The goal is to track and quantify your direct mail piece. Gather critical information from your potential clients by presenting them with customized variable data personal URLs tailored to them. Report and export the activity for your direct mail campaign to Excel for use in following leads and also for generating subsequent targeted campaigns

Step 1 – Create campaign piece

Your direct mail piece will be created the same way as you do now. Whether that be by your own designers or an outside firm, this process will remain the same. The one thing to plan for is a personal URL to be placed somewhere in the piece. Make it prominent and try to build a call to action around it by offering something if the pURL is visited.

Step 2 – Prepare your mailing list

Your mailing list will be prepared as you do it today. The mailing list will contain standard name and address information. But now, with a pURL generator, you have the power to enhance this list to leverage it within your landing pages. Add in new variable data columns that can be used to personalize landing pages even further.

For example: A car dealer has information on past clients car year, model and color. Their mailing list might look like this:

Step 3 – Build a landing page template

Within your pURL providers application navigate to the template manager area. It is here you will build the landing page that will present your clients with variable data, survey questions, data gathering forms, coupons, etc. A good template editor will give you all the tools you need to quickly create an effective landing page template.

In our car dealer example above, we might build a simple template that looks like this:

Hi %First_Name% %Last_Name%, Your %Year% %Model% vehicle is due for maintenance. Print the following coupon and bring in to our shop for 20% off service %Coupon_Code%

By mapping your data into our known fields, a sample landing page would look like this:

Hi Joe Smith, Your 1994 Ford Explorer vehicle is due for maintenance. Print the following coupon and bring in to our shop for 20% off service BNG-1234

Step 4 – Create your pURL campaign

Once you have your mailing list and template for your landing page pURLs, you are ready to create your campaign. Do this by navigating to your pURL application’s campaign creator or wizard. This portion of the application will walk you through the process of setting up a pURL campaign. Once complete, you will be presented with a modified mailing list file you can download. This modified file will contain all your mailing list data as well as a new column for pURLs. This new mailing list file is sent to your print provider as you normally would with your mailing list. A sample landing page might look something like this www.boingnet.com/MyGig/Phil_Jones

Step 5 – Send your mailing and wait!

Depending on your provider, one of the steps in the campaign creation creation should you to be notified on pURL activity with email alerts. This is a great way to keep you finger on the pulse of your campaign. During the campaign run, you can also login to the admin tool and run a variety of reports on this campaign as well as past campaigns.

Step 6 – Analyze your results

Once the campaign is complete, you can run complete reports and charts and analyze how well the campaign did. Detailed data reports will show you the actual form information submitted based on what you developed for a landing page. This data can also be downloaded to be used for lead generation and also in planning and building subsequent campaigns