeal is all but gone. However the addition of this level of personalization really opens up opportunities that you don’t have with a generic URL.
PURLs allow you to customize the landing page for each particular customer incorporating customer details from your data base to great effect. This may be hard to grasp so I will give you an example. We recently completed a campaign for a car dealership looking to increase traffic to a special sales event. The campaign started with a direct mail piece targeted to customers we mined from their database, these customers were invited to get a quote for a trade in and upgrade of their current vehicle.
The PURL was used to point them to a personalized landing page where they found an image of the new model of their current vehicle and a form they were ask to complete to claim a special cash back upgrade voucher. Once the customer completed their form they were emailed their voucher and the customer information for that lead was automatically forwarded to the dealership. This information gave the dealer the best time to contact the customer and the vehicle that the lead was most interested in, it also allowed the sales team to follow up and book private appointments with that customer.
This program was extremely successful and resulted in great sales for our client. With PURL’s the options are limitless and take advantage of the impact of Direct Mail to drive strong online response. It’s a great lesson that direct mail doesn’t have to follow the traditional route to be effective. So the next time you think about planning a direct mail campaign don’t confine yourself to what you can do on paper, and if you need some help, don’t hesitate to give JR Direct a call or leave us a note here.
