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Response rate from marketing by mail?

How effective are Direct Mail PURL's for marketing?

  • I am looking for feed back on using Direct Mail PURL's (personalized URL) for marketing. Possibly the "Swiss Army Knife of direct mail," marketing with PURL's is the convergence of personalized printed direct mail and matching co-produced Internet content through the use of digital printing software. PURL's seem to be the leading edge of direct mail. Personalizing the content and a URL that are printed using special software allows your direct mail campaign additional legs to convey your message. Internet content is built to match the branding and message of the printed piece, allowing almost an seamless user experience. In the printed content a personalized website address is created from the mailing list using variable data software that creates a unique Internet website address using each persons name from the list. For example the printed document would invite the recipient to visit the website of firstname.lastname.website-url. It creates curiosity for the intended recipient of the mailing. When the recipient enters the website doorway of that personalized URL content personalized to them is posted in that Internet page. Personalized greetings, gifts, awards, offers, coupons, presentations, surveys, contests, shopping and more are awaiting. All the users actions are logged and tracked. Allowing you to know they are responding to your printed message and measuring that response. This is possibly the most powerful direct mail marketing available today. I am interested to know if anyone here has used Direct Mail PURL's for marketing and how effective was it for you?

  • Answer:

    Although I haven't used it myself, I really do think that it could  be an effective marketing campaign especially that it's an offline-online incoraporation type of marketing.

Melanie Taylor at Quora Visit the source

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I've used them....And trust me, it's hit or miss. That's the nature of all marketing. It ALWAYS depends on the target, environment, and offer. If you're marketing to farmers in Nebraska they probably aren't going to appreciate seeing their name in a URL. Be careful not to alienate your audience. So the answer: There's no right answer here. Want to find out if they work? It's cheap to implement a campaign. Measure and test it. The great part is you can measure calls, visits to a page, opt-ins, etc. I can tell you I tried it with a small business in the finance / insurance industry and it bombed over and over again....very little lift and wasn't worth it...Freaked some people out too because on the landing page we merged in data on their home from county databases... Do an experiment and see if it works.

KJ Prince

I have used PURLs effectively for my own self-promotion, and have also been involved with hundreds of campaigns for Purlem users. But I will be the first to agree with - they are hit or miss.  It depends on the list, creative and offer.  The PURLs will "enhance" an campaign that gets these elements right.  However, if you place a PURL on a poorly executed campaign, the campaign is still going to suck (sorry - no magic bullet here). One of my favorite studies demonstrating the effectivness of PURLs is here: http://purlem.com/blog/2012/10/personalized-vs-static-response-rates/

Martin Thomas

PURLs work very well and I use them as much as possible for both in-house lists and external lists.  If your printer can handle variable data printing, there's no reason for you not to use it, both in the ad copy and the response URL. Calson has a case study that compared their own numbers to the DMA and saw that PURL response outperformed static response by up to 575%

Phil Lomboy

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