Why Personalisation Might Not Be The Keyword When It Comes To Purls
This Image below is what we have in mind when we think Personalised URLs, right?
But what if we told you that there is a more efficient way to capture your leads interest?
Yes, it is tempting to see your name in a URL you receive but at the same time it might be confusing or creepy… Think of it, it’s like an account although you didn’t set one up. Which is why you can take a much more subtle approach to allow a similar level of relevance without spooking potential customers.
If we look at this one instead:
Yes, it also greets people by name but it doesn’t strictly stick to the colours of their company (which can be a good approach too to reinforce your logo) but goes out of its way to make people feel more comfortable without letting them know they collected the information ‘Favourite Colour’. By now people are rather hesitant with giving out information if they don’t receive something they really want in return.
Of course having the customer’s name in the URL isn’t generally a bad thing and it works particularly well for social media accounts as we can see in this example and as most of us are familiar with.
But we do not want to strive to social media in this post. We were talking about PURls and how we can use them more efficiently. Most marketers are so focused on a degree of personalisation that they forget it is about the offer initially. The website can be greeting you by name, have your name in the URL and display your favourite colours.. If the offer is irrelevant it won’t matter, the lead is not going to purchase anything.
Now let’s take something else into account: In the picture above we have John, Colleen and Robert and their favourite colours. But what about all the people that have blue as their favourite colour in common? If you don’t consider the names, that is an easy way to minimise the effort and bring the amount of microsites that you have to create down and therefore minimise the costs as well. Because that is still one of the most relevant problems with PURLs: They are rather expensive and take a lot of time to create.
And there is something else about this campaign:
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Each of them is approached with a different offer that matches their favourite sports and that is the most relevant when it comes to PURLs. The overall image has to fit, in that case this consists of their name, their favourite colour and their favourite sport. Those are only three pieces of information and yet they can easily help you to make offers that are specifically targeted and will therefore have a higher response rate. To back this up with some numbers: PODI.org has researched that relevant campaigns generate a 300% higher response rate!
Perhaps we shouldn’t call it Personalised URLs but Relevant URls instead… 
Which brings us to the last aspect that is also hidden in the picture. Can you guess what it is?
Don’t worry, we’ll help. These are displayed on three different devices. If you think about it, that’s a level of personalisation as well. The choice which device you will use to check your mails or visit websites. Therefore it is very important for PURLs to work on mobile and tablet as well. Nothing will turn people off more than a website that doesn’t work, they will leave your page and it’s not very probable that you’ll see them again. This is drifting off the actual content of PURLs but it is so important that we decided to include it anyway. So think practical and logical what will actually help people purchasing instead of trying to display as much information as you have – which leads us back to the “creep fact”.
In case you want to take a step back and remember why you should even use PURLs in the first place [Below] you can have a look at the impact it will have on your marketing strategies.
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