One of the most critical elements of a successful Personalized URL (PURL) campaign is the offer.  It’s critical that you give your customers/prospects a good reason to respond to your message.  Typically the offer is a small gift, or entry to a competition.  Whatever it is, it should be attention grabbing and relevant to your audience. You want to make it a no-brainer for the recipient to take action.

But one “offer” that is commonly overlooked is an event.  This month’s PODi free case study features an AlphaGraphics campaign that used Personalized URLs to invite people to an event.

AlphaGraphics sent 331 invitations to the anniversary party, received 82 responses (24.8%) and welcomed 56 guests (16.9%) to the party.

They even took it a step further by personalizing the party favors to the guests, depending how they answered the survey questions on the Personalized URL.

After the event AlphaGraphics received several requests from clients to create similar campaigns for their own initiatives

Events are a powerful, and often overlooked, way to generate big responses for your Personalized URL campaign.

The overall cost of your PURL campaign is greatly dependent on the software you choose.  As the founder of Purlem, I’m obviously a biased to what I feel is the best & most affordable PURL software.  But I will try to give an overview of the different software options that are available, and the PURL cost associated with each.  Also, since the “other guys” hide their prices, I will only be able to give an approximate PURL Cost from research. You can see the links I used in the asterisks below.  If you have any further insight, please share!

Obviously, each of the above companies have slightly different offerings and features.  It would be up to you to research each company and decide which is the best for your you.

Other costs associated with a PURL Campaign you should be aware of…

Other than the software, you are likely going to also have to purchase a domain name and hosting account. Domain name’s typically run at $10/year and basic hosting accounts start at just $5/month.

Many of the above PURL applications provided landing page templates that are included in the fees. However, if you have a specific design in mind, there could be time and costs associated with creating the Landing Page design. I can’t speak for the other guys, but at Purlem a good ball-park for the design of a custom Landing Page is $1,000.

* http://purlem.com/packages
** http://www.printweek.com/news/800691/MindFire-LookWhosClicking
** http://www.printweek.com/Digital/article/1119897/printers-bridging-gap-cross-media/ 
*** http://easypurl.info/?p=179
**** http://www.seyboldpublications.com/v/vspfiles/downloadables/TSR0912.pdf  
***** http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/207184
******  http://www.seyboldpublications.com/v/vspfiles/downloadables/TSR0912.pdf

Approximately 37,000 direct mail pieces were sent to STAPLES Business Depot customers.  One half of the list received a a letter with personalized content and the other half received a started letter without any personalization.

In the personalized letter, the recipient was offered a gift based on their past purchase history, a description of the loyalty program they were currently registered for, and a coupon that was related to past purchases.

The rate of coupon redemption for the personalized piece was 50% greater.  The average purchase amount also increased by 18% from the personalized piece.

Download the PDF Case Study provided by Xerox

Did you know that it’s possible to use Photoshop’s Variables to add PURLs and QR Codes to your promotional pieces? Well you do now!  And believe it or not, it’s actually easy!

It can be very expensive to have a printer pull in variable content into your promotional pieces. By using this technique, you can bypass this expense entirely and save hundreds if not thousands of dollars.

Learn more about how you can Add PURLs & QR Codes with Photoshop.

Objectives:
We wanted to create a customised landing page and individual purls for each of our contacts as part of a discounted price we were offering to selected clients. We aimed to distribute these purls through email to over 8,000 clients, so that they would read www.salessummit2011.com/firstname.lastname

By uploading the same contact list into both Purlem and our email distribution software and tagging the link in both as the above, we hoped this would allow us to send the correct purl to each contact on mass.

Then, when they clicked through to the site, it would read:

Hi #firstname#, we have a special message for you…

We hoped that the use of purls customised with each individuals name would encourage them to open the email and click through to the site. We wanted it to stand out from other promotional offers they may receive and we hoped the purls and customised landing page would encourage people to make a purchase with us.

We also wanted to be able to track exactly which recipients had visited the site and how many times they had visited it, so that we could compare these to our own records of purchases made through the purls. This was for two reasons, firstly so that we could see how well the purls were working and how many purchases they were leading to, and secondly so that we could offer those who clicked through but didn’t buy a chance at a discounted fee.

Target audience:
Our target audience was mostly sales professionals, sales directors and business owners who we have already distributed either emails, newsletter, blog posts or sales tips to previously. We are in constant contact with most of these clients via some form of online contact throughout the year so they are current or previous clients of ours and are aware of who we are and what we do.

Results: 
We had some real problems trying to copy our original landing page into the Purlem landing page, as the text, images and layout ended up all over the place and it took us a long time to correct it. I have to admit, I didn’t find Purlem to be the easiest software to use and had to have the help of both a web designer and a member of the Purlem technical team help correct the design issues, but this may well have been due to the fact I am not fluent in web design as others who use the software will be.

We also had quite a lot of trouble using the purls in our form of email distribution software, as the tags didn’t quite match up and our lists were not edited in the way that they needed to be in order to be uploaded to Purlem – so it meant lots of messing around editing lists and contact data in order to get it right.

However, thanks to the help of the Purlem technical team (Martin Thomas in particular) we did manage to get all of the design issues sorted out and the purls did work as we wanted them to in the end.

We had a really good click through rate (5.75% of 8525 contacts) and we did have some clients go on to buy following the purl distribution, so we were pleased with the end results and we are intending to use Purlem again on a future project.

Hopefully it will be much easier the second time around, as the situation described above was the first time we had ever used purl software and that might be why we encountered so many problems initially.

Personalized URL (PURL) Landing Page

Personalized URL (PURL) Email

Case Study provided by MTD Training

Objective:
To acquire at least one new heating and plumbing company in seven of Roto Rooter’s core markets.

Results:
This was our most successful company acquisition campaign to date. We mailed 800 heating and plumbing companies with sales over $1MM. Overall 30 companies responded (3.75% response rate) — half of these responses came from the personalized URL. We successfully acquired 4 businesses from this campaign.

Roto-Rooter Direct Mail Letter with Personalized URL (PURL)

Roto Rooter Personal URL (PURL) Landing Page

Case Study provided by PLG Consulting.

We just released PURL If Statements to Purlem’s landing page editor. If Statements allow you to create “rules” that display unique content based on the visitor’s profile.

For example, if you wanted to display unique content for only Chicago Bears fans you can!

You can see our forum or video tutorial for more information on how you can begin to implement If Statments in your next PURL campaign.

The following is a PURL Case Study was conducted by the guys at Pharm Fresh Media. Special thanks to Steve for allowing other Purlem users to learn from such a well executed campaign.

Background

Client is an independent pharmacy buying cooperative with over 750 members. Client is made up of six regional groups who pattern and mimic each other in terms of compliance and behaviors. When an opportunity is at hand, they are able to successfully leverage the buy point of all six groups. Client is known for their tough negations and their transparent, low cost operating model which secures their members the lowest in-clase buying program and maximizes their rebate checks.

Program

Client contacted Pharm Fresh Media to assist them in attracting qualified pharmacy owners/decision makers, who were attending the trade shows, to an “offsite” resonation by Client. At the presentation, prospects would learn about the history of Client, its strengths and most importantly, find out how becoming a member of Client would benefit their pharmacy. The event would take place in a private meeting room in Caesars Palace, Las Vegas and attendees need to pre-register the attend. The event was one hour and had three different day/times to attend.

Objective

Achieving 100 pharmacies in attendance would be considered a run away success.

Strengths

• Client is well known for their straight forward, low cost, low overhead way of doing business.
• Client has a strong reputation. A brief search of reviews and discussions regarding their services returns many positive comments/pages.  Members are often brand advocated, refuting false or inaccurate claims from disgruntled or uneducated reviewers/posers.
• The last Vegas trade shows are some of the best attended trade shows.
• Client was giving away an amazing incentive: each attendee would receive an iPad2 at the conclusion of the presentation.
• Client would dedicate staff to follow up with PURL.

Challenges

• The nature of Client begin a cooperative of six regional groups all with separate names/marks dilutes the main Client brand and recognition.
• Current website lacks substance/content and is dated.
• Mail list for campaign was a combination in-house list and web crawler list. Out of 3187 addresses, there were only 2429 unique names. our assumption was that in many cases, it was not known which pharmacy the owner worked from (in the case of multi-store owners), so mailers were sent to all stores. Approximately 352 addresses were without owner names in which case we substituted the pharmacy name in place of “first name” or “last name.”
• It was not known how many of the addresses mailed to were actually attending either tradeshow in Las Vegas. Based upon NCPA tradeshow attendance vs the size of their membership, it could be assumed that 10%-15% of addresses mailed to were attending the tradeshow giving us a maximum possibility of attracting 365 pharmacies if we had a 100% success rate.

Campaign: Pharm Fresh Media’s Role

• Three direct mailers: a die cut, invitation style mailer with a personalized “golden” ticket; a pop-up iPad2 folded over card which mailed in a clear plastic envelope and an oversized postcard. All three mailers used variable data to personalize the piece to the recipient.
• An email blast
• A two page Personal URL (PURL) website
• A 14 page information website
• Business card sized referral cards for the day of the tradeshow
• iPad2 Skin-it graphics

John Cassidy over at Duplicates INK was nice enough to share some of the PURL campaigns they have been working on.  If your looking for a company to really help take your PURL campaign to the next level I’d highly recommend Duplicates INK.

2011 Liberty Campaign
The 2011liberty is still active and is doing well so far 3.2% response rate and 80% survey completion rate (Data Enrichment)

LandStealsnc Campaign
Landstealsnc.com deal the purl had a 4X lift in response rate from Static

So what are PURLs and how can they help my business?

Well I’m glad you asked!

Personalized URLs or “PURLs” are simply a URL that is personalized to the recipient.


For example:
mysite.com/Sally.Anderson
or
mysite.com/Mike.Jones

(Obviously mysite would be replace with your domain name).

And when Mike goes to the internet and types in his “PURL” he will be taken to a website that is personalized to him.

At the same time, Mikes activity is tracked in Purlem’s dashboard, and you are instantly notified of his visit and any information he submits through the landing page form.

Typically, PURLs are used in conjunction with a direct mail campaign, or with email marketing.

By using PURLs in your next campaign, you’ll be able to benefit from:
- Increased response rates
- The ability to Track Responses in real time, and receive email alerts to instantly follow up with interested prospects
- Engage customers at a deeper level by collecting valuable information from your prospects, and using that information to make subsequent campaigns even more relevant.

With Purlem you can get started for Free.  Yes, absolutly free.  For no risk, and only a few minutes of time, you can test out PURLs and see how they work for your business.  You have nothing to loose and a ton of new business to gain.