Maximize Direct Mail ROI with pURL Direct Mail Marketing

There’s one thing all marketers agree on – personalization drives success. pURL direct mail marketing is a time tested way of introducing personalization that spans physical and digital channels.

Previously, making your direct mail campaigns personalized was time and resource heavy. But with the arrival of direct mail tools, it can now be achieved in a few minutes at no added cost. 

Enter the hero of our article: personalized URLs. 

pURLs are a great way to make your recipients feel special and motivate them to take the desired action. But what exactly does a pURL mean? How can you utilize them in your campaigns? And what are the pURL direct mail marketing best practices? 

Let’s find out.

How Do pURLs Work? 

A pURL is a unique web address that targets a specific customer. This personalized URL is printed on a direct mail piece to help track the online activity and response of the recipients. 

These personalized landing pages can have any number of customizations in them. For example, you can display the recipient’s and company’s names, personalize the image for different target customers, display the charity amount or form depending on the recipient’s past behaviors or actions, etc. 

The best part about these URLs is that you can track each individual’s actions and gain unique insights on how you can optimize, iterate, and take things forward. 

What is pURL Marketing? 

pURL marketing involves using personalized URLs on any marketing channel that will bring the viewer/recipient to a personalized landing page when they click, type, or scan the URL. 

Typically these URLs are found on direct mail like postcards, letters, event invites and brochures. pURL marketing allows your team to become very creative as you can optimize your landing pages to feel specially made for the recipient and evoke purchases or conversions.

Direct mail tools like Postalytics can create and deploy these pURLs in a few minutes without any manual effort, even if you’re creating a direct mail campaign for hundreds or thousands of people. 

What are pURL Direct Mail Benefits and Why You Should Use Them 

Many companies are now looking for ways to personalize different aspects of their marketing campaigns. In such a scenario, pURLs could greatly diversify your personalization efforts and bring better results. Here are four key reasons for using pURLs in your direct mail campaigns. 

Improved ROI 

How often did you have trouble finding the ROI for your direct mail campaigns? If your answer is “many times,” pURLs can be a solution. Using pURLs, marketers can see which direct mail pieces generate the most traffic and conversions. This enables them to focus on the most effective campaigns and achieve a higher ROI. 

Easy Integration 

Most businesses use multiple marketing strategies like email marketing, SMS marketing, and social media marketing. You can easily integrate pURLs in all your marketing campaigns, maintaining consistency in messaging. By personalizing different marketing initiatives, you can see increased campaign effectiveness.  

Enhanced Engagement 

Can you remember the last time you took action on an offer sent to you via direct mail or email? Was it because the offer was quite relevant to you? Probably yes. That’s why pURLs with effective targeting work great. Because this personalization helps the recipients access information and offers that are highly relevant to them. This automatically increases engagement. 

Tracking  

Without tracking your direct mail campaigns, you can keep making the same mistakes repeatedly or fail to optimize your campaigns to bring better results. With pURLs, you can easily track the recipients who take action on your CTAs and keep an eye on their online activity when they click on your URL. This data highlights the campaigns bringing the most visitors to your landing pages.  

How to Create pURLs in Direct Mail Marketing 

You can easily generate pURLs within minutes in Postalytics at no additional cost. 

Below are five steps to get started with pURLs in the platform. 

1. Get a domain to host your pURLs. This domain will get printed on your mailer and support each unique URL generated on Postalytics. You can easily purchase a custom domain from within Postalytics or use a free, shared domain.
2. Drop the Postalytics tracking code into the HTML of your landing page or website. You can access this code from the “Integrations” menu selection beneath your username. Ensure that the full tracking code appears in the page’s source code.
3. Insert the pURL variable into your creative. You can do this in Postalytics direct mail editor.

4. Choose pURL format in the campaign wizard. There are two formats you can use:

• Friendly URL string

– Random URL string 

Here’s a quick video on how you can format your pURLs. 

Embed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmkHHAcW2q8  

5. Test your pURLs using the test mode in Postalytics. This mode lets you download and test your URLs to ensure they function properly.

Best Practices to Improve Your pURL Direct Mail Strategy 

You can use pURLs for a number of reasons, but to make them effective, here are seven best practices you can adopt. 

Verify Your Data Accuracy 

Personalization is great. But what if you address the direct mail piece to the wrong name? This could hurt your campaign’s success. The recipient would even go on to not read your future mail pieces. That’s why it’s important to have accurate data regarding name, address, and other vital details. 

You can either manually check these records regularly to ward off incomplete, out-of-date, and duplicate records or use a direct mail automation tool like Postalytics to get the work done for you. 

Define Your Objectives 

Your objective will help your team make the right design decisions for the landing page. For example, suppose you want to get a donation via your pURL. In that case, you need to emphasize the cause of the donation, use persuasive copy, and include imagery that motivates the recipient to take action. 

You can even give little information in your direct mail piece and evoke enough curiosity for the recipient to access the pURL and get more details. 

Make your direct mail pURLs attention-grabbing 

Many businesses make the mistake of adding the pURL in their direct mail piece but not adding a CTA next to it or a description of what the URL holds for them. 

After all, nobody would like to act on something unless they are given a good enough reason.  

For example, adding, “Hey Mark, visit xyz.com to unlock an exciting offer just for you,” encourages Mark to at least open the URL and see what this offer is. 

Personalize your offers on your landing pages 

Personalization makes your customers feel special and more inclined to act on your CTAs if the offers are relevant to them. 

Using the Postalytics landing page personalization tools, you can easily personalize not only your direct mail pieces, but also your landing pages with demographic, purchase, and behavioral data.  

You can even create triggered drip campaigns if you need to send more mails to get a better response with your personalization and segmentation strategy. 

Monitor and learn from your campaign 

It’s not enough to get metrics for your campaign. You also need to analyze these metrics and dive deep into the elements working in your campaigns and how to optimize them further. 

This process becomes easier when using a pURL as you can track every action once your recipient lands on your website or landing page. For example, you can track actions like their responses, the CTA they clicked on, the pages they visited, when and how long they were there, etc.

This will give you valuable insights into what works for your direct mail campaigns. 

Automate trigger responses 

Once the customers have responded to your pURLs, you must trigger responses like: 

• Thank them for visiting the website/landing page
• Confirm their actions, like making a purchase, completing a form, etc.
• Provide follow-up information in the form of a mail, download link, etc.
• Follow up with another offer
• Encourage them to tell others about this offer or your brand on social channels

These triggers are created to confirm your user’s actions and build confidence in your brand. 

Continuously test and optimize your strategy 

Testing your direct mail campaigns is essential to replicating more successes and improving your mistakes. 

With pURLs, this becomes easier as tracking happens quickly and effectively. You can even use A/B testing to gather analytics on the personalization elements, imagery, headings, and offers that work the best. 

Based on these results, you can refine your strategy and experiment with different elements to see the campaigns that hit the right chords with your customers. 

pURL Direct Mail Final Thoughts 

pURL direct mail marketing can help make your campaigns effective and increase conversions. There’s scope to make these campaigns more creative and engaging using different customization and personalization options. 

With Postalytics, you can create, deploy and track your direct mail campaigns and pURLs without manual effort. 

Get started with your free trial to learn more about the platform.