Tracking Direct Mail With PURL's

Direct mail is effective but notoriously difficult to measure. Once a project is dropped off at the post office, it seems to fall into a black hole. Until recently, the best you can do is to pay attention to how often your phone rings and evaluate the return on investment through gut feeling.

New options are available to help measure your direct mail project more objectively. Personalized URLs or PURLs represent a new way to track, test and tweak your campaigns.

What is a PURL? Think of it as a mini site devoted to your direct mail campaign. If your company has a website at acmewidgets.com, register a new domain at acmeoffers.com (or whatever else you like) and build your PURLs there. Using a company like MindFire Inc or BlueTreeDirect, you can set up a page for each member of your mail list. Then you can print postcards or flyers with your prospects' personalized URL right on it.

Once they arrive at their PURL, you prospect will be greeted by name. You can also show different content to different members of your list. This can be useful when you're introducing them to their territory representative or trying to cross sell relevant products to your past customers.

By sending them to a PURL, rather than your main site, you can view the results of your mail more closely. Using reporting features, you can see which prospect responded to your mail and when they responded. You can see what they clicked on and how much time they spent there. You can also set up triggers so that a sales representative gets an email the instant a prospect clicks on a certain link.

With so much trackability, you can test different offers and see which one gets the best results. Or you can add or remove pages based on how long users stay on the site. By fine tuning your project, you'll enjoy better results on your direct mail campaign.
PURLs usually cost $.04-$.08 each to set up so they are an affordable solution for most businesses. Take advantage of this new technology and get more control over your next direct mail campaign.