It’s been a crazy morning and I’ve just had a chance to sit down. But I wanted to make sure you got today’s post…

There’s a lot of talk recently about Personal URLs. I’m glad people are talking about it…but personalizing marketing and advertising communications is nothing new.

Actually for those of us who have been using direct marketing and direct mail it’s a given - common sense that is.

Why would you want to personalize your marketing messages and what’s all this talk about PURLs (Personal URLs that is)?

First off, imagine a letter arriving in your mailbox. It doesn’t have your name on it…you might just throw it in the garbage right? But let’s say you proceed to open that letter. You unfold the letter and see that it starts with “Dear Friend” or “Dear Car Owner”…if they don’t have a headline or graphic that grabs your eyeballs right away…good chance that paper is going to the trash (though I hope you’d recycle it).

Now, taking a step back. If that envelope had your name on it…close to 95% of people would open it. When the letter has your name on it…you almost feel compelled to read it don’t you?

That’s why hundreds of marketing tests have shown that the more you personalize your communications (just like the more you segment and target your market) the higher response you’ll get.

Let’s take a U-turn now and cover the second point. Personalized URLs.

I’ll break it down and tell you in basic English how this works…

Let’s say your a wine distributor and sell expensive and rare bottles and you want to get some new customers. You buy a targeted list of people likely to buy $150-$500 bottles of wine (in a future article we’ll talk about lists) and put together a postcard.

Here’s where the personalization starts.

The postcard has each prospects name on it (so it feels personal). The postcard copy talks about the history of these wines, how rare they are, what a great investment they can be, and how special you’ll feel having some of these in your collection.

That’s where the personalization often stopped.

 But the next step is where the prospect is told to access a special link just for them that will give them more details about the wines and how they can get a free gift. The URL might look something like this www.henderson.raregrapes.com

Now Mr. Henderson is feeling excited about their name being in a URL. What is it he wonders? Is it a special website just for them?

Yes and no.

What will happen is that they’ll access a website that is automatically generated. Software for Personalized URLs allows website owners to use a prospect or customer database…the software picks up the information you want to be inserted into the webpage like First Name or Location, etc and automatically puts it into the personalized web page.

The template of each page is pretty much the same. However, on top of automatically inserting new text in key areas of your message you can also set it to show different pictures for different people…so you could personalize it by showing pictures of people the same age as the prospect or same background, etc…there is much room for personalization.

If you were targeting 10,000 prospects it would take you months to set up 10,000 pages. But with this technology you can just set the level of personalization and what you want to change and then select your database.

Once prospects come to your website you can capture more of their information, send them personalized emails and other communications.

Of course the best software allows you to fully track every aspect of the campaign so you can adjust it along the way and improve each step as you role out more mailings.

You’d probably also be interested to know that personalization is already being used in automatic telephone marketing systems and SMS messages.

I haven’t yet seen it in video…but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was out there.

Just remember. The fundamentals of marketing or advertising haven’t changed here. It’s just a new way to deliver and enhance your marketing and advertising messages.

Next week’s topic is going to blow you away…you’ve probably thought about it before…but we’ll set the record straight.

To your success,

Michael
Relagy Marketing