Don’t sell PURLs!

Tweet This discussion is directed to anyone who thinks they are in a position to “wow” their prospect with an offer to increase results with increased response rates generated by the introduction of personalized URLs (PURLs) in their next campaign. Though the technology is nothing new, we are seeing a greater interest in this service as more publicity of its merits is exposed. For purely selfish reasons the time has come for me to offer these folks my advice…“Don’t sell PURLs”!

You see, at AccuLink we specialize in highly personalized communications and I find myself spending a lot of my time educating others about the benefit of PURLs and how they fit inside a well thought out campaign. Many of my customers are value added resellers who want desperately to be the first to introduce their customers to this new technology. Crazy as it may sound, I find myself discouraging them from selling PURLs more often than not. Let me explain with a simple analogy.

We all know that baseball, like any competitive sport, involves much more than luck to win consistently throughout a season. Championship teams begin with strong coaching, hard work, talented players, thoughtful execution, good timing and practice, practice, practice to name a few. Now in the game of business I equate a PURL with a catcher’s mitt. The ball is the data and all the other aspects of the game are no different than the considerations one must consider in a marketing campaign. Examples of those ingredients include data research, strategic objectives, target audience, relevant messages, powerful incentives, strong call to action, appealing design, timing, ample budget, testing, and follow up (the list can go on).
My intention here is to point out that a salesman is misguided if he focuses on selling a team owner on the idea that a catcher’s mitt product will bring that team a championship trophy. I would argue he may sell his product once but he is risking that relationship if he does not address the other ingredients to the team’s potential victory. A successful marketing campaign is no different.

The moral of the story is to understand where a PURL resides in a campaign. Focus on ALL the ingredients and when you get to the point in a discussion where your client agrees that there is a need to capture more information within the campaign than you started with…well THAT is when the PURL discussion begins and it will sell itself!