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.

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.

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

I’m giving a new marketing strategy a try.  I’m calling in the PURL Campaign-In-A-Box.  The campaign is targeted towards printers who have not jumped into the PURL game yet.  For a selected group of these printers, I’m going to offer a complete PURL Campaign for FREE.

Here is how it will work.

1. Purlem is going to provide  the creative and technology involved with running a PURL campaign.
2. Purlem will also provide in-store promotional items to increase awareness.
3. The printer ‘s only responsibility and cost is to print and mail postcards to their clients who can benefit from PURLs.

The goal of this campaign is two-fold.

One… to introduce PURLs to the printer’s customers and develop new business.

Two… to allow for printer’s to become comfortable using PURLs with virtually no risk.

Here are my initial ideas for campaigns:

(Click on image to view actual landing page)

Feedback is welcome!

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!

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