Personalized URL (PURL) and sometimes referred to as custom URL, has recently caught the attention of marketers in the internet age. It’s one of those marketing strategy integrations that marry traditional and digital methods. What powers this integration is the innate value of personalization. Personalization, in almost all cases, works. Most businesses resort to this idea when thinking about adding a twist in their efforts. This is mainly because in personalization, marketers get to relay the message to customers that says, “It’s about you.” It’s customer-oriented, that is. PURL then prunes the possibility of spamming, that which usually repels customers’ interest to the product or offer, in a marketer’s campaign efforts.
Proofs that PURL Works
The statistics presented by L2, Inc. quite tells enough about the success of integrating PURL into marketing campaigns. It says that, “Personalized URL providers claim they consistently get above 30% increase in ROI for their clients’ one to one marketing campaigns.” I know that’s the claim of the service providers. And there’s that possibility of it being exaggerated. But it’s not. Even the big companies have felt a positive effect on their ROI because of PURL. The well-known brand of computers, Hewlett-Packard, in a case study, cites that before, they usually just get 1% to 3% response rate. That gives them $60,000 in revenues. But when personalization was integrated into their marketing campaigns, it yielded 9.4% response rate. That generated significantly bigger revenue of $556,000. Along with the above, case studies from the Pacific Northwest Bank (PNB) and Carlson Companies, Inc., revealing the effectiveness of personalizing, can be read from Summit’s site.
On another context, when the University of Toronto wanted to increase its donations and respondent base, they resorted to personalized printing. What the university did was that it went back to their existing database and reconsidered the mailing list. The university came up with a 50% less number of recipients. But even with that less number, its donor based increased by 80% and their revenue by 30%. Similarly, Franklin University, when they wanted to increase their enrollment applications used personalization. The university replaced its generic view book and full-sized course catalogs with a personalized, color brochure based on questions answered by prospective students on its website. The result: 60% cost savings from its previous inquiry packet.
How PURL Works
Personalizing URL is quite simple. For example, a certain website with “website.com” as the url and if that website is targeting a certain customer named John Doe, the usual PURL that would be generated is “johndoe.website.com” or “website.com/johndoe” depending on the generator that you use. There are actually a lot of service providers that offer that around the web.
For some personalizing tips, here’s a slideshow from L2soft.com or PURL strategics:
PURL works best with direct mailing. And in direct mailing, although the use of PURL has been proven to be effective, there are still a lot of factors that has to be considered. Some of these factors include how you go about the design and content of your printed materials like postcards, brochures or flyers and PrintPlace.com has a lot of resources when it comes to those. You can check this link for cross-media campaign or this link for direct mailing tips. And since PURL is best integrated with print media marketing, small businesses could take full advantage of it. For more efficient campaigns, it may be best to contact postal service providers.
