PURLS

The goal of any marketing piece is to connect the person receiving it with the person sending it. Effective marketing pieces have used calls-to-action as the main vehicle to elicit a response from the recipient. For a call-to-action to be effective, the customer's desire must be sufficiently strong to warrant an equally strong response. Therefore, if you are trying to grow your response rate exponentially, you will either have to increase the customer's desire, or you will have to make it easier for them to respond. The use of private URLs, PURLS, allows you to do both.

By using customized PURLS with your marketing piece, you can effectively increase the customer's desire AND make it much easier and more comfortable for them to respond to your call-to-action. Traditional marketing pieces require the customer to pick up the phone and talk to a live person or to get into their car and drive somewhere in order for them to respond to your call-to-action. With the advent of PURLS, the customer can now take a much more comfortable step, while you still maintain the ability to capture their information and allow them to identify themselves as "interested."

The PURLS Concept:

A PURL is the missing link between a great offer, and the customer's ability to identify him or herself as "interested" in your offer. The sales process cannot begin until a conversation between the salesperson and the potential customer begins, when you allow the customer to comfortably identify him or herself as "interested," the amount of conversations that take place grows exponentially. Imagine yourself standing in front of 10,000 people in a movie theater. A traditional call-to-action is similar to asking anybody who is interested to please come to the front of the theater. With this type of required action, only those who are enthusiastically interested will make their way out of their seat to join others at the front of the stage. While this is an effective way of determining who is interested, there are still hundreds of people in the theater who "may" be interested, but need more information first, or simply do not feel comfortable making their way to the front of the stage. This type of discomfort is especially common in industries known for hard sales tactics such as the automotive industry.

The adaptation of PURLS allows you to change your call-to-action to something that helps identify all of those people who have interest in your product. Using the same example, imagine if you were standing at the front of a theater and you were able to ask after your sales pitch, "Anybody who is interested, please raise your hand." The much simpler method of asking somebody to raise their hand will dramatically increase your participation rates. If you could then clear out all of the people who did not raise their hand and only speak to those who showed an interest, you would then have a captive audience in front of you. Knowing that everybody who remained in the theater was indeed somewhat interested in your product would then allow you to refine your message and begin a more detailed conversation with your audience.

By using a combination of handwritten personalization and technologically advanced personalization methods, PURLS allow you to provide a comfortable "next step" to those people who are interested in your offer. Instead of having to pick up the phone or drive to your location, your customers can now visit a private website to respond to your incentive. Their visit to this private website is a personalized conversation that not only gives you their information so you can immediately follow up with them, but it also allows them to take a more detailed look at what it is you are offering them.

The simple fact that they do not need to leave their home, they do not need to talk to a live person, and they do not need to commit to anything will dramatically increase the number of respondents your marketing piece receives. The concept is more powerful than just a website visit, because the website they are visiting is 100% personally customized to the specific customer. With their own name in the domain name and their name splashed on the page next to the word "Welcome," your customers are given a personal experience designed with their comfort in mind. The power of the PURL is the fact that their visit to the site allows the sales conversation to begin. Through the act of the customer claiming their incentive, your sales staff will be sent their information for a quick, personal follow-up, and you will instantly have access to the hundreds of people who have identified themselves as interested in a purchase in the near future. Good information is as good as cash when it is in the right hands, and PURLs provide you with great information.