Get Personal Personal URL Marketing

Finally!  You can now tie Purlem’s Personal URL application into Wordpress themes.  After several requests for this feature, I slightly tweaked Purlem and added a tutorial on how to Tie in Purlem with Wodpress.

The biggest benefit of doing this is that you can select from the thousand of wordpress designs to use as your Personalized URL Landing page!

I hope to create a wordpress plugin… but for now this should do the trick for those that don’t want to wait.

I created this PURL (personal URL) campaign for one of my clients:

View at: http://pizzapurl.com/Joe.Smith

The pizzeria already has good success sending tri-fold mailers to people that are new to the neighborhood. The mailer offers the receipient a free medium pizza.

Now the pizzeria would like to take it one step further with a Personalized URL.  The PURL (as seen above) asks the visitor to enter his email to recieve the Free Pizza coupon.  By doing this, the pizzeria will have a nice collection of email addresses to add to their marketing database.

They could even take it a step further and allow the visitor to place an order right on their PURL!  But lets not get carried away!

Client: Private Country Club (name is confidential)

Campaign Goal: The client already has a list of prospects and their emails from a previous on-site promotion. Now the goal is to collect the mailing addresses and golfing habits of these same prospects so the country club can continue to send them relevant solicitations in the future.

Strategy: Send a an email with a Personalized URL (PURL), that will direct the prospects to a website that welcomes them by name. The call to action will be a “braded gift” from the country club, received after filling out an online survey. When the prospect visits their PURL, they will be guided through a series of questions regarding their golfing habits. At the end, they will be asked to insert their mailing information so the club can send the gift.

Execution: The email sent to the prospects was sent in plain text and contained the following copy:
Dear Mike,

As a past guest of __________, I would like to present you with a free “” of the . We have created a short photo tour of our spectacular courses. To view the tour please go to:http://____________.com/Mike.Jones

Results:
440 Prospects received the email
157 Visited the PURL (35.7%)
110 Completed the survey and submitted their mailing address (25%)

Purlem now allows you to automatically create new Personalized URLs through your landing page form.  Now anybody that requests information through your site, can be forwarded to their web page personalized specifically to them.  It would also allow you to conveniently insert new contacts into your PURL campaigns from your site.

This is accomplished with Purlem’s API.  Before you begin using Purlem’s API you will need to do two things:
1) Request an API Token from Purlem.
2) Inform Purlem of the website where the form will be hosted.

With an active API account, you simply have to have the form on your website submit the information to Purlem’s API, and the contacts will be inserted into the appropriate campaign.

Learn more on the forum here: Personalized URL Forum

I created this demo personalized URL page  for a client that is going to be pitching the technology to Cruise Ships.  Thoughts? Comments?

You can view the site here: http://cruisepurl.com/Mike.Jones

Trying to decide the best way to mail your  personalized url postcards can be very overwhelming. There seems to be a million different options. The short answer is to let your printer handle the mailing. Most print shops have mailing services, and if they don’t, they know somebody who does. From my experience, you can plan on paying $80 – $150 to have your printer prep your mailing to send to the postoffice. Preping includes Address verification/NCOA certification/Cass certification & Presorting.

Benefits of mailing through your printer is that they understand how to get the lowest possible mailing rate with the postoffice. Chances are you will make the mailing service fees back in the amount you will save on postage. For example, if you were to mail a standard size (4″x6″) postcard, you would normally pay the full first class postage rate of 28¢. But a printer can usually bring that price down to 23¢ using their mailing services.

The only time to consider using standard postage (as opposed to first class) would be when you are sending postcards that are larger than 6 inches long by 4-1/4 inches high. In this case it you could save up to 10¢ per card mailing standard. The two big drawbacks of using standard mail typically will take an additional 10-15 days to deliver, and it is not undeliverable addresses are not forwarded or returned. A typical mailing will have 8% undeliverable addresses, so it is valuable to know which addresses these are for future mailings.

Added a new feature to Purlem today that allows you to save email drafts. Previously, there was no way for you to save an email that was to go out to the entire campaign.  Now you can press the ‘Save Draft’ button, and the email will be saved for future use.  Access the email drafts by clicking on “Drafts” in light blue email menu.

I’m typically not a sci-fi fan, so I went to see Avatar last night with low expectations.  Really, just wanted to see it for the new 3D technology before it left theaters.  But I left extremely impressed.  I would go as far as to say it is the best movie I have seen in years. Even my wife, who I had to drag to the movie, thought it was great.

But what I really thought was intersting about the success of Avatar is how they utilized Web 2.0 technologies to promote their brand.  They of-course had Twitter and Facebook pages. This is standard for every movie today.  But they took it a step further by reinventing the online preview with Adobe Air, and a MTV webcast with James Cameron himself.  The premier was even broadcast online on ustream.

But where is the personalization?  Couldn’t a movie such as Avatar really knock it out o the park with some quality 1:1 marketing techniques?  I think we will soon see movies start to market this was as 1:1 marketing hits main stream….

It might come as a surprise, but according to a new study by U.K.-based e-mail service provider Pure360, the best time to send a commerical email is outside of office hours.

In a study of 660,000 messages sent by 34 companies, Pure360 reports that just 9% of e-mails were opened between noon and 2 p.m., and 62% of those messages were news or magazine alerts.

However, according to Pure360, almost half, or 48%, of marketing e-mails in the study were opened outside office hours.

When I think about my email habits this actually makes sense.  If I receive a commercial email during office hours that is not from a client, friend, or prospect I immediately delete it.  However, if I receive a commercial email and it sparks my interests outside of office hours, I’m much more likely to explore a little deeper.

You could actually test this theory yourself with PURLs.  Send a campaign during office hours and track the response rates in real time.  And then do the same thing during office hours.  Doing this one thing could drastically increase your email marketing response rates.

The other day we met a group of Rockclimbers in Tucson and they were kind enough to take us out.  There’s something about trusting a stranger with your life as you repel down the mountain.

Me rock climbing in Tucson AZ