PURLs Make Marketing Music

When you go to the symphony, you’re not going to have a satisfying experience if you listen to the violin play for a little while, and then the cello, and then the timpani, and then the French horn, and then the violin again. The success of the experience is based on those individual instruments coming together for one glorious sound.

Marketing your product or service is no different. You’re doing yourself a disservice if you direct mail and then call “game.” Or send a blast email to all the contacts in your database, then sit back and wait for the orders to come streaming in.

Integrated cross-media marketing campaigns sounds like high-falootin’ agency-speak, but they’re really a basic means of communicating your corporate message to key audience stakeholders through multiple channels, multiple times, over multiple occasions.

So let’s talk about integrated marketing. You’ve got your four P’s of marketing (product, price, promotion, placement) and your traditional channels (direct mail, advertising, email)… more often than not — unless you’ve elected to conduct your business in a pre-1990s non-e-commerce genre — every marketing piece and every call to action is going to drive your audience to a website.

Successful marketing is about the personal touch. If you’re going to try to talk one-on-one to your audience — even with a mass marketing piece — why not do everything in your power to make it seem like you are talking to that one, individual person? “Joe, did you know that this widget will change your life?” “Mary, you cannot go on without incorporating this wombat into your business!”

So you incorporate that personal touch into your marketing piece, you mail merge until your finger cramps, and then you send your very personal message… and direct your audience to a generic website. You’ve just gotten lost in the crowd.

PURLs, or personalized URLs, continue the personalization one step farther.

Simply stated, a PURL is a URL created with individual customer data, such as www.YourURL.com/TheirName. When a recipient accesses their PURL, they are taken directly to their own personalized website.  Here, they can gather information, receive offers, download white papers, register, donate, join or place orders instantly.  Customers demand personalized information – their online experience with you needs to be personal or you will make them feel like one of the audience instead of the spotlight soloist on stage.

PURLs:

• Allow companies to deliver relevant content to customers, which in turn increase customer interaction.
• Help generate qualified leads, which lead to increased conversions – often doubling response rates – and increased customer loyalty.
• Enable companies to track and measure marketing efforts quickly and easily, providing instant and actionable web analytics critical to business.

Studies have proven the effectiveness of PURLs in cross media marketing campaigns – check out www.podi.org, an organization that tracks and reports on PURL campaign results.

Increased brand awareness. Increased lead retrieval. Increased response rates. Creating a personal connection from the get-go saves you money in the long run – and isn’t that what we’re all after? Cutting the bottom line?

Let’s talk about how we can get you started on composing your own marketing symphony. Visit www.gocrossmedia.com to

• Learn more
• Sign up for a demo
• Download a whitepaper entitled “Cross-Media Marketing: How to Maximize Results in Your Campaign”
• Receive a coupon for $200 off your first Go Cross Media PURL campaign from Source Unlimited, Inc.

Stay tuned for more fresh ideas.

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