Recently I have had a couple requests for an undbraded “How To” document for Purlem.
Your wish is my command. The PURLs | Personal URL Marketing document gives you step-by-step illustrated directions on every feature Purlem has to offer.
The Purlem brand has been removed from the document to allow our white-label users to provide this to their clients, while preserving their brand.
Also have full print quality version available upon request.
I recently had a client use the Purlem Import API to not only create PURLs on the fly, but also redirect to their PURL microsite. Seems very obvious, but is a very interesting use of the API that I have not thought of.
My client uses an external system to run his outbound marketing campaigns. The original prospect list has hundreds to thousands of names, and emails. An email is sent to his prospect list, encouraging them to click and view their Personalized URL (PURL).
When the user clicks on the link, it actually takes them through Purlem’s API, a PURL is instantly created, and then they are redirected to their actual PURL microsite.
By including this Personalized URL (PURL) “Auto-Add” link, he does not have to export, import, and sync multiple databases before every mailing.
Additinoally, when the PURL is created through the Purlem’s API, an email is automatically generated, and routed to the sales team for instant follow up.
So to summarize the process:
To learn more visit the Forum’s PURL API Import Link post.
Other Personal URL applications have a hard time recognizing accent characters. But now Purlem is completely compatible with all accent characters such as À í or ú.
Although you are not able to use the accents in URLs themselves, they can be used in Purlem’s dashboard, landing pages, and results.
Just one small step for programmers, one giant leap for PURL marketers everywhere!
Today Purlem’s WordPress plugin was accepted by wordpress as one of their official plugins. You can now download the Purlem’s Personal URL WordPress plugin directly from wordpress.
It’s a good day for PURL Lovers! 
Recently I had the opportunity to do an interview with Nick Devine (The Print Coach) over in the UK. We spoke about Personalized URLs – PURLs – and how they apply to the printing industry.
We start by discussing the basics and then continue with what makes a successful PURL campaign, and how exactly printers can benefit from this technology.
The interview was featured in the June 2010 edition of “Digital Express.”
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A couple weeks ago I had the pleasure of doing an interview with “The Print Coach” Nick Devine about PURLs. http://theprintcoach.com. Nick is a renowned printing business expert in the UK. Below is a transcript of our conversation together.
Nick Devine: Hello everyone. This is Nick Devine from The Print Coach. And welcome to this interview in Digital Express. This is going to be a very interesting interview because I’ve got Marty Thomas from a company called Purlem.com. Marty is the founder and owner of that company. And they’ve got about a hundred times doing PURLs at different stages of evolution.
We’re not going to be particularly talking about Marty’s company or his technology. We’re going to be talking about PURLs themselves. And it’s going to be an interesting conversation because we’re going to start right with the basics and go right up to some of the specificity of some campaigns that Marty has done. And also the building blocks of what makes a really good campaign and understanding the components that you really need to look at if you want to get a campaign out in the marketplace that’s going to do something in the marketplace. So, Marty, welcome.
Marty Thomas: Yeah, thanks, I’m glad to be here.
Nick Devine: And Marty is in sunny California. San Francisco, Marty, I think you are today?
Marty Thomas: Yes, I am.
Nick Devine: And I’m not. I’m actually in England and the sun is shining, which doesn’t happen as often as it happens in California. But I am looking out at a lovely view of rolling English countryside today with the sun shining and the sheep rolling around in the fields and little baby lambs wandering around the place. So today is a nice day in England.
Marty Thomas: Must be nice.
Nick Devine: Marty, we’re going to go through a lot of information today. We’ve obviously had a chat beforehand just talking about the structure of the call. So if you think about this is a building and when we’re done with the building people will have a very good sense of what PURLs are, how they work. How they can be used in a printing business. How they can be used from the client’s perspective, how clients can benefit from them. And what are the components of them. So let’s just start with a couple of very basic building blocks. We won’t spend a long time on these but just to make sure everybody is in the same place with us in the conversation. So just explain, what is a PURL?
Marty Thomas: Well the PURL simply is a personalized url. So basically what you get is you’ve got your traditional url would be yoursite.com. But then it would typically be followed by a person’s name. So like say, Jim Smith. So Jim would typically receive a marketing piece of some sort, usually like a postcard, maybe an email, and it would have this personalized url on it saying, “Hey, Jim, visit your personalized website here.” Something like yoursite.com/JimSmith. So Jim would, that would be his personalized url or PURL and Jim would visit that website and it would be personalized to him then. It would say something like, “Welcome, Jim,” and have an offer that was personalized to him. So PURLs are all about personalization basically.
Nick Devine: And talk about the media that’s involved in this type of campaign. This is not just … when a lot of people think about PURLs, they do think about postcards and then the personalized landing page. Can you talk a bit more about the media and why that’s important as the market for our client’s roles?
Marty Thomas: The different media that the PURLs can be placed on like outside of postcards?
Nick Devine: Yes, exactly.
Marty Thomas: I would say that a postcard is the most obvious way to go. That’s what the majority of people use for their PURLs. I think the next most popular one is email, probably because it’s simple. It probably doesn’t get as good of a response rate just because people are so desensitized now to the email. But that’s another popular one, very easy to do and work with PURLs.
Another big one is with letters going out for like bills, with companies like that. I actually don’t have any clients that have gotten to that point yet, but you know say it’s an electric company. And they’re sending out a bill to their existing client.
Nick Devine: A promo type environment.
Marty Thomas: Yes. They want to engage them further and using a PURL, even on something like a bill or a letter that’s going out to an existing client; it’s a great way to engage an existing client further. So that’s another popular one.
Nick Devine: We’ll talk in a little bit about the difference between campaigns and promotions but one of the key things to take away in there is it’s multi-media. So you can use a combination of print media and non-print media, email being obviously the classic example of that. And the combination of them will typically produce a better result. And I’ll talk about some examples we’ve had from there, not using PURLs but using cross media in our own company actually as well.
Marty, talk us through the levels of personalization. Because when a lot of people think about personalization, they really think about it’s got my name, it’s got my address on it. But do you want to talk a little bit more about that, kind of what are the different aspects that incorporate in?
Marty Thomas: Yes, there’s a huge range there. You know, it can be as simple as the person’s name. If that’s all you’ve got is a name and an email or a name and an address, you can just have their name on the website. And you know that pulls in a big response. People are curious. They see their name on there and they are like what is this? So I think curiosity with just seeing their name sparks their interest right away. It’s very powerful. So even if you just have a name and they go on the website and it says, “Welcome, Jim.” It’s like whoa, that’s pretty cool. But even with just a name, it’s very basic. It’s probably the most basic level of personalization.
Nick Devine: But that’s actually still fairly unusual these days.
Marty Thomas: Yes.
Nick Devine: Not everybody is doing that. So I think as you said there is the curiosity and the unusual factor that’s still available at this stage.
Marty Thomas: Absolutely. And people love their names. So you know, they see their name somewhere and immediately they’re like whoa. But then you can get even more involved. Like one of the example that we’ll look at in a little bit here is with an auto dealership. And you know auto dealers have a lot of information about their clients. The type of car that they drive, they know the last time they’ve been in for an oil change. If they’ve been in for any service in the past. They know a lot of information about their clients and they can leverage that information into personalization. So now if a client of theirs visits their PURL, it’s not just their name. They can also say, “Hey, Jim. Thanks for purchasing your ’07 Honda Accord with us. We appreciate that you came in for your oil change last July. It looks like you’re up for a new one and here’s a coupon.” So it can be very, very personalized. The possibilities there are endless. It just depends on the information you have.
Nick Devine: When I was doing some research before we did the call, Marty, I was scouring the web to see what was the latest data on performance of PURLs versus the performance of just standard marketing campaigns. And the kind of consensus data that I’ve picked up on the research I was doing that for what we generally consider best in class companies that do a lot of direct response type marketing. That if you get the personalization and the PURL correct, which typically does require a little bit of testing first. But once you’ve got that in place you can expect about a third percent bump in results for people. And if you’re doing any kind of marketing at all, to be able to boost your results by a third is phenomenal. That can be the difference between a loss making campaign and a significant profit making campaign. Or a nice campaign and one that’s completely hit it out of the park.
So getting it right can make a significant difference. And if you look at the life of a printer, one of the things we’re always challenged with with printers is how do we differentiate what we’re doing from the competition? And how do we help our clients with things other than just commodity print where they’re price shopping us against somebody else? So everybody listening to this really does need to think about how do we get into these new types of media.
We all hear the thing about becoming a graphics communication company, becoming a marketing services company. And at some stage you’re going to have to make a decision to be superb at just developing, creating, and selling commoditized print and your business is optimized for that. Or you have to make a decision that I’m going to get involved in some of these new types of media. Because your customers have a requirement and their requirement will grow.
So the opportunity is there and it’s the institution of the printer who goes do I want to take advantage of the opportunity that’s in front of me. And the first place they’re going to look is to a print provider because it’s got that printed component into it. So it is a great opportunity. And there is a lot of data that talks about the growth of this and obviously the evolution of digital technology, digital print technology, makes this a lot easier.
So, Marty, we’re talking about PURLs – imagine I’m a printer. I’ve got a portfolio of clients and I’ve got some prospects that I’m trying to do some business with. And I know PURLs sound like an interesting conversation to have with a client. I’m thinking about how do I create that conversation, so how do I start that conversation? What can I talk to them about? What can I say to them that would be a good use of the PURL in their business? How would you advise a printer or coach a printer in that context?
Marty Thomas: Yeah, there are a few different uses that a client could have depending on their needs. One, they could just sell something. You know, they could have an offer pointing to the PURL and the PURL would be offering them a product or a service right off the bat. They could also be used for lead generation, getting people to raise their hand and say yeah, I’m interested in that. And just capturing a little bit more information maybe even with an email, just capturing a little bit more information from a prospect. Or another one could be a survey. They could just be going to the PURL and you’re just wanting some more information on this client. Maybe you could do subsequent campaigns just to learn a little bit more about a prospect. Just ask a few questions on a survey. And that could be a purpose of the PURL.
Nick Devine: Okay. I was thinking about my own company as you were talking about those three things. We’re actually just about … as we’re recording this we’re just developing a campaign at the moment. And the purpose of the campaign is actually to generate leads. We’re not trying to sell anything, so we’re trying to identify people who would be interested in a particular product that we’re about to launch. And I was thinking in fact before this conversation took place that I was going to use PURLs to do that. So we would send them to a website and there would be … we would create essentially an interest list on the website. But we’d give something to the person who goes to the website so that there was a benefit for them for identifying themselves as being an interested party.
Marty Thomas: Right.
Nick Devine: So essentially I could go sell something. So there’s an offer on the postcard, I go to the webpage. It’s personalized with my details or some other details about me or my company. I could generate leads for salespeople or just for my company if I’m marketing online. Or I could clean up my data file. One of the things that we know is typically a data file, the data on the data file only changes between business to business or business to consumer. But it deteriorates at a very significant rate and I think it’s something at the level of about 15 or 20% per annum with the data changes. So just keeping a database up to date is critically important. And one of the things that we know is that people are doing direct response marketing, a huge cost factor on the wastage can be if I’m marketing to a database where 15 or 20% of the people are no longer at the addresses or the contactee that we’re marketing to. So three good purposes.
I remember when I was doing the research for this I came across this framework that people talk about in the PURL world. I assume that you’re a bit familiar with this framework where they talk about promote and capture and responding. Do you want to talk about that in a bit of detail from your experience?
Marty Thomas: Yes. Promote, capture, respond is the typical framework for PURLs. Promoting would be just generating the PURL and a direct mail piece or maybe email or whatever was being used. And that’s just simply placing the PURL on whatever marketing piece is going on. So that’s kind of the promotion phase. The capture phase is the phase when the person that receives that postcard or marketing piece actually visits their PURL. So they actually go to yoursite.com/JimSmith or Sally White or whoever it is. That’s actually the process of them visiting that. And then as soon as that happens with a PURL, that’s trackable. So you can see that Jim Smith just visited his PURL, his landing page. And then the response would be third one and it is responding to those people that have raised their hand or asked to purchase something or submitted the survey, getting back to those people. And you can do that in real time with PURLs.
Nick Devine: Do you want to expand on that a bit? Maybe give an example of that, the response bit?
Marty Thomas: On the real time?
Nick Devine: Yes.
Marty Thomas: I mean everything happens instantly. You can set up alerts. With Purlem you can and on most personal url software applications, there are alert features where if somebody visits a website, you can say notify me right away as soon as somebody hits the website. And you receive an email saying Jim Smith just visited your website. You have to be careful not to be too creepy there because if Jim just visited a website thinking nobody is looking at him and then all of a sudden he receives a phone call he might be like whoa, what’s going on? But the feature is there and it’s nice to have. You can see how your postcards are being spread out across the country. Say I’m here in California and I’m sending a postcard campaign across the country. I immediately start seeing results maybe that day, maybe the next day, from local people in California here. I see them hitting the website. Before I know it, five days later, I’m getting hits from the East Coast. So you can see when your marketing pieces are going out. So real time can be very powerful.
Nick Devine: And there is a … and we’re all wired like this from a human nature perspective, our interest in different things goes up and down fairly quickly. So if I get a postcard and then I react fairly quickly and I go to the website and someplace in there I do something that identifies me as now being an interesting prospect for the supplier and then they follow up with me fairly quickly while I’m still to use the term “in heat”, while I’m still in heat about it. Because the reality is I will cool off. And we know that in typical sales and marketing psychology, is the older the lead gets the less likely they are to convert. And that’s kind of the role of the data now. But it’s fairly significant. There’s a big drop off in the level of interest the longer a lead has been left inactive. So the great thing about PURLs is you can react to them. And you might decide I’m going to give them a day or I’m going to give them four hours or I’m going to give them two days. But you have that ability to track and take action on the PURL.
Marty Thomas: Absolutely. I just wouldn’t give one minute.
Nick Devine: Not while they’re on the website. I noticed you just clicked on the XYZ page, that’s likely a little bit freaky. Do you want to talk about, we touched on this in the beginning, do you want to talk about PURLs as a multi-media campaign? So we’re involving more than just print as a medium, which I guess a lot of this audience, we’re print focused because of the nature of our businesses.
Marty Thomas: It can be a little bit intimidating to kind of get outside of the familiar print zone, using other digital technologies like PURLs. I mean you’ve got the direct mail, postcards and everything that printers are familiar with that you can plop a PURL on. And that’s the most common way. The personalized landing page, the actual development of that, usually you typically have to know a little bit of html to customize the landing page and make it look the way you want. A lot of printers have that in-house. I’d say half of the people that, half of my clients actually give it to me. And they just send me the design of their postcard and they say hey Marty, design me a landing page that looks like this. So to find somebody to do it for you is easy as well. But the actual personalization and the creation of the landing page is part of the multi-media of the PURL. And the email itself, whether it’s a … it can be as simple as just a plain text email with the PURL placed on it which I’ve seen to be more effective even than a real fancy html email with pictures and different colors and borders and all that kind of stuff. The plain text comes across real nicely. It feels like that person is actually just sending you an email. It doesn’t feel corporate. And you can personalize it so you can say hey, Jim. Jim is going to think that this is coming directly from you and be like hey, I created a web page for you here and put the PURL on it. I think it has more value there. So the emails too, you’ve got the direct mail, you’ve got the landing pages, and you have email to kind of bring up the whole multi-media campaign into it.
Nick Devine: We will talk about this later but one of the core rules in any kind of direct response marketing is you have to test. So your comment about plain versus a really smart designed, html-type email is an interesting one because in some markets the html works better, the really nice jazzy email. And in some markets the really plain one works a lot better. And in some markets what works really well is to actually do both of them. I’m on a lot of lists and what I’ve noticed some of the really successful marketers do is they’ll send you the html version and then two days later or a day later you’ll get the plain text version. And they’re doing that consistently. And the reason they’re doing that consistently is some people are clicking on the html one and then some people are just clicking on the plain text one. And the plain text one is actually done in html and just looks like it’s done in plain text. The other thing you said, Marty, which can sometimes intimidate some people is the landing page is obviously developed in html and a lot of printers will be familiar with the print side of the operation but not be overly familiar with going around messing in the back end of websites. And I’d be one of those folks. I’m going to give you a couple of … for everybody listening, I’ll give you a couple of websites and these will actually be in the notes that you’ll get with the call as well. But there’s a site called Guru.com and there’s a site called Elance.com. And what happens in Guru and in Elance is they are what I call freelance sites, so freelance service providers, i.e. web developers, bid for projects. So you can just post a project up there and say I need somebody to create a micro website with three pages – a landing page, two survey pages, and a thank you page, so that would be four pages. Here’s the postcard design. People will bid on that project for you and you can see how a lot of people rated them. So it’s a bit like going to eBay but for service providers as opposed to for products. It’s a bidding process and you can say how long it’s going to be, how long the bidding is going to be open for. And a lot of people that I use for projects we do actually get from those two sites.
Marty Thomas: Sure.
Nick Devine: Have you ever …?
Marty Thomas: I have. In fact I was on Elance as a service provider for a little while actually. It’s very interesting. You can post a project, like simple projects like doing like you said a three page simple website design. You’re likely to get hundreds of bids on those. You’re going to have so many people to choose from to do them. And I think typically a ballpark for that would probably be … you’re going to want to spend a couple hundred dollars on doing something like that. You’re going to get people willing to do it for you for fifty bucks and you’re going to get quotes up to a couple of thousand dollars. You’re going to get quotes all over the board. Typically a simple three page nice designed website, you know you’re spending maybe $200 to $400 for it.
Nick Devine: What I’ve done is I’ve been using those sites for a couple of years, so what I’ve done is I’ve found a few providers in a number of different kind of service areas and I now just use them consistently without having to go to Guru or Elance. But I found them there originally, so good sites.
Marty Thomas: Absolutely.
Nick Devine: We were touching on this kind of in a bit of the conversation we were just having, what I’d like you to talk about is the difference between a campaign and a promotion.
Marty Thomas: Promotion is typically a one-off deal, right?
Nick Devine: Yes, exactly.
Marty Thomas: You know a person is like let’s give this PURL thing a try. Or I’m going to send out one round of direct mail postcards like a promotion. Typically low response rates. Typically people do a promotion and get discouraged and say this doesn’t work. And they leave. Campaigns on the other hand, you kind of go into it right away knowing this is going to take several rounds of marketing. And you hit them from different angles. Hit them from an email, hit them from a postcard, hit them from different angles and build it around a campaign. And be committed to that campaign when you go into it. You know, knowing that the first round might not give you the response, but the third and the fourth you’re going to start to see that increase in response rates. I mean typically that’s the way to go.
Nick Devine: I’ll give a couple of personal examples of this actually because when I got into the world of marketing first I did what I think a lot of people do is I would design a campaign, send it out. I’d get results and I’d go oh good or oh no. We’ve all had those experiences. And no matter how much you learn about marketing, you still have both experiences. I discovered two things that were really important. One was testing and the other one was running campaigns or sequential marketing versus just running one-off promotions. So about two or three years ago we were doing something in the printing industry and the first part of the campaign was we wanted to generate some leads. So we designed a postcard. But instead of designing one postcard, I designed four postcards. And then we sent all four of them to different subsections of one list. So we sent one card to 200 names here and the next 200 names got card B and the next 200 got card C and the next 200 got card D. And what we worked out was … I thought all four of them were fantastic but I would think that because I created all four of them. What I discovered is the market thought two of them were complete rubbish and two of them were really good. So two of them had about a 2 ½% response rate each and two of them pulled in about a half percent. So we’re talking about 500% difference in the two different postcards. So then what we did was we ditched the two losers and we mailed one of the winners to the rest of the list. And we waited a week and then we rolled out the next winner to the rest of the list. And we still got that 2 ½% response each time. So by the time we mailed out the second card we were up to about a 5% response rate. Then we took the content from both of the postcards and put it into two letters and mailed the two letters. Essentially the same content that was in the postcards but just a different media, a different format, and that brought us up to about 10%. And then we did a piece of lumpy mail, so we got a letter and put a … I don’t remember specifically what it was now, but we put something in the envelope to make it not flat, but multi-dimensional. And we got up to … by the time we were finished we got up to about 11 ½% to 12%. And the two important things in there are one, you do have to test. So no matter how compelled we feel by the opinion we hold about an offer or a headline or something, you have to test. And the market vote, they vote with the wallet. And then the second thing is that if people are still reacting, you have to keep mailing. I was listening to something in the car today from a marketer in the U.S. and he was saying he’s got a particular campaign he’s running at the moment. It has thirteen steps in it and it’s profitable up to the thirteenth step. And originally when he launched the campaign, he stopped at step three because he inherited this concept of three-step mailings, so he did three. And then what he worked out is that if it’s still profitable at three maybe I should do four. And he’s now got up to thirteen. And he’s got everything in there. He’s got faxes, emails, outbound telemarketing is actually the last step that he’s got in the campaign.
Marty Thomas: So he’s hitting them from all directions.
Nick Devine: Tear sheet, magazine sheets, all sorts of things in there. You know, every piece of conceivable media you could come up with. So the thing to take away here is one-step mailings that have the potential to work can leave a tremendous amount of money on the table. So particularly if you’ve got something that’s working, you should find multiple ways of getting that media out. And it doesn’t require a lot of time and effort but it can make a dramatic difference in your results long term.
Marty, let’s talk about some of the kind of core premises of PURLs. One of the things that I want to talk about here is this concept of matching the message that’s on the thing that you’re sending out to the market you’re sending it to. So can you talk about that a bit? Really I guess what we’re talking about here is relevance to the area of interest for the receiving party of the PURL and the difference that it can make.
Marty Thomas: Right. I mean there’s a certain expectation. People when they receive a postcard and they go to their PURL it should all kind of look the same. If it looks way different, they’re going to be like is this the same company? What is this all about? So the general look is very important for consistency and allowing people to feel comfortable, not to mention the branding and all that stuff as well. And then the offer, it should be right there. It should be right there in front of you. The offer that’s on the postcard, they’re going to the website for a reason. They’re visiting their PURL for a reason, whatever the promotion was on the postcard. Make it obvious. Make it stand out on the landing page as well. So the consistency there to get that conversion rate up is extremely important.
Nick Devine: So what’s interesting here is what people talk about, so we were talking about personalization a little bit earlier and what people talk about in personalization is two different things. One they talk about the standard, basic contact details used in personalization. So you use the name, use maybe the name of your local town, something like that. But there’s another more sophisticated type of personalization which has to do with relevancy. As an example, let’s just say we were promoting a sales and marketing event. And I could just send a personalized postcard out with Marty’s name on the postcard and say hey Marty, we’re running our next sales and marketing event. I know you came to the last one and I think you’d really enjoy this one too. Actually I may not do that, let’s just say hey Marty, we’re running a sales and marketing event. Here’s the dates it’s on, here’s the benefits of coming. Would you like to come? And there’d be an offer to join. But I could make that more relevant by segmenting my list. And I might see in there I’ve got people who are business owners, and I could create a message specific to business owners who have an interest in sales and marketing. I could notice I’ve got sales directors. I could have a different type of sales driven message for them. And I could do a different one for marketing directors. And I could do a different one for people like Marty who’ve attended a previous event and say hey Marty, we’ve got the next one on and here’s who we have speaking at this event for your line of business. I think here’s what you’ll find really interesting about it. So there’s a lot higher degree of relevancy. Now it takes certainly more effort but the response rates can differ by hundreds of percents. Instead of maybe getting 2% I could get 6% because of my relevancy to their area of interest. Ben Kennedy calls this message to market match. So the offer on the card and the context of the card is very relevant to the interest areas of the person that I’m sending it to.
Marty Thomas: Right. Also recently I’ve heard that going along with those same kind of terms, the feedback loop. I’ve heard that before. And the PURL world. And it’s kind of all about gaining a deeper and deeper understanding of your prospect. You know, through each subsequent mailing campaign and then showing that. Like for the first campaign all you know about the guy is their first and last name and an email address. Try to understand them more in the next campaign and use that information in subsequent campaigns. Make it even more relevant. So if you find out hey this guy is a salesperson, put him in the salesperson category. If you find out that he’s a business owner, put him in the business owner category and market to those people in a sub category specifically. I think that’s great.
Nick Devine: We’re going to talk about a golf club, I think, in one of your campaigns in a couple of minutes. So in a golf club, if you did a PURL campaign to your members and potential prospects and one of the things that you wanted to identify is what part of their game did they want to work on? So if they wanted to work on the long drives or if they wanted to work on the short game or if they wanted to work on putting and then you had those three categories. So you could then mail different campaigns to those three different groups of people and just say we’ve got a special three-series putting workshop and you have a picture of somebody putting on the green or Tiger Woods putting on the green. Or hey Marty, would you like to be able to putt like Tiger Woods? And that’s going to peak your interest and going to be a lot more relevant to you than just a general we’ve got some tutorage or some classes going on generally about improving your golf game. So the relevance would be a lot higher in there.
Marty Thomas: Huge, yeah.
Nick Devine: Marty, I want to talk about … before we get on to some of the examples we’re going to talk about, I want to talk about a couple of the critical ingredients. And we’ve spoken about this before and we’ve got kind of a slightly different opinion on this. So based on both my experience and a lot of the research I’ve done, what I’ve identified and I call this the 40-40-20 rule, so 40% of the success of any campaign is based upon the quality of the list. 40% of it is based upon the quality of the offer. So using the example we just gave you, putting workshop for people who have identified that they have an interest in the putting part of their golf game. And then 20% of it is everything else – so having good graphics on the postcard, having the personalization done well, matching up the landing page to the postcard so it looks similar when they go there, etc. so all of that kind of graphic layout. So it’s 40-40-20, 40% on the list, 40% on the offer. So if you’re thinking about what are the things I need to pay attention to, 80% of what you need to pay attention to is actually in the offer and in the list the offer is going to be made to. So Marty, you’ve got a slight, kind of along the same lines but you’ve got a slightly different view of this. Do you want to just talk about what your view of this is as well?
Marty Thomas: I mean just from my experience with my clients, they think that PURLs are going to be like a magic little bit of fairy dust that you’re going to sprinkle on a campaign. And you’re going to get your 30% response rate that everybody talks about. The biggest downfall is the list. That’s where I see the majority of people making mistakes. And that’s why when we were talking before I said … it may be a bit of an exaggeration but 80% I would say is part of the list. And the only reason I say that is that I just see it happen over and over again. I see people coming up and doing these PURL campaigns. And they go out and they just buy any old list. And I’ve done it too. It just doesn’t work. The power of the personal urls and using the PURLs is the personalization. And if you just have any old list, you don’t know anything about these people. And you’re putting a PURL on it and sending them out. And of course the offer has a ton to do with it, but I just see it fail over and over again with a bad list. And that’s why I exaggerate that number. But absolutely the offer, very big portion of it, obviously compelling and relevant, like we talked about before is a very big portion of it. And then I think as we’re going to talk about with one of the examples that we’re going to use is I would say that one of the case studies that we’re going to use coming up here shortly is that they had a good list. They had a compelling offer. But that landing page design wasn’t quite there.
Nick Devine: Well, Marty, do you want to just talk about a couple of those? Because we identified a couple of campaigns that we were going to talk about, some that worked well and some that worked poorly. Because I think it’s good to look at both. So do you want to talk about maybe the first couple here?
Marty Thomas: Sure, that sounds good. I think one of them was a fitness club up in Finland that is a client of mine. And they had a really good success. What they did was they had a great list. And their list was people that had been to the fitness club in the past, maybe they were visiting and they indicated that they were interested. You know a lot of fitness clubs, they give like a 7-day free trial to come in and try the club for a week or something like that. So they have a powerful list. It’s people that actually have been there but for one reason or another aren’t members right now. So that’s their list, it’s a very good list.
Nick Devine: So if we go back to when we were talking about the purposes of PURLs. So what we said was you can use PURLs to sell things, to generate leads, or to survey people would be the three typical things. So in this example a PURL could have been used to generate leads because the client that you’re talking about here had actually people who had raised their hands at some stage. They hadn’t raised their hands by a PURL, they had actually raised them by taking advantage of a come in for a free trial of the club or something. So they had a good quality list. It was a good match. They knew they had an interest in this area. So the list was good in this example.
Marty Thomas: Absolutely. Yeah. And then their offer was compelling as well. They were giving these guys an incentive to come back and try the club again or become a member at a discounted rate or whatnot. And they actually personalized the offer to the person too. So the offer was good and they saw with those two things but the landing page was also a very nice landing page. It was done very simply and to the point. I don’t know if you can kind of show that or post that somewhere.
Nick Devine: We’ll actually give a printout of it when we send out the interview.
Marty Thomas: Yeah, because I think it’s just such a … it’s what the PURLs are all about. It’s personalized with the first and last name but it’s just to the point and it’s very obvious. Well, I don’t speak the language so it wasn’t obvious to me what to do.
Nick Devine: The landing page, for the people listening and you’ll be seeing this when you look at the printout, but the landing page is obviously in Finnish. So neither Marty nor I can actually translate it into English. But what’s interesting is it is actually still visually very obvious what you need to do here.
Marty Thomas: You’re absolutely right. Yeah. So I think they had all the ingredients there to make a successful campaign. And it ended up being the club was very happy with the results.
Nick Devine: Can you talk about some of the results? I’ve got them here.
Marty Thomas: Yeah. Let me pull them up here. So they had a 22.3% response. And that’s kind of interesting because they were never really able to track a response prior without using PURLs, other than a phone call. You know and a phone call is basically a conversion. If the person is calling up, the chances of them converting are pretty high. So it was interesting, 22.3% of people that received the postcard, visiting their PURL which they were very happy with. And another interesting thing with that number is that these people showed a little bit of interest. They weren’t quite ready, they probably wouldn’t have picked up the phone and made a phone call. But they showed enough interest to visit the website and just having … I call it the “B” prospects, because if the people that are not quite interested enough to make a move now but they’re slightly interested enough just to look on the web page. And now you can focus your marketing on that group of people even more. So 22.3% response and then they had a 3.2% actual conversion of people becoming new members. So they were very happy with both numbers.
Nick Devine: And is that 3.2% of the overall group that you sent the PURLs out to or of the people that raised their hands?
Marty Thomas: No, of the overall group.
Nick Devine: Okay. So 3.2% buyers?
Marty Thomas: Right.
Nick Devine: I think anybody that got 3.2% buyers from a mailing campaign would be smiling.
Marty Thomas: Yes. Absolutely. And they were.
Nick Devine: And for people listening you’ll have a copy of the landing page when you get the CD interview that you’re listening to here as well. Marty, do you want to talk about another one that wasn’t maybe quite as good?
Marty Thomas: Yeah.
Nick Devine: It was actually still good, I thought, but wasn’t quite as good.
Marty Thomas: Maybe it wasn’t as good as what they were hoping. It was an auto dealership here in the states. And I guess they were hoping for something like a big bang. You know like what people see, you know everybody talking about the PURLs with the 30% responses. And it seemed like this auto dealership also had a good list. With these guys as well it was past customers of theirs that they had been in there either for service with an oil change or service for their car or they actually bought a car from the dealership. So again, a very strong list. The offer to these people was again a personalized offer depending on if they bought a car, if they’d been in for service. And it was just an incentive to come in for like a free oil change, a percentage off of service, something like that. It was a decent offer. And what they had to do to get the offer was they had to go to the landing page … visit the PURL, go the landing page, and enter in information and then at that point they would receive the coupon. So that’s how they kind of tracked it there. And they ended up getting a 2.7% actual response to download the coupon. I haven’t seen numbers for the actual number of people that used the coupon, but 2.7% downloaded it. They were hoping for something a little bit more. I mean it’s like a coupon. No skin of their back for going onto the website and downloading it. They thought they were going to get like a 30% response rate or something like that. Still 2/7 is nothing to sneeze at, right? Most people would be happy with that kind of response rate. But that’s what they saw there. and I think that as we were talking before they had a good offer, they had a quality list, but I think what they were missing out on was the landing page design. It wasn’t real obvious what they were to do when a person visits this website. They were like well what am I supposed to do now? They gave it like 2 seconds time and then they leave because they’re just not sure. The relevancy wasn’t there that we talked about before. You saw the landing page too, what were your thoughts on it?
Nick Devine: We spoke about this before we started recording the interview. My sense is if I landed on this page, and we’re all click happy these days so if we land on the landing page and we can’t immediately see something that grabs our attention, we mouse click away because we have too many things going on in our lives, all of us. What struck me when I looked at this page is the top of the page is taken up with the header graphic, so that picture that you often see at the top of web pages. That’s not actually selling me anything at all. So it’s interesting for the provider because it’s their header graphic but it has no interest to me as somebody visiting the page. So then I looked further down the page and on the right-hand side, I’ve got a place that says enter my first name, last name, phone number, and email. But I can’t quite see why I should do that. There’s nothing that’s standing out to me. Then I look over at the left-hand side where the text is. The text isn’t very large so it’s not calling out to me in any compelling fashion. And I think the big thing that’s missing, and it looks more like a sub-headline than a headline to me, is there’s no compelling offer that’s screaming out to me that I think oh boy, fantastic. You know, putting lessons or whatever or great I get a free XYZ for my Honda model ABC. So I’m going to the page and what it just looks like, it just looks a bit like a corporate website. There’s a nice big header graphic and it seems to be that the landing page is more about the company as opposed to me. And the purpose of personalization is it should be more about me and less about the company.
And if I compare it to the Finland one, the Finland one has right from the top of the page there’s no header graphic that I can identify. It’s all about health and fitness. It’s in Finnish but there’s a really interesting picture of somebody kind of training in the club and there seems to be kind of lots of detail about that. And then a very obvious kind of benefit-driven opt-in box or squeeze page as they call it. So I think you’re right. The landing page did not help them there.
Marty, let’s move on. We’ve got a couple more case studies we’re going to get to in a minute. We were talking about mistakes people make. So what are the big mistakes people make?
Marty Thomas: As we were talking before with the list, the data quality. That kind of goes along the same lines of having a poor list. But if you have poor information on the company or even the wrong information on a company, you know, you’re buying a list and you’re not quite sure where it came from. And if there is poor data on that you’re not going to get a strong response rate. I think another thing is a poor offer. If you don’t have a relevant offer, as we were talking before, if you don’t have a relevant offer, there’s no strong call to action like in this last case study that we looked at, another big mistake. And then the way everything looks too. And we kind of touched on this before too, is that if all those different media components are not matching up like the postcard looks nothing like the landing page or the PURL or it’s just a bad design as we were talking about. I think those three are the biggest ones. Is that your experience?
Nick Devine: Not spending enough time on the list, not matching up the offer to the list that you’re mailing to. And then just not getting the graphics right. And we were talking about testing postcards a few minutes ago, the other thing I would do and I spend a lot of time watching what happens in the internet marketing arena because it’s a really fast-moving arena at the moment. And one of the things I watch a lot is people testing different types of web pages. And I would definitely recommend if you’re doing a campaign, I would be testing the postcard if that’s the one you’re going to most use. I would test html and text emails, and you’ll probably find that both of them will work for you at different levels. And I would definitely test landing pages. And I would test two or three different types of landing pages because they could all perform differently. And we’ll talk about roll out later on in this interview, how you roll out a campaign without putting all your eggs in one basket right from the get-go. Marty, case studies are interesting because you can learn a lot from case studies. Let’s talk about a couple more of your case studies. You’ve got a document management one and a country club one. So let’s look at those and how they did and what you learned.
Marty Thomas: These two are very interesting because there is a huge range in the results on both of these here. The country club had a huge success. Again, they had all of the ingredients of success. They had an opted-in list. I mean this list that they had, people had raised their hand in the past saying that they were interested in this country club, either through an event that they were hosting … I think that was what it was actually. It was an event that they had actually had at the club at one point or another and they were just collecting people’s email addresses if they were interested in receiving more information. So that was the list. A very, very strong opted-in list. And what they wanted to do now was that they had an email for all of these people and what they wanted to do now was they wanted to just engage them a little bit more. And the next step was just to get their actual addresses so they can engage them through snail mail as well. So that was the goal of this campaign was to capture people’s addresses as well. And so what they did was they just sent out a postcard … I’m sorry, it wasn’t a postcard because they didn’t have mailing addresses yet. So they just sent out an email.
Nick Devine: I was curious how they could send out a postcard to someone they didn’t have a mailing address for yet.
Marty Thomas: Right. So they just sent out a real simple plain text email. And it was just like hey, Jim, thanks for stopping by the club the other day, blah blah. We have a special gift for you. We’ve created a personalized page for you. If you’ll just visit here, we’ll be able to give you this gift. And the gift was … actually my client didn’t want to expose gifts but it was just a real simple little gift that a person visiting the club might like. So the person would then receive the email, they would visit their PURL, and the PURL was quite interesting. Also a very simple page and it would just ask them … there were like five pages right in a row and it would just ask them one question on each page. And that first question was what is your handicap? They just wanted to get a better idea of this person’s golf game. And the next question was something else similar to do with the golf game. And they were just slowly asking them information that could be relevant in subsequent campaigns. And on the final page they just asked for their mailing address so they could mail them their free gift. And they had … what was the response rate on that? They had a 35.7% from the email which was 157 people. The mailing list was 440, 157 people actually visited the PURL. And then 110 actually went all the way through the survey process and submitted their actual physical mailing address. So from their perspective, huge success. They weren’t expecting anything in that range. But they had all of the ingredients so it paid off.
Nick Devine: So going back to what we were talking about at the beginning in terms of purposes, this was I guess a combination of a survey and lead generation.
Marty Thomas: Absolutely. It was a survey, I think that was the base part. It was a survey and just gathering more information on their prospects.
Nick Devine: And one would assume they would then have been subjected to another campaign to get them into the club.
Marty Thomas: Yes. Absolutely.
Nick Devine: Or do something with them. So that’s the country club one. So what do you think made that work well? Obviously the list was a very good list. What else do you think made that work? I’m looking at the front page of it, where it says what is your handicap. What do you think made it work well?
Marty Thomas: The list was a very big thing. Obviously these people were already interested in the club. So that was huge. The offer was non-intrusive. It was they were given a gift for answering a few questions and the gift was something that somebody would enjoy. It was nothing big or fancy but it was nice. And they weren’t being sold anything. It was a very non-intrusive way to gather some more information. And it was very easy for these people to go on, answer a few questions, and receive a nice little gift. So that’s why I think that they saw such a big response rate. You know if they used the same campaign and at the end of the day they’re selling something, obviously it would be nowhere near a 25% conversion rate. But it was free gift in exchange for some information. I think that’s why it was so huge.
Nick Devine: So let’s talk about the other one then, the document management one.
Marty Thomas: The document management was the most elaborate campaign that I’ve ever worked on. Right from the outset before any testing was really done and that could have been a big downfall. You talked a lot about testing so far. But we had two different scenarios on the first page of different options. They could fill out a form on the top to download a brochure or a form on the bottom to join an event. And depending on their answers they would be taken to different landing pages. And it was all automated. I think there was a total of like fourteen different pages that a person could potentially be taken to depending on the questions that were answered. It was extremely elaborate. And that was for only one promotion out of the campaign.
Then depending on how these people answered the question we had a whole other campaign for them with a whole other fourteen set of different pages that they could potentially be taken to. It was huge and elaborate and the design actually … it looks like a nice design. The call to action, it wasn’t real simple but it was a nice design. I think the problem here was probably the list. The list wasn’t people that have opted in in the past saying hey, look at me. I’m interested in this document management service; please send me more information as was the case in the previous case studies. So this list was purchased. They were using a PURL on a purchased list and all they really had to personalize it with at first was the first and last name. And then the offer was a brochure which I suppose if somebody was really interested in it that they would have been interested in downloading a brochure but this was a purchased list. Like the chances of somebody being really that interested in this document management service to download a brochure, I don’t know. And then the other option was to go join an event. Again, not quite sure if that was the right thing.
Nick Devine: I’m looking at the page and I’m obviously not a prospect for the types of things they do but I will give you my reaction while I’m looking at the page, you’ve identified obviously one big problem is the quality of the list itself. So you’re marketing to a cold list. So if you imagine me as a recipient, and people listening you’ll have this page in the material you’ve got. So imagine you’ve received a postcard from somebody you have no relationship with at all. And when you go to the first page, let’s just count this … they’re looking for thirteen pieces of data off of me on the front page right off the bat with nothing compelling in exchange. And that’s too much. There’s no relationship being built at all.
So I think there are few things that are really confusing about this. It looks like a lot of … it’s too much data. They’re asking for too much without giving much in return. It’s also confusing. Exactly as you identified because you give people two options which means you’re confusing the prospect. And one of the things that we know about marketing is the confused mind does not take action. So on the landing page you just have one call to action so it’s really clear. Do this and that’s the only option. So if that doesn’t grab you, this isn’t a good match. What I would have done here is I’d have created some kind of a really compelling report that matched up to the needs of that audience. So it might be “Free Report Reveals the 7 Biggest Mistakes That X Type of People Make” and I would just have gone and collected the email. And then I would have a second campaign that ran for that opted-in list like you were saying with the country club example we just did where I’ve got the email. And then I would run the second campaign for them giving them a second gift or a second ethical bribe to now give us their other details, their address details, etc. if I wanted to capture the full data.
I think it’s very confusing. There are too many options on the page and trying to collect way too much data and it’s a cold list. And they’re not giving anything compelling in exchange for trying to get into a warm list. So a few fundamental things wrong there, so if you think about too confusing, not a strong offer, to a cold list. It’s got the fundamentals that we spoke about before, it’s got those wrong.
When I was doing some research on this, I was looking at the types of questions people ask about PURLs. I’m going to show you just a few very quick, we’ll run through these pretty quickly. Just the typical types of questions people ask. So one is landing pages, so just give us a real short explanation of what a landing page is. We’ve kind of touched on it a lot in this interview but just for clarity.
Marty Thomas: Typically a landing page is simply just like a one-page website. Maybe a one page or maybe a two or three page consecutive website that people will visit. And with the PURL the landing page will be personalized for that person visiting it. So that’s basically it. A landing page is a one-page website, maybe a squeeze page they can be referred to as and they’re just capturing information. So that’s kind of the landing page.
Nick Devine: So that would be the first page that somebody would see and then they would have the option of some kind of either a questionnaire page or a registration page would be the next two types of pages. Would you talk about both of those?
Marty Thomas: What were the two?
Nick Devine: So the questionnaire page?
Marty Thomas: Right. The questionnaire page it could be the questionnaire could be right on the first page there. It typically is.
Nick Devine: Like we’ve got the country club example in fact.
Marty Thomas: Yeah. Like people would just answer questions, maybe it would be a series of questions, and then you finally take them to a thank you page.
Nick Devine: And what would be on the thank you page typically?
Marty Thomas: Typically it’s just thanking the person by their name. Like “Thanks, Jim for filling out information. We’ll be in contact with you shortly or we’re sending out your free gift.” And then possibly a link to more information for them to dive in a little bit deeper if they wanted to.
Nick Devine: I think that’s probably a good way to describe it. The core things in my experience to have on there is let people know what’s going to happen next if there is something due to happen next. So if you’re due to send them a gift just say thanks for completing the survey, your gift will be on its way to you. Expect to receive it within the next 7 days or I’ll be sending you an email with a link to something. It will arrive to you in the next hour. Watch your email inbox; it will be from XYZ at ABC.com. Just so it’s very clear about what’s going to happen next because while in your mind, the person that created the campaign, you know exactly what’s going to happen next. This person, they’ve only seen the thing a minute or two minutes previously. So you just need to guide it step by step so you’ve managed the expectations. I know one of the questions that gets asked a lot, Marty, is corporate websites, micro sites, where do I build the web pages?
Marty Thomas: As we touched on before, you can hire it done if you don’t know.
Nick Devine: But I mean where? Do I do it on my corporate site? So if I’m Microsoft do I have Microsoft.com/MartyThomas or do I create a special micro site or how do I do that?
Marty Thomas: You can do it either way. If you wanted it to be done on your corporate site, absolutely possible. Typically easy to do. Probably the most common way is to create … to just use a new domain name. So it’s not actually on your corporate site. Maybe the domain actually has to do with the promotion. It makes it a little bit more compelling. So we’ll use the Honda dealership for example and instead of going to JimsHonda.com so it’s a corporate site, maybe it will be like HondaFallPromotion.com or something like that. So they’ll actually use a unique url. I see that happen quite a bit as opposed to being on a corporate website.
Nick Devine: When we do things like this, we do a lot of this type of stuff in our company and I do it with companies where I’m involved as well, is we typically create just specific micro sites for the project. So we’re doing one at the moment in the printing industry and the site is not up yet but it will probably be up by the time people hear this interview, called Breakthrough To Profits. Now the corporate site is The Print Coach. But for this campaign we’ve just built a new little micro site. It’s only got a few pages, only three or four pages will be on the site. But it’s very specific to the thing we’re sending out and it’s got no header graphics, it’s got none of our corporate type information on there. It’s just specific to the offer that we’re sending out on that site.
Marty, let’s talk about the feedback loop, if you will. So the ability to track and the dashboard where you would do that. What type of things can you see in there and how might you use them?
Marty Thomas: As far as the results and everything?
Nick Devine: Exactly. So people are clicking on my PURLs, how can I see who is clicking on what? What kind of information can I get or see?
Marty Thomas: Well one, you’ll receive an alert. There’s usually alert settings with PURL applications where you’ll receive an email alert anytime anybody takes an action. So say that you set an alert for as soon as somebody submits the questionnaire. So the email that you would receive would actually include that person’s name, when they visited the website or filled out the questionnaire, and the information that was on that questionnaire would be in that email. So you would instantly receive that information. You could also log on and you’d be able to log into Purlem’s dashboard, for instance. And on Purlem’s dashboard you’d be able to see a list of everybody that’s visited the website and everybody that filled out the questionnaire, if we’re using the questionnaire example. And you’d be able to click on those people and see their answers that they submitted. So it’s all right there.
Nick Devine: And it looks pretty simple. I was looking at your dashboard that Purlem.com, your site, the dashboards look very simple. And it looks like you can get very good information and very intuitive, I thought.
Marty Thomas: Yes. Very straightforward, tried to make it as simple as possible.
Nick Devine: Marty, in wrapping up I want to talk about this concept of testing because this is probably one of the biggest mistakes I see people making in any kind of marketing initiative. We spoke about this when I was giving the example of one of the campaigns that we’ve run. And the one that we’re designing now in Breakthrough To Profits we’re doing the exact same thing. So we’re designing a range of different cards that we’re going to test and different marketing pieces that we’re going to test. So the pieces I give people on testing is the big pieces – test the offer. So don’t fall into the trap of thinking we’ve come up with a really clever offer, test two or three different offers and see which one people respond to because the market is going to have the definitive vote on this. I would also test lists. And we were using the example of the document company. In that type of scenario where you don’t know, when you’re buying a list, what I would do is try and buy the smallest possible quantity of a number of different lists. And then I would test as inexpensively as possible, so on the email probably first to see which lists are going to respond best to the thing that I’m putting out into the marketplace. And then you roll out more to the lists that are obviously responding. And then the third thing that I would say is test the headlines, because the headline is a big piece, so the headline on the postcard, the headline on the landing page. And then the fourth thing to be very aware of is I would do progressive roll out. So let’s take an example. I’ve got a list of 50,000 which would be a very big campaign. And let’s say I test 5,000 and I got a result that I was really happy and excited about, I would not go from 5,000 to 50,000 just in case there were some outliers in that list. I might go from 5,000 to 10,000 and then I might go 10 to 20 and then I might go 35 and then I’d go to 50. So if there was a problem someplace, I’ve not thrown my whole marketing budget at one big thing and it’s failed for some reason or another and I don’t understand. So test the list, test the offer, test the headlines, and then just progressively roll out. And then there’s lots of little things you can test like the graphics, the design of the landing page, etc. You might try two or three designs of that as well which is pretty easy to test. And testing those web pages is very easy because anything that knows anything basic about web pages and web technology at all can help you easily set up an automatic rotation of the landing pages. And have you done any of that yourselves, Marty, in your campaign.
Marty Thomas: Yes, absolutely. I mean it’s easy to do just like a simple A/B testing with Purlem. We just split your list in half and then you can see how … just change the headline even between the two different campaigns and see how the response rates have affected. So yeah it’s very, like you said, very easy to kind of modify the html or split up the campaigns with an application like Purlem so you can do A/B testing and whatnot.
Nick Devine: Fantastic, Marty. Let’s wrap up there. So if you were going to give people a nugget that you wanted to leave them with, what would it be?
Marty Thomas: Well I would say that PURLs shouldn’t be intimidating. They can be really intimidating but once people get into it and get comfortable with it and we do our best at Purlem to really hold hands or walk people through it and really just try to make the process as simple as possible. And once people get into it they realize wow, this really isn’t that hard to do. They start knocking out, start creating new PURL pages and campaigns. You can do it in minutes literally. So don’t be intimidated by it, dive into it. And see that it is easy to do and you’re going to see also the very nice benefits and results from doing it as well that you’ll really appreciate.
Nick Devine: And Marty, in your company, obviously I don’t know a massive amount about your company but I think you’ve got some kind of a free offer on your site where people can test out some of these things on PURLs without sticking their hand in their wallet. Am I correct there?
Marty Thomas: Yes, absolutely. They can try it out, it limits to like a mailing list of 500 but it’s great for like a print provider that just wants to be comfortable with it first themselves before they offer it to their clients. It’s a great way for them to kind of dive in, play around with creating personalized url pages, PURL pages, and even mailing out a list themselves and watching the results come in. And just really realizing how easy and it allows them to get comfortable with it and then it allows them to be more comfortable showing it to their clients as well.
Nick Devine: For people listening to this and if they’re not already in PURLs, that would be a great thing to do. So that’s just on your corporate site, Marty? Is it Purlem.com?
Marty Thomas: Yes.
Nick Devine: And it’s fairly obvious where to go once you get there?
Marty Thomas: Absolutely.
Nick Devine: Okay, fantastic. And I would say summing up from my point of view the two things I would say – the market in the printing industry is very tough these days. It’s difficult trying to win new clients. A lot of existing clients, their spending on print has declined a) because of the recession environment that we’ve been going through and b) there’s a lot of competition from other media. So I think PURLs are an interesting opportunity as are a lot of the other aspects of what we categorize as digital and value-added services. And why I think PURLs are interesting is one it gives you an opportunity very easily and fairly inexpensively to get into digital and value-added services in another new way. So it doesn’t require a sophisticated level of skills and it doesn’t require a lot of money. So it’s an easy entry in there. It’s very easy to test and experiment. And to then sit down in front of a client you’ve got an opportunity to have a different type of a conversation with them so it’s no longer just about when are you due to reprint the catalogue or the marketing materials and can we give you a price? And they’re comparing your price with the price from three other printers. This gives you a unique conversation to have with them where they can’t go price shop or are very unlikely to go price shop your proposition with other people because you’d be walking them through something that’s a bit more sophisticated. And if the client gets it right with your help, and there would be a bit of testing that goes on in here. Then the level of loyalty towards you is going to be higher because you’ve actually helped them in things that are important for the business which is getting new clients, selling more of the products and services that they sell, improving client loyalty, building up their own internal database, so knowing more about their customers. Surveying their customers so they know what things their customers are interested in. So they are all business type benefits as opposed to just product type benefits. And what we’re all trying to do in the printing industry at the moment is get further up the value chain and have business type conversations with our customers that are levels above what I call the “quote and hope” way of selling print. So I hope you found this really interesting and useful. I found it interesting doing the research and talking to Marty before today’s call and obviously having the pleasure of having over an hour with Marty on this call. I’ve just found it very enlightening. And Marty, I really appreciate you giving up obviously the time today and the time you’ve given up to prepare for this as well. Because for the people listening, I did give Marty a bit of homework to do before we did the call which he very happily and quickly did which was very kind of you.
Marty Thomas: I was happy to, it was a great experience.
Nick Devine: Folks, I’ve enjoyed this and we’ll look forward to catching you on the next edition of Digital Express. Have a great day. Thank you.
[End of Audio]
Introducing the new Purlem Personalized URL WordPress Plugin! Now you can combine the power of WordPress with Purlem for the ultimate PURL Campaigns!
I received a few requests to have a Refer-A-Friend feature for Purlem. The beautiful thing about Purlem is that it is built around a simple API. What this means is that it is extremely easy customize Purlem to fit your needs. The sky is the limit!
So although Purlem does not have a ‘Refer-A-Friend’ or ‘Forward-To-A-Fiend’ feature built in, I show you in this video tutorial just how easy it is to customize Purlem to include a feature like this.
Watch the video tutorial: http://www.purlem.com/pages/video/referafriend.php
Today I was asked this question by a potential client. Thought it was interesting.
Q: Are PURLs becoming ‘has been’ technology?
A: “The only technology that I see overtaking PURLs would be QR Codes. They have had some success in Japan, but its going to be a while before it is commonplace here in the states. People will not only have to have the right technology in their hands, but they will also have to know how to use it. So I think PURLs will be around for a while as the primary medium to track offline marketing efforts.”
Thoughts?
Just launched a new website to help connect Variable Data Printers with Customers: http://printvdp.com. The project started out as a resource to help connect my clients with printers. I had such a great response that I decided to make the resource public through PrintVDP.com.
If you have ever had a Variable Data print job quoted by a few companies, you know that the estimates can swing by thousands of dollars (seriously). Every printer in PrintVDP is required to estimate a ‘mock’ Variable data project. That you, you know before even contacting the printer for a quote where they come in.
You can also search by location, and see what types of Equipment and Paper the printers use. Hopefully will be a good resource for both printers and customers alike.
Welcome to Get Personal, a blog by Marty Thomas on business, marketing, design and technology. Marty founded Purlem - a Personal URL application that allows marketers to personalize, improve and track their marketing efforts. Learn more at Personal URL Marketing