First things first, what is PURL?
PURL stands for Personalised URL and it is here to take your DM (Direct Mail) marketing to the next level.
By adding PURLs to your DM Marketing Campaigns, your links will automatically take your prospect/customer to a completely personalised landing page (all custom filled by Kulea of course)
PURL functionality enables continuity of personalisation between off and online marketing materials, providing your prospect/customer with a much more interesting and engaging experience.
Even more exciting is that by clicking a PURL link, Kulea drops a tracking cookie on the user's browser, enabling you to track the success of your offline DM Campaigns AND even respond to offline events when actions have or have not been completed by the prospect/customer!
Ok, so how do I do this in Kulea?
Here is our guide, followed by a wonderful video demonstration by Andrew...
*Disclaimer- Purl is an advanced piece of functionality, the Kulea parts are of course a doddle, however it does take some external configuration... if you have a resident developer that’s cool, or if you’re using WordPress you can enable this functionality with a redirection plugin, but if you need extra help please contact us for development options*
Getting set up:
First of all, you will have your webpage, in this demonstration we will use our own Kulea.ma
Within WordPress we have added an iFrame with the personalisation we want to show, as an unknown visitor, it reads like a generic message:
(You may of course use a different website builder and text editor)
In this example, we've simply dropped a Kulea block into an existing page (it's then bit with text followed by the smily face), however, there's no reason why you can't embed an entire Kulea landing page into your iframe, and set the iframe height and width to 100% on your page.
Back in your Kulea account, you will need to set up a campaign (it will not send the campaign, but this is where PURL lives). PURL is not switched on by default, so if you wish to activate it in your account, please speak with your account manager.
Step 1)
You will need to select an email to get started, you don’t have to send that email, however we do recommend you follow up your DM with an email (you can even embed your personalised URL into your content to encourage higher open/click through rates)
Step 2)
Insert your welcome domain in the box provided, you don’t need any https or http (for example: kulea.ma)
*it does not have to be your homepage, it could be any domain you have set up for a particular campaign.
Step 3)
Select the contacts in your database that you want it to go to. You can apply specific filters during step 3 of the campaign builder.
Step 4)
Now you generate your DM campaign (Don’t worry, it will not send it at this stage!)
You then get 4 options:
Delete:
This will delete the whole thing.
Send:
This will send out the email campaign selected.
Mail Merge:
This will download an Excel spreadsheet for you to send to a print house or a word document mailmerge for your own print marketing.
This file contains all of the data you hold on the customer, such as Forename, Surname, Salutation, Address 1 etc, and this is also where we have generated the PURL links for you!
The PURL link is created from the Forename, Surname and Salutation of the customer.
DON’T PANIC
Purls are unique and If you are sending this out to a large database, chances are you’re going to have quite a few duplicate Salutation and Surnames (I’m talking to you Mr John Smith) but don’t fear, our PURL engine is built on a set of rules that will keep them all unique... for example:
John.Smith
JohnSmith
JSmith
JohnS
MrJohnSmith
etc. etc.
There are hundreds of possibilities, and rest assured, each contact will be issued with a completely unique PURL
htaccess:
This downloads a text file which contains a series of rules that your server needs to follow if a specific person visits their PURL.
In our example:
1) It is a redirect rule (eg: Redirect 301)
2) Anyone that goes to the url (eg: kulea.ma/AndrewNicholson)
3) Will be redirected to a specific Kulea page
4) Kulea then takes over and reads that link, drops the appropriate cookie for tracking and then forwards that individual straight to your welcome url (normally a campisgn domain or your homepage)
Save your htaccess Text file to your desktop as you need it for step 5...
Step 5)
What you now need to do is put that information onto your server.
Send it the Dev... OR, if you are using WordPress, you can do the following:
Download a redirect plugin (we used one called redirection)
Find your plugin in Tools
Click Import/Export
Upload the text file (all your redirects)
(You can view these using the blue view button)
Step 6)
It is live and ready to go!
What happens now is when your recipient goes on the PURL link you’ve directly sent them (created in your mail merge document), Kulea will do it’s ‘thang’ and redirect the recipient to your desired page with the personalised experience you want, just for them!
There you have it...
A completely personalised Direct Mail campaign set up with cookie tracking too!
At this point you can report on DM analytics, set up journeys to trigger other actions (such as email or a note to the sales rep to give them a call) and you can see where that prospect goes on your website (and also see if they come back in 6 months time!).
Cool huh?
To top it all off, here is Andrew’s video demonstration showing you all of the steps above. Enjoy!