One slick way to bring together online and offline marketing channels is with the use of PURLs (or “personalized URLs”). These individualized web experiences are a way for marketers to extend the personalization, segmentation and measurement inherent in direct digital marketing, addressable from, say, an email or a direct mail piece. (Read more about PURLs and how to use them to provide meaningful message to the customer in this post from Dutch.)I opened it to find a tiny Book of Secrets. This little book contained secrets from how to cook perfect rice, to the secret of happiness, to the secret to quiet a crying baby. But the real secret was the company who sent it to me! My only clue was wedged inside the book, the hook of the promotion. I was intrigued to see what this was all about.
Apparently, by visiting this PURL, I would learn some kind of secret. So I typed in the address from the bookmark to “pull back the curtains.” And was surprised to see this:
Not the experience I anticipated, to say the least.
For all the effort and expense by the marketing team for this mysterious company, the PURL was a real disconnect. At that moment, they had me, then they blew it. I wanted the pleasure of a personalized online experience. It’s a shame, really. The company had created a direct-mail package that caught my attention, included an element personalized to me, but failed to either purchase the domain name for the campaign, and/or test to make sure the domain and PURL were working correctly.
So, here’s my secret (one you won’t find in the book): Test. When creating and deploying any direct digital marketing campaign, test everything.
As Dutch noted in that earlier post on PURLs, employing a customer-centric approach to marketing goes far beyond putting a person’s name on a piece of paper. It’s about building relationships and providing them with content they value.
What’s the secret I was supposed to discover in this experience? I’d still like to know.
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