Marketing with a Personalized URL
Imagine that you have to send out a marketing letter to all of the people who are on your mailing list. You obviously want to get as many of them as possible to respond to the letter. This is going to be a lot more likely to occur if you can find a way to personalize the letter so that each recipient feels as though it was written just for them (even though it obviously wasn’t). One great way to do this is to direct each recipient to his or her own personalized URL.
The personalized URL (also called PURL) is a web landing page on your website which incorporates the name of the individual or business that you are targeting into the URL that you are sending them to. For example, you direct Bob Jones to www.BobJones.yourbusinessname.com. When Bob Jones goes to that page, he finds one to one marketing information designed specifically to get his attention.
There are a lot of different techniques for marketing that are used today which rely on the web (web-to-print publishing of marketing materials is perhaps the best well known of these) but the use of personalized URL pages isn’t yet widely known. This is great for you because it means that you can get in on this right away before others are widely using it and really impress the customers that you are marketing towards.
1 Comment(s)
By socaljoe on Sep 29, 2008 | Reply
Probably more important than getting people’s attention is the fact that purls can be used as a feedback mechanism helping marketers assess how effective are their techniques. You can tell who is following their purls, and you can ask them questions on their microsite. And you can do this again and again over time. So, you can start to assess “What did I do this time made them click that I wasn’t doing before?” And of course, through their answers to the questions you ask, you are qualifying them as a prospect for further follow up.
I’d be interested in hearing about people’s experience with purls and how they used them.