All Forum Posts by: 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?

George Cox:

After 20 years, and the advent of the internet, I have yet to loose faith in direct mail. The single most common mistake marketers make is to buy a list, write a letter, send it out and wait for the phone to ring. It's a huge error that fills talk space with nonsense and anecdotes that can point you in opposite directions depending on who you talk to.

So before you give up on Direct Mail, let me make a couple of suggestions.

1. Don't be cheap. Plan on mailing not one, not two, not three but four pieces to the same list. It is a statistical fact that most consumers do not respond to the first touch. It sometimes takes as many as four touches before someone responds to your call to action.

2. Be prepared to quantify. Without exception, every business owner I've ever consulted for, has made the mistake of estimating the response to direct mail. I have yet to find a business owner who does direct mail and guesses about the results. On the contrary, the businesses who consistently use direct mail, know down to the penny how much postage is, and how much each resulting call has cost them.

3. Don't rely on just Direct mail. Integrate your methods. If your list includes phone numbers, send a piece that tells your audience to expect a phone call, and then call them. Or You can do something I've had incredible amount of success with and that's the use of PURLS (Personalize URL). This is a method in which you create a website using the name of your recipient. For example, if I'm sending a letter to Joe Blow, My letter reads - dear Joe, I've got great info for you. It's so awesome that I had to put it on your own website at www.website.com/JOE.BLOW. Now I not only know how many people are calling as a result of direct mail, I know who's visiting my website.

4. Don't make a decision based on one mailing. You should not expect much from your first mailing other than to provide a performance baseline. Once you know what your piece can do, then you can make decisions about tinkering and modifying things in a way that will improve your response rate.

The bottom line, is I've been doing this long enough to know that there are no shortcuts to success in direct mail. There is a right way and a wrong way. If you don't experience success in direct mail, there is usually something you can do about it. 9 times out of 10, it comes down to your budget, and how much "testing" or "learning" you are willing to go through with your particular list or piece.

I say keep at it. Quantify, and experiment, and integrate your strategies.

Good Luck.

Delayed responses like these are one of the things that has forced us to review the performance of some of our direct mail campaigns. Traditionally, we measure performance within the time frame that a campaign will run. But we've noticed enough calls from folks who say they held on to our piece for months before deciding to call, that we are discussing the merits of new campaigns knowing that we may not receive the action we are asking for right away.

Often times, text is hijacked for the simple reason that it is very easy to scrape text from one page to another. One thing you might consider doing is converting your add to a bitmap or jpeg image. So for instance, create your ad, take a quick screen capture of your ad the way you want it to appear, save that capture as a jpeg, then post the jpeg as your ad, instead of raw text.

This won't ensure people will stop stealing your copy, but it will force them to put more effort into copying it, then otherwise. I've found that just making things difficult for would-be plagiarists, keeps many of them away.

Shane,

If you want to find out what your real search rank is, try searching for a search rank checker like the one at mikes-marketing-tools. You plug in your url, and the term. It will return actual google, yahoo and bing rank.

As far as your search history "contaminating" your search results this is a simple fix. Simpley log into google, go into your account settings and turn off "web history". This tells google to stop "tailoring" search results to your previous click history.

Another tool, you can use is google's webmasters utility. Under queries, it lists the all of the search terms that google has listed your site. It also shows you the average position your site appears in search results for that term. This is a bit more crude, but it give you an idea of the what google thinks your site is relevant to right now.

Hey there.

Just a quick tip. You need to keep things as simple as possible. Which is a very difficult thing to do. Why? Because there are so many things you want to convey to the reader, and sometimes writing becomes an exercise in trying to cram all of those ideas into a simple letter.

Start by getting very basic. What is it that you want? What is it that you want them to do. Stick to those idea's and nothing more.

The other thing to remember is to couch things in terms of either getting pleasure, or avoiding pain. If you are really good, you can do both. Keep in mind, someone going through foreclosure is already experiencing a lot of pain, so instinct tells me that inviting them to some relief is the way to go.

Your assumption that they are motivated because they are only 2 weeks away from a sheriff sale is probably off. If someone is that close, chances are, they have probably already come to terms with the situation and have moved on to other problems/issues. Probably not really interested in revisiting a painful issue.

I would suggest respecting their situation by being direct and to the point. But also show some compassion. Consider the time of year and maybe there are things you can offer that might make selling to you a less painful process. For instance, you might mention that if you were to purchase their home, you would not require them to vacate until after the holidays.

At the end of the day, keep it simple, and brief. You have only one call to action that is important. You want them to call you, not their lender, not their broker. No one else. If they do anything as a result of your letter, you want them to dial your number. If you can make the call to you a relieving and pleasurable one, that is your best shot.

Hi Marcus,

I might be a little biased having grown up in Arizona, but I would say phoenix is an excellent place for real estate investment. As you know, the market is dynamic. Right now, it's a "perfect storm". For our business model, we have focused on north & north west phoenix, but a deal is a deal and they can be found all over the valley. It really has more to do with your particular goals. The more clear you make your goals, the easier it is to find the right property to match up with.