Clicks Internet Marketing Magazine for Small Business Clicks Magazine 32 | Page 16

Variable Data Printing Personalized URLs
Did you know that there are printers who will seg-
ment mailers into small batches to print person-
alized information on mailers? It’s called variable
data printing and it’s one way to bring information
you gather digitally into your prospects’ homes. One of the coolest ways to bring your direct
mail campaigns into the digital age is to give
customers a personalized URL (PURL). When
they enter it in their browser, it directs them
to a special page that you’ve created for your
campaign.
You can choose to print mailers based on users’
geographical information. For example, if you
were targeting a nationwide audience, you might
do a different mailer for each state featuring an
iconic image like the Empire State Building for
New York or the Everglades for Florida.
If you wanted to get more specific than that,
you could even produce postcards that showed
customers in your local area how to get to your
store from their neighborhood.
Alternatives might be based on customers’ previ-
ous buying habits or their ages. You can get cre-
ative with it and give your direct mail pieces the
kind of personal touch that translates into sales.
What makes the page personalized is that the
PURL you create incorporates their name. It
might look like this:
www.yourcompanyname.com/customername
The benefits here are two-fold. First, your
customer feels that you have reached out
directly to them, and that increases the chances
that they will visit the website and check it
out. Second, it gives you the opportunity to
determine exactly who has responded to your
mailer – and you can use that information to
follow up based on the actions they take once
they visit the Personalized URL.