A recent CMO Council survey identified the following benefits of personalized communication:
It is important to track your campaign’s results. PURLs provide an efficient, immediate, and accurate way of measuring not just responses, but overall performance of the campaign. With PURLs you have access to real-time tracking of who visited their PURL, when they responded, what they viewed, and what they have shown interests in.
Information collected from the PURL landing page is stored in a central database. This data helps the marketer to make future campaigns even more relevant to the user. The more you know about your visitors, the more you can deliver messaging that causes them to act.
The process of continuously learning more about your visitors from one campaign to the next is known as the “Feedback Loop.” By receiving immediate feedback on your campaign, you can use that information to make future campaigns even more relevant and effective.
A very practical application of the feedback loop is to use the results to partition your mailing list. For example, if you send out 1,000 postcards (with PURLs), and 50 people visit the PURL, you know that these 50 are somewhat intrigued by your product or service. You may want to move these 50 contacts into a separate list, call it the A list. You may market to a little harder to the A list, and provide even more relevant content to them based on their past visit. All of this is possible with PURLs, and should be leveraged in your campaign.
Is there a way to link Personalized Urls to job security? Yes! says David LaBonte in his book Shiny objects marketing.
David recalls how they were developing a series of programs to help a traditional printer expand its list of services, one of which was personalized mailings. However, the sales people were having 2 problems,
As David wrote – “They identified the Personalized URL feature as the key point.. This feature, in essence, allowed you to send a mailer to a prospective customer that prompted them to go to a web site that had their name in the web address.”
Job security was identified as the “shiny object” for anybody that has been in charge of marketing. By tying the “shiny object” to Personalized URLs, the print salesmen had a new sales tactic with tremendous benefits to the customer.
The chart displayed here was created for the printer to illustrate the pathway to the shiny object.
PURL email responses are your 24/7 marketing & sales team. These emails are a very powerful way to provide instant and relevant follow up information to your visitors. The purl emails are triggered to automatically send based on PURL landing page activity, and are commonly used to:
Your purl email responses can be as personalized as your landing page. Take advantage of variable text, images, and rules to provide the recipient with information that is relevant to them.
A word of caution – only use a automated email responses when it is warranted. If the response email is not of any value to your visitor, and can be perceived as spam, and hurt your reputation. It is a mistake to send a response email just because the feature is available. If it doesn’t provide any value to your visitor, don’t send it.
Learn more about sending response emails with Purlem.
“Remember that a person’s name is to that person the most important sound in any language.”
Dale Carnegie
“How to Win Friends and Influence People”
Most email marketing platforms allow you to upload a spreadsheet of contacts. In that spreadsheet you would include a column called “PURL.” Then you can add the PURL column as a custom/new field. Now that your email platform knows each contact’s PURLs, you can pull each contact’s PURL into the landing page just as you would their first name.
Learn more about adding PURLs to your Constant Contact email campaign.
Want to give your landing page visitor’s personalized directions form their home to your business? This is a great way for businesses selling to a local audience to make their message more personal and relevant.
By using PURLs and Google Maps API it is extremely easy to do! Visit Purlem’s support page to see a quick tutorial.
A QR Code is square barcode that can be scanned by a smart phone’s camera and take the user directly to their PURL Landing Page. The QR Code bypasses the need for the user to actually type in the PURL itself. Sounds trivial, but the increased buzz and attention given to QR Codes over the past few years, can help to increase your response rates.
You can use your Personalized QR Codes on your printed piece, or in your email marketing campaigns. It can add a certain level of excited to your campaign with a “what’s behind door number one” mentality.
It might sound crazy to have a QR Code in an email, but if your recipients are going to be printing out the email to save for later (like with a coupon or directions) then the QR Code can be useful.
A word of caution when it comes to using QR Codes - you need to determine if QR codes are a good fit for your business and your audience. Don’t just use the QR Codes because you think they’re cool. If you determine that you have a good fit, ensure that the Landing Page the QR Code scanner is taken to is mobile friendly.
The visitor to your PURL Landing Page should know within 5 seconds of visiting what your exactly offering. To test this use the five second test. Have somebody (preferably somebody in your industry) take a look at your landing page for 5 seconds then take it down. Ask them what the website was all about. If they can’t tell you, your message is not clear enough. Try to portray your message in fewer than 7 words. Make those words big and bold – the first thing people see when they visit the site. You want to make it as obvious as possible what your site is all about, and the next steps your visitors should take.
Here is a great tool to assist with your 5 second test: http://fivesecondtest.com/
(Purlem has nothing to do with fivesecondtest.com)
