March 2009

Personalized URLs: fact versus fiction
There’s a lot of misunderstanding about what they are and how to use them wisely. Let’s demystify these important tools. By Heidi Tolliver-Nigro

One of the buzzwords in multi-channel marketing these days is “personalized URLs”. Some marketers see this technology as a powerful tool in a complete arsenal of marketing touches. Other marketers see pURLs as an unnecessary duplication of less expensive approaches. What’s the reality?
Personalized URLs are a specialized sub-set of 1:1 marketing that, in the print world, uses the 1:1 production capabilities of digital presses to print a unique URL on each mailer (www.janesfurniture/bobsmith) and which, in turn, leads recipients to their own personalized mini-sites.

These typically interact with recipients by name, provide personalized pages based on known information or survey responses (including pre-populating forms) and record visitors’ behaviour while they are on the site. Mini-sites can also be set up to trigger automatic follow-ups, such as direct mailers, e-mails, brochures, sales calls, or other touches the marketer might establish.

Anatomy of a personalized URL
Most personalized URL solutions have a similar structure. Once on the site, recipients are encouraged to take a short survey that can be answered by pushing radio buttons. This process is followed by an information page describing the product, service, or offer, which may or may not be personalized based on the visitors’ previous responses to the survey. The final page thanks the user for logging on and describes how to receive the response incentive if one was offered.

While this is the structure used by most off-the-shelf solutions, other offerings enable marketers to create mini-sites at any level of complexity, including personalized charts, graphics, and hypotheticals based on respondents’ interaction on the site “on the fly.”

The most recognizable term for these applications is “PURL.” Because the exclusive right to use the term is claimed by Nimblefish, however, you will see these applications referred to by other names: “personalized URLs,” “response URLs” (RURLs, trademarked by XMPie), “personalized landing pages,” “personalized Web sites,” “one to one micro-Web sites,” and even “customized Web sites”. Personalized URLs can be generated for print or e-mail, but this article will focus on print.

Misunderstandings about personalized URLs
Some marketers have been hard pressed to understand the difference in value between personalized URLs and generic landing pages with data-acquisition forms. They ask: “Why spend the premium and per-click charge for personalized URLs, when you can use a broadcast medium such as banner ads, direct mail, or newspaper ads to drive traffic to a Web site where the same information can be collected?”

Marketers have also questioned the value of personalized URLs because of the costs associated with acquiring the demographic, psychographic, and other elements they perceive as being necessary to drive a successful segmentation and personalization strategy for the personalized URL campaign.
These challenges show a fundamental misunderstanding of the value of personalized URLs and where they fit into the marketer’s toolset.

Best practices for personalized URLs
Personalized URLs are not a broadcast medium. Nor, for the most part, are they designed to be driven by detailed information from a database.

Rather, personalized URLs are designed to enable marketers to begin a dialogue with a well-defined target audience. Often, this audience is its own customer base or a prospect base that mirrors its existing or desired customer profile. The goal of the campaign may not be to sell something immediately. Rather, it is often to solicit information or begin a dialogue that will be used to target future communications with that site visitor.

Thus, one of the great values of personalized URL campaigns is not to use existing demographic information. It’s to gather it in the first place.

Best-in-class examples
Here are three approaches to personalized URLs that exemplify “best in class” uses of this technology:

• A regional theatre wanted to increase its membership base. It developed a profile of the most likely theatre patron. It then purchased a list of prospects who lived within 20 miles of the theatre and matched this demographic profile. The theatre subsequently targeted these prospects with smart creative and asked them to log onto a personalized URL and provide information on their favourite types of theatre productions. As an incentive for completing this survey, prospects’ names were entered in a sweepstakes to win free theatre tickets. By the end of the campaign, not only did the theatre have a very pre-qualified list of prospects for future direct mailings, it also had e-mail addresses for future less expensive, non-print communications.
• A marketer wanted to pre-qualify an existing, in-house prospect list to make it more effective for sales presentations. The recipient’s incentive was not only to respond to a valued supplier, but also to receive a personalized, humorous office sign. In order to receive the sign, visitors had to log on to their personalized URLs and complete a survey, which asked them to identify the most critical pain points in their businesses. Among top executives, the response rate was 1.6 percent. However, with the information gathered from the survey, the marketer’s follow-up team was able to craft such powerful sales presentations that it achieved a 73.9 percent conversion rate.
• A software company had grown through acquisition, and each of its divisions was continuing to act independently. As a result, customers were unaware of the full range of the company’s product offerings, and cross-sells were ineffective. The company created a personalized URL program that brought together all aspects of its business, targeted existing customers, and used the campaign to educate them about relevant products. The firm used an incentive to get customers to the landing page, then surveyed them about pain points in their business. Respondents’ answers triggered the appropriate cross-sell products on the subsequent page. Eleven percent of recipients logged on to their personalized URLs; 70 percent of these updated and cleaned up their contact information (saving the company substantial costs associated with outdated information) and more than 10,000 sales leads were generated.
• This is where personalized URLs shine. They aren’t competitors to forms of mass marketing. They are a targeted solution for specific types of marketing applications.

Best uses
In “Personalized URLs: Beyond the Hype,” a marketer’s primer on personalized URLs from Digital Printing Reports, these applications are broken down into five overarching categories: lead generation /intelligence gathering, direct sales (primarily cross-sells and upsells), event registrations, customer retention and loyalty, and information dissemination.

This list paints a very different picture than that which many marketers may perceive as the role of personalized URLs. In fact, in an informal online survey conducted by Digital Printing Reports, marketers’ answers consistently reflected a high degree of misinformation about personalized URLs as being barriers to adoption. (For example, 22 cited “don’t have the databases necessary” as a primary factor in their decision not to deploy these campaigns.)

So before you write off personalized URLs as unnecessary, expensive, or a complex duplication of an easier, less expensive approach, dig a little deeper. It may be that you still need to wrap your head around where and how these tools really fit.

Heidi Tolliver-Nigro is an industry analyst specializing in digital, 1:1 (personalized), personalized URL, and Web-to-print applications. Her Marketer’s Primer Series, available through Digital Printing Reports (www.digitalprintingreports.com), includes “Digital Printing: Transforming Business and Marketing Models,” “1:1 (Personalized) Printing: Boosting Profits through Relevance,” “Personalized URLs: Beyond the Hype,” and “Web-to-Print: Transforming Document Management and Marketing.”