Marketing with PURLs (part 2 of 3)

By Mike Capuzzi | January 31, 2013 |

In part 1 of this series (https://mikecapuzzi.com/marketing-with-purls-1) I gave you some background on why marketing with PURLs is a smart technique for all businesses. PURL marketing allows you to create personalized marketing for direct mail and email campaigns and I cannot imagine any type of business owner not being able to add PURLs to their marketing toolkit. In part 2 of this series on PURL marketing, I am going to share with you the first five types of marketing that’s perfect for PURL marketing.

#1: Getting Feedback

A PURL campaign is the perfect tool to get specific feedback from your customers, clients, patrons or even prospects. You can use that information in a few ways:

Ensure that you’re providing the best product or service you can, and address global customer concerns on an ongoing basis
Gather social proof (or testimonials) and data that you can use in your future marketing
Follow up with your customers with ultra-targeted campaigns based on their responses

For instance, If you own a pest-control company, you can use a PURL like,

John-Doe.ABCPest.WantsYourFeedback.com

to follow up with your clients after a treatment appointment. When the recipient, John in this case, visits his PURL, you could have some thank you copy and a feedback form that asks them if they’ve seen a decrease in their pests, whether they’ve followed your advice on maintenance, and if they would recommend your service to a friend. You could also give them a gift for filling this out!

#2: Offering a Gift or Discount

Offering gifts or discounts with PURLs is easy and it’s a great way to add a little “pizzazz” to your marketing message. When you use PURLs, you can enhance the one-to-one marketing message that makes personalization so effective. Your customer will think that this discount is ONLY for them!

If you own a restaurant, for example, you could send your customers an e-mail that offers them a gift certificate on their next meal if they respond within a certain time-frame. You could send them to a PURL that will allow them to print out their certificate and instruct them to bring it in the next time they visit. That certificate would be personalized, so you’ll be able to see which segment of your customers brought in their certificate and which didn’t.

Want to see an example of what this could look like? Enter your first name in the form below:

#3: Holiday Marketing

Using PURL marketing around holidays is a great way to add some fun and stand-out power to your promotions. By creating a Simple PURL domain that’s generic, like mike-capuzzi.com, and using our unique “Simple Modifiers”, I can send out periodic PURL campaigns around holidays like this:

Lisa.GetYourChristmasGiftFrom.Mike-Capuzzi.com

Lori.DownloadThisHalloweenSurpriseFrom.Mike-Capuzzi.com

Want to see a corny example I just created? Go ahead and type in your first name in the form below.

#4: Contests

A contest is a great way to encourage interaction from your customer or prospect list with your business. When you use PURLs to run your contest, you’re able to prepare a follow-up sequence that will ensure the additional traffic stays engaged with your business, rather than dropping off immediately after the contest is over.

If you run an auto repair shop, for example, you could run a contest inviting your list of prospects to tell their biggest car-related horror story, and they could win a years’ worth of free oil changes.

Not only will you have generated some great stories to use in your marketing (perhaps even social media) but you will also now be able to follow up with your list and offer them a discount on services in the future. You can use their horror stories to tailor messages to them and explain how your shop is different than others that they may have experienced in the past.

#5: Lost Customer Reactivation

There are general guidelines on which segments of your list are going to be the most responsive, and lost customers rank just below Current Customers and Referrals on that list. That’s because they’ve already shown that they have a need or want for your product or service and that they’re willing to pay you to meet that need for them.

If you own a company that provides on-call tech support for a monthly fee, for instance, you can use a PURL that might look something like this:

John-Smith.WeWantYouBack.com

to convince previous members of your support plan to let them know you miss working with them and to ask them to give you another chance. (As an aside the domain wewantyouback.com is up for auction from GoDaddy and the opening bid is $60.00).

You can send them a letter in the mail letting them know that you’ve expanded your offerings and inviting them to check out their PURL to find out what’s new that you can do for them.

One important strategy when creating any of these campaigns is to craft the copy and design to entice the recipient to take further action. This means eye-grabbing design and an irresistible offer to get them to take action now.

In the next part of this series, I will review a few additional types of PURL marketing campaigns you can be using to boost response.

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The Simple PURL system is the easiest-to-use PURL system in the world. It was designed to be used by time-crunched business owners and entrepreneurs who want to tap into the power of personalized marketing. Visit www.SimplePurls.com for more information.