Smile—and Flash Your pURLy Sites

Using personalized Web sites gives customers a reason to respond

October 2007 By W. Eric Martin

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And if you don’t have the data? That’s actually another reason to use pURLs. “Marketers are attracted to pURLs as a way to grab e-mail addresses,” says Coté. “If you can make a sale with them, fantastic, but in lieu of a sale, they’re a great data-gathering mechanism.” A magazine publisher, for example, can use a pURL-driven campaign to contact lapsed subscribers to find out why they didn’t renew.

Adds Spyro Kourtis, president of Bellevue, Wash., direct marketing agency The Hacker Group, “You can start with a survey, then deliver relevant content and offers based on that information.” For one project under development, customers will see different wireless plans and phones based on their survey responses and receive an offer tailored for them.

What’s even better, says Kourtis, “I can ask your permission to contact you in the future, and when you come back, you’ll see something new.” If customers didn’t sign up for a wireless plan last time, their survey responses will automatically determine whether the marketer should sweeten the offer or present a different product.

Adding pURLs to Your Marketing Wardrobe

pURLs enable the personalization of direct mail, while providing the benefits of Web design. “If you see a survey question being consistently ignored or not getting the response you want, you can change it immediately,” says Pamela Evans, director of account services for BAM! Direct, a direct marketing agency in Suwanee, Ga. “You can also modify a campaign in progress, so it’s a beautiful integration of print and Web.”

Customer tracking is another pURL plus. “I can know to the day how many people have opened this page and were interested enough to give us more information,” says Bronstad. “I even know which people looked at the page but haven’t given us information, which gives me data for follow-up calls or e-mails.”

While you can use pURLs in e-mail campaigns, doing so defeats the purpose of a pURL because e-mail already contains clickable links. “Clicking an e-mail isn’t the same as typing the URL that includes your name,” says Bronstad. “In marketing, any time you can activate someone to do something, that increases the response.”

For all their positive attributes, pURLs work only within the context of a coordinated campaign. “pURLs are a great enhancement for getting response in direct market[ing],” says Evans, “but they’re not the end-all, be-all tool. You can’t neglect proper targeting with a product that has relevance.”

Coté discovered this first-hand with a client who insisted on using a pURL for a product that appealed to older men. While the Web site featured dazzling design and streaming video, the users never saw it because they vanished as soon as the site requested an e-mail address. “You want to use mail and drive people to pURLs when you’ve already determined that they’re Web savvy and order online,” he says.

A Few How-tos

Ideally, says Frank Hudetz, you’ll develop a direct mail piece that will point out the pURL, using images to highlight it and stressing the personalized information that awaits at the Web site. Place the recipient’s name as close to the front of the URL as possible so he has a greater chance of noticing the personalization, and keep the URL short to encourage action.

For recipients with identical names—which Ballantine Director of Marketing Ryan Coté estimates is 2 percent of his clients’ lists—you can add characters to the pURL to eliminate the duplication, e.g., www.company.com/michaelsmith23, although you might want to disguise these efforts to keep the URL looking personal. Ballantine takes another approach, printing a unique security code on each item mailed. “If you have a mail file of 50,000 names, the code will be five digits long,” says Coté. When someone with a duplicated name visits the Web site, that person will be prompted for the security code, which will connect him or her with the right data; everyone else will go immediately to their personalized landing page.

Surveying lists for duplicate names and otherwise assembling the data for pURLs will up the prep time on any campaign. To avoid adding even more time, Hudetz suggests keeping your IT department out of the process. “That’s a big flaw that we almost stepped into, as it will take IT six to 12 months to reinvent the wheel,” he says. By going with an established provider, you’ll get started more quickly and have access to immediate reports and tracking.

Once you start exploring the possibilities with pURLs, which can be personalized to any degree that your budget can bear, you’ll come to see them as an invaluable tool. Says Bronstad, “From a marketing standpoint, I love them to death.”

W. Eric Martin is a freelance writer and editor. He can be reached at eric@twowriters.net.

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