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Don’t Let Mistakes with Personalized URLs Blow Up a Perfectly Good Marketing Campaign
By Wrich Printz and Ryan Lou
One of the jobs of any marketing professional is to make sure that the explosions generated by a marketing campaign are controlled and kept to a minimum. Everyone wants an “explosion of customer interest”, but no one wants a “firestorm of customer complaints” or an “eruption of angry salespeople” that you may get when adopting a process and technology that is new, or untested to your specific market.
Over the last few years, personalized URLs have been hailed as the “big bang” of direct marketing. With personalized URLs, you give users the impression that you created the entire marketing campaign just for them. After sending the direct mail or email campaign with the recipient’s personalized URL splashed in big font across the marketing piece, the marketer sits back expecting a tremendous response to the campaign, but the only loud noise you hear is the growling stomachs of a sales department hungry for real leads.
Many marketers have been in this situation. They’ve seen the statistics and they’ve heard the vendor pitches; ‘personalized URLs boost response by 30%’, so what went wrong?
In most cases, the strategy for using personalized URL marketing was lacking. Industry analyst Heidi Tolliver-Nigro recently talked about this on her blog:
“I think one of the reasons so many personalized URL applications bomb is because there isn’t enough thought put into how well the offer is matched to the recipient, whether it’s relevant to the recipient, and whether personalized URLs are the right response mechanism for this campaign in the first place.”
From “Guaranteeing the Success of Personalized URLs” – The Digital Nirvana
4 Explosively Bad Personalized URL Marketing Mistakes
1) The Creepy Factor
The most common mistake marketers make is to include too much personalization. This can lead to the ‘creepy factor’, where in trying to make the campaign relevant to the recipient, the marketer inevitably uses too much personal information about the customer.
Imagine receiving a postcard or email with a campaign message like this.
John,
Sick of the Green Toyota Camry you bought on the 15th of November, 2004?
Isn’t it time for you to use your $11,500 monthly income to buy that new Toyota Prius you know you and your wife Jane would love to show off at 121 El Camino Real?
What to do instead? Be subtle. Use a dynamic image similar to the customer’s car, and specific images that relate to the information you have collected about this customer without dynamiting them with over the head specifics.
2) Relying too much on the URL
Many marketers still rely too much on the URL to do the legwork in their personalized marketing campaign. This was perhaps acceptable, even recommended, a year or two ago, when having the recipient’s first and last name on the URL was a novelty, but that ship has sailed.
Now, continuing to get the massive response from a personalized marketing campaign goes beyond focusing on the URL. It involves creating a strategy for two-way conversations with the customer.
3) Using Personalized URLs as the only Explosive Element
Personalized marketing is as much about the landing page as it is the initial postcard or email message. It is not just about displaying the person’s first name prominently on the landing page, it is also about customizing each individual’s experience with the campaign using messages, creative, offers and interaction that is relevant to their preferences. Knock their socks off with choices they can use to make better buying decisions.
Amazon sets a good example of how you can use data you have of the individual to provide content that is relevant. Using data to drive relevant campaigns improves the customer experience and encourages them to purchase from you again and again.
The beauty of personalized URLs is also in the interaction and feedback mechanisms you can use to continue the conversation. They allow you to quickly adapt your analysis of the individual’s preferences based on how they interact with your campaign.
4) Keeping the Same Marketing Mix, When you Need to Blow the Budget Up!
A study from Aberdeen Research, ‘Recessionary Marketing: How Best-in-Class Companies are Weathering the Storm’, surveyed marketers to find out how their allocation of marketing resources have changed due to the economic gloom.
They found that instead of cutting their marketing spend across all marketing channels, marketers were reallocating these resources from traditional media to new media and investment in technology.
Of the 250 marketers surveyed, 60 percent cut television and print advertising, 45 percent cut trade promotion and 62 percent cut their event budgets. Together with this cut in traditional media spending, the marketers also said they increased investment in marketing technology, 68 percent increased spending to enable social media, 47 percent to improve email marketing, 41 percent for online promotions and 38 percent for search engine marketing and 16 percent for mobile marketing.
These marketers reacted to smaller marketing budgets by focusing on the technology or channels that had an impact on the bottom-line. Similarly, with personalized URLs you need a strategy that focuses on using personalized URL technology to sell the right products to each customer.
Part II.
A Guide for Safer Marketing Explosions
How to use personalized URLs without losing any limbs in the process.
The best way to think of personalized URLs is to see it as data-driven intelligence. Rather than splash all the information you have of the prospect to ‘show you know them personally’, you should be analyzing the data to make each campaign relevant.
For example, if you run a cafe and you know a particular customer only buys coffee from you, send them a coupon delivered via the personalized URL for coffee. If they drink tea, send them a coupon for tea. Offer them what they want, and they are far more likely to buy it from you. Personalized 1:1 marketing is really that simple.
After all those years in the data mine, what if you still don’t know your customer?
One of the stand-out reasons to use personalized URLs is that you can collect information from the prospect through surveys or interactive elements and immediately use that to customize the campaign, creative or offer to the recipient.
On top of that, you’ll also have the ability to track who responded and what they did on the personalized URL. With this information you can narrow a list down, through a lead scoring system, to the 20% or so that are most likely to buy from you and focus your subsequent marketing efforts on these people. This would allow you to create personalized direct mail follow-up, involve sales in a timely manner or even send better offers to this group of likely purchasers.
It’s more than just a way to make big chunks of rock, it’s a way to get to customer gold.
Some marketers view the personalized URL as a form to capture information. They forget that the personalized URL is the key to a continuing relationship. The personalized URL should act on the call-to-action in the email or direct mail piece. For example, if you sent the prospect to the personalized URL to find out more about a new car. Then the personalized URL could have the technical specifics, the benefits of owning the car, which element of the car they can customize or even the opportunity to customize a graphic of them driving the car depending on which interests them most.
The interaction with your product or brand makes your campaign more valuable to the recipient and increases the likelihood of them buying from you. Yes, you’ll probably still throw in a contact form somewhere in the application but only to make it easier for the prospect to respond after you have already provided them with value.
How do I use personalized URLs in a way that is good for me, great for my customer and safe for the environment?
This perhaps is the classic question of personalized URL marketing. Really, the number of ways to use personalized URL technology is endless and will depend on the objective of the campaign. A holiday application for example, would allow you to create a personalized holiday greeting using viral marketing tools. A more direct ‘buy now’ campaign would use personalized coupons, contact forms or even a survey with sales notifications triggered by response to the campaign. A campaign to improve brand relationship or brand awareness could involve a personalized flash game or flash video, a personalized PDF or poster for download, or even a contest.
With personalized URLs you have all these tools in your arsenal to ensure you create interaction with the customer that is aligned with the bottom-line.
Join the Bomb Squad
For more fail-safe personalized URL marketing strategies, join the bomb squad at www.L2soft.com or www.BetterResponseBlog.com or download the personalized URL strategy guide at http://PurlStrategy.L2soft.com
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