Article How marketers today are successfully using PURLs

If you’re interested in using PURLs to increase response rates, you’re setting yourself up for failure. From my experience PURLs do not increase response rates. Those that tell you otherwise, are trying to swindle your money.

The primary goal with your PURL campaign should be to simply identify who’s visiting, and then continue to engage those people until they convert.

Let’s break this down a bit… Say that you’re going to send out 1,000 direct mail pieces. It’s possible that you’ll get 50 that visit their PURL. Of those 50, 3 will “convert” by submitting their information. The value here is in the 50 that visit the PURL. The 3 that convert are icing in the cake. The 50 is how you evaluate the overall success or failure campaign.

So if you’re evaluating PURLs for the first time, the question to ask yourself is…

“Is knowing who these 50 people are, of any value to me?”

You may say no… you don’t care who those 50 people are. You only care about those that convert. In those cases, PURLs offer are of no value to you. You’re time is better spent elsewhere. But here’s the thing…

In many cases, PURLs are used with direct mail campaigns. And if you’re using direct mail, chances are that it’s one of your first “touch points.” Prevailing wisdom is that it takes 6 to 8 touches to generate a viable sales lead. So to evaluate your direct mail campaign based on the number of people that immediately convert, is really, quite ridiculous.

With PURLs, you will be able to see exactly who those 50 people are that responded. Successful marketers are placing value on these 50 people, because they understand that this is only the first of many touch points. They are using PURLs to identify those that have shown some interests in their offering, and continuing to engage them until they are ready to convert. This is where the primary value of PURLs lie.