Will the Real Personalized URL Please Stand Up?

Do you think personalized URLs are the hottest things in marketing? The answer probably depends on whether you are a creative, a marketer, or a print provider. I've spent quite a bit of time over the last few months in the social media channels, taking the pulse on personalized URLs from different segments. It's been fascinating to see just how differently these applications are perceived on different sides of the fence.

What's also interesting is the number of misperceptions about personalized URLs floating around. In this column, I'd like to address a specific misperception that I've been seeing a lot lately. This is the mis-use of the term "personalized URL" itself, which is creating a lot of confusion and misinformation.

PURLs on Billboards?

One of the pieces of conventional wisdom circulating out there is that personalized URLs can be printed on billboards, point-of-sale materials, print advertisements, and other static media, as well as direct mail.

This is a bit of a head-scratcher for me. By definition, personalized URLs are unique URLs pre-generated for each recipient, whether in print or in email. These URLs take recipients to corresponding pre-generated Internet landing pages that can be personalized with the recipients' names, demographic information, or anything else that might exist in the marketer's database. These mini-sites generally have a four-page structure: landing page, survey page, information page (which may or may not be personalized based on information gathered on the survey page), and thank you page. It's a self-contained architecture unique to these applications.

These mini-sites cannot be created from static URLs. Technically, it might be possible to create something similar based on the visitor's IP address once he or she lands on the specified Web page, but that's certainly not recommended for a variety of marketing reasons, not to mention ethical ones.

What some marketers have called "personalized URLs" are really sites that are personalized for the recipient based on information input by the recipients themselves once they've landed on the designated page. Visitors might be sent to this page from a static medium, such as billboard, print advertisement, or point-of-sale display, and once there, they might choose to input their name, interests, or other demographic information so that subsequent pages can be personalized to them.

These are not personalized URLs, however, since the URL itself is generic. They are sites that are user-personalizable.

A similar application is to include a data acquisition form to gather personal and demographic information on site visitors that can be collected and used for targeting later.

Another mis-use of the term "personalized URL" seems to be for response tracking. Marketers may be using the term "personalized URL," but they are really creating multiple landing pages for tracking different media and messages within the same campaign. They might be creating separate landing pages, say, for a television ad, a billboard, and point-of-sale materials—and each medium might have multiple landing pages for different geographic locations, different messages, or to test other elements of a campaign. But these are tracking URLs, not personalized URLs.

Why Pay the Premium?

The option to personalize website content and gather visitor information through data-acquisition forms from generic landing pages seems to be particularly compelling to marketers. Why spend the premium and per-click charge for personalized URLs when you can use a broadcast medium like banner ads, direct mail, or newspaper ads to drive traffic to a website, where the same information can be collected?

The answer is, it depends on your marketing goals.

Personalized URLs are not a broadcast medium. Nor, for the most part, are they designed to be driven by a detailed customer or prospect database. Rather, they enable marketers to begin a dialog with a well-defined target audience. Often, this audience is their own customer base or a prospect base that mirrors their existing or desired customer profile. The goal of the campaign may not be to sell something immediately. It may be to solicit information or begin a dialog that will be used to target communications in the future.

Let's look at three "typical" campaigns that are representative of this approach:

A regional theater wanted to increase its membership base, so it developed an "ideal" patron profile and purchased the appropriate list. Next, it asked respondents to log into a personalized URL to provide information on their favorite types of theater productions in exchange for entry into a sweepstakes to win free theater tickets. At the end of the campaign, it had a very pre-qualified list of prospects for future direct mailings, plus email addresses to drive down the cost of future contacts.

A marketer wanted to pre-qualify its in-house prospect list to be more effective in its sales presentations. It created a personalized URL campaign that offered recipients a free gift. In order to receive the gift, visitors had to log into their personalized URLs to complete a survey, which asked them to identify the most critical pain points in their businesses. With this information, the marketer's follow-up team was able to such powerful sales presentations that ultimately resulted in a 73.9 percent conversion rate.

A software company had grown through acquisition and was concerned that its customers were unaware of the full range of its product offerings. To improve its cross-sell opportunities, the company created a personalized URL program that brought together all aspects of its business, targeted its existing customers, and used the campaign to educate its existing customers about relevant products. Respondents' answers to the survey triggered the appropriate cross-sell products on the subsequent page.

This is where personalized URLs shine. They aren't competitors to forms of mass marketing. They are targeted solutions for achieving specific marketing goals.

Still, it's important to keep in mind the other models, as well. Response tracking URLs, acquisition forms, and sites with user-personalizable content are terrific applications.

Understanding the benefits and value of each is an important part of building your marketing tool set. It's simply important to understand that they are different applications from personalized URLs and meet different marketing goals.

Heidi Tolliver-Nigro is an industry writer, an analyst specializing in digital workflow and technologies. Her e-mail address is htollvr@aol.com.