PURLS - Anyone Else Have Any Experience?

[Barry Hammond]

I'm wondering if anyone else has explored the use of PURLs (personalized urls) in direct mail campaigns. If so what was the experience like?

Having been in the field of Marketing for over 20 years now, I've always advocated integration of marketing methods. In other words, don't just place an ad, or send a letter, or make phone calls... do all of those things and tie them together. Using PURLS is a very powerful way of using direct mail to "prime the pump" when it comes to generating web traffic.

I thought I'd share with you some of the results we recently experienced when we decided to add this element to our direct mail campaigns.

Over an 8 week period, we experienced an increase in every category of measure:

Site Visits - .72 %
Web Form Submissions - 276.19 %
Inbound Calls - 1.15 %
Total Lead Conversions - 439.53%

Beyond this, every step in our conversion funnel increased - in one step by 200%, and in the highest by 533%. These are not typos.

What we quickly saw was that the impact on web traffic wasn't nearly as significant as the quality of leads generated. The traffic we gained clicked through more, gave us more information, completed more webforms. Frankly, we gained a much more engaged audience. All of these having a trickle-down effect with regard to google authority on any/all of our SEO activities. Not to mention plenty of much more qualified leads for sales to convert.

In-spite of our success with purl, I've spoken to other marketers who have not experienced similar or better results. But my fear is that these marketers think they didn't experience results because they make a very common and critical error - they didn't track.

I'm curious to know if any of you have tried, and if you would be willing to share your experience?