punctuative! by Matt Winn

YOUR NAME HERE … ?, originally uploaded by tejana

At DrJays, I used to champion the merits of personalization.  Whatever we could do to dynamically adjust a page to fit a visitor’s stated, or probablistic, preferences, I’d recommend we pursue.  Why show winter coats to a visitor whose IP address placed her in Hawaii?  If a repeat customer had bought Rocawear day in and day out, why not direct them right to the Rocawear sub-shop, then upsell them on items that Rocawear purchasers often bought?  As a young company, we stuck to our knitting with mainly online advertising, emails, and a smattering of print ads.  No direct mail.  

It was, then, with significant interest that I heard mention today of PURLs, or personalized URLs (websites), not to be confused with persistent uniform resource locators.  Apparently, personalized URLs have been around for a while, pioneered by a venture-backed company called Nimblefish out of San Francisco to better integrate offline marketing campaigns with online results.  Picture receiving a custom postcard-sized mailing pointing one to a website customized specifically for you (e.g. puctuative.com/yournamehere).  Direct mail databases usually hold a host of information on individuals - plenty with which to customize a page and more appropriately target a message.  And digital printing technology enables large-scale “runs of one” (unique postcards).  As online marketers work hard to build landing pages meant to extract information from a visitor for future correspondence or to drive a transaction, PURLs apparently work.  Consider the following case study from HP’s website:

For example, when a leading travel firm wanted to reach its
top customers with new travel opportunities, Nimblefish
put imagery from each customer’s previous trips into both
the direct mail piece and a PURL™ – activated Flash
web-response page, along with customized messaging
about upcoming trips that matched their interests. The result?
Response rates – and revenues – were doubled.

On the other hand, I always ran into the “big brother” debate when arguing the case for personalization.  Don’t people get “creeped out” by blatant targeting?  Probably, but I’ll choose relevance any day of the week.  Personal data is out there and folks are smart enough to know it.  I’m more interested in figuring out why PURLs haven’t become a more mainstream marketing technique and I’ll bet the answer is expense (both digital printing and effective PURL generation) which likely relegates the service to select sales, largely B2B.  If anyone knows more about advertising PURLs, I’m all ears.