These days some marketers are talking about more advanced ways of using the web to track recipient responses.  There are a few new ways of using a webpage to customize the user experience when your audience member visits your website, but before we go into those, I want to cover the standard forms of landing pages that most everyone is familiar with:

Company Website URL

This is the option that most small businesses are employing at present in their marketing.  Let’s imagine an example company called “SallyCo”, and their website is www.sallyco.com – many businesses today are placing this “root” domain URL on their marketing pieces in addition to an email address and phone number to funnel response.  The problem with doing this is two fold: 1) By your website server logs, you know that 100 people visited the site yesterday, but you don’t really know which of your audience members comprised this group.  2) There is probably not a link between your marketing piece creative/call to action and the company’s main website.  There is room left here to customize and personalize the experience, which of course leads to increased conversions to customers.

GURL – Generic (or Generalized) URL

The next level of finesse is using GURLs.  By this I do not mean it in the sense of empowered teenagers that you might have heard, instead these Generic URLs are also known as landing pages, or campaign pages.  It is essentially a specific URL mentioned on a marketing piece that directs them to a page on a website created especially for  that campaign.  In this use, all recipients of the piece see the same content when they visit the website.  Here’s an example of a GURL: www.sallyco.com/10percent  it could also be in the form of a microsite www.10offAtSallyCo.com .

CURL – Customized URL

If you’ve already segmented your marketing database into different groups (frequent purchasers, groupings by state, or something similar) then essentially using a Customized URL would entail creating a separate landing page / webpage for each of your groups.  If you were to segment by state for example, then maybe the URL would be www.sallyco.com/texas if your recipient was in Texas.  If you have not segmented your overall list or database, then I would recommend taking “baby steps” in this direction.  Doing an even split somehow is the best way to get your feet wet using this technique.  Choose groupings that more or less leave you with even groups.  Possibly it’s along a product line?  If you were in the personal products business, then maybe Purchasers of Hairspray would be one group, and Purchasers of Lotion would be another group. The relevant CURLs would then be www.sallyco.com/campaign/hair , and www.sallyco.com/campaign/lotions  – note that the “campaign” directory is optional, but probably something similar is recommended by your web developer so that if you ever remove those webpages, Google and web visitors can realize by the URL that it was meant as a temporary landing page.

PURL – Personalized URL

These are the coolest of the options just for the sheer impact it makes on a recipient.  When I receive a marketing piece in the mail, or by email that has a URL that looks like www.sallyco.com/luispaez , this tells me that the company has invested a good amount of time and effort to tailoring their approach to me as an individual.  If you’ve never received a piece in the mail like this, then imagine the impact of that type of creative.  It’s similar to having a handwritten note sent to you in the mail – amongst all the generic messages, those that have a personalization component tend to stand out dramatically. In addition, using this approach guarantees that you’ll know on a person-to-person basis, who is responding to  your ad. Whether you create actual webpages on your server, and just track them in your web logs – or you use a PURL provider to implement variable re-directs (so you only have to physicaly have one landing page), you’ll have the data you need to increase excitement and customer conversions.

All these options are available in different manners, and obviously, you could get very creative on how you implement any one of these.  If you need more examples about how they have been used previously, you can ask your trusted marketing partner, or search for more articles on this and other blogs for implementation ideas.  The two things to keep in mind as you use these are  1) is this piece raising the impact level and personalization of my message, and 2) Can I tell who, specifically, is visiting the site.  If you can drill down to an individual level, then you or your sales team can follow up with the right verbage and their timing, will likely never be better.