Heidi Tolliver-Nigro, the digital nirvana, today posted initial comments to a survey she’s been conducting.

Take the survey here…

Most of the reasons for not using personalized URLs involve not understanding the technology or having the right provider to implement personalized URLs.

“PURL campaigns are too difficult, time-consuming to set up”

“Don’t know how to design the creative”

“Too expensive/ costly to test”

Perhaps in this economic climate some might feel that this is the wrong time to try out a new technology even if it promises to significantly increase campaign response and ROI if implemented well.

Then again, if you’re streamlining your business, personalized URLs integrated with your other marketing channels (email, direct mail, print, ads) can be something that is more cost-effective compared to mass marketing yet help you better target customers with the right products/offers.

Contact me ( RLou@L2soft.com) if you need a referral to an agency/ printer that can help you implement personalized URL campaigns. Of course, contact us ( info@L2soft.com ) if you need to provide personalized URLs to your clients.

Uncertain times? Definitely, but its not all depressing.

Bradley Johnson and Kevin Brown, in their introduction to Ad Age’s annual 2009, looks at how marketers still launch new products, campaigns, and tweak marketing messages even in major recessions.

Here are some strategies marketers could adopt in this down time.

1) Targeted rather than mass marketing.

Most have already made the leap towards sending marketing messages that are relevant and customized to each individual, but those that haven’t/ refuse to will likely lose out in 2009.

Targeted messaging creating campaigns that are relevant to each segment and each individual in your datalist. Customizing everything from messaging to the offer and design.

2) Build marketing applications.

Applications add variety to your marketing message and can help brands build better relationships with their customers. They can be as simple as Facebook applications, interactive games or content aggregators that work through viral marketing.

Read: Applications- The next wave of marketing.

2009 will be a year where marketing has to find more innovative and cost-efficient ways to connect with the customer. Competing on price may not be sufficient in the fledgling economy.

3) Quality in direct mail not quantity

Suzanne Obermire, reports news of a postal slump for the USPS in volume and revenue. Sending direct-mail isn’t cheap and with decreasing marketing budgets, they have to be used more effectively with other mediums through interactive campaigns.

4) Measuring effectiveness of marketing

One of Seth Godin’s first 2009 blog posts has to do with ensuring ads work. No longer can marketers run ads they don’t measure or track. The same level of analytics that we associate with adwords campaigns, will be necessary to measure response from email, web, print and direct mail campaigns.

What marketing message did you send out this holiday season?
Was it product/offer-driven? Was it a simple holiday message?

Or did you build an application customers could use?

Perhaps what would make marketing messages even better is building an application to go along with it. They could be as simple as a game (http://stockrider.trone.com/), a holiday snow globe (http://asia.nwa.com/asia/en/happyholidays08/card.jsp) or a viral application to send a simple greeting card (http://Greeting.L2soft.com).

This holiday, we chose to send a simple holiday greeting but with a link to an application that allows prospects to send a personalized email greeting to their friends, colleagues or loved ones.

Marketing applications that help you generate curiosity and interest while showcasing the abilities of your product will be the next big thing in marketing. They help you stand out from the clutter of marketing messages and if it is well designed and executed, your recipients will remember you for it.

For better campaign results: mix up your 2009 marketing messages with applications and you will build a better 1 to 1 relationship with your prospects.

Its that time of the year again! A few weeks to the holiday and while you finish up on marketing tasks for 2008, it is also time to prepare for 2009.

Now, more so than ever, your marketing plan and marketing calendar for 2009 should be high on your december to-do list! And while you set goals for the number of new customers, how you are going to distribute your advertising budget, etc., don’t forget to plan for regular marketing campaigns to your prospects list..

We’ve found in our own marketing, that campaigns to a particular segment persistently gets double the response and conversion as our other segments.

The difference - we sent more regular messaging to that particular segment…

… and because we kept our campaign messages relevant and customized them to each individual, we were able to build better brand recognition which gave us double the average response rate for this segment!

I’m sure you will too!

Relevant posts:
Read: Our post on how often you should send emails

Connect with me on Twitter http://twitter.com/RyanLou

Anne Holland of MarketingSherpa wrote about converting email with images turned off. She quoted a statistic that 59% of consumers and 90% of business email users view some or all of their email with images turned off.

In the article she highlighted an example of an email she received from a HomeAway email newsletter (A vacation lodgings firm).

See what the newsletter looked like with images turned off. http://www.marketingsherpa.com/cs/homeaway/1b.html

The good: Each image included “alt tags” and clickable links that allows for clicks to specific sections of the travel website. The tags and clickable links provides users with options even when they have no idea how to view the images. Contrast this to the Borders Rewards email (view in the post) that is filled with some of the best email designs but are blank when images are turned off.

For designers, another solution with blocked images is to setup the email using tables instead of Div layouts. This allows you to display emails with blocked images while still maintaining designability.

Read the post for screenshots of how it works

You know passive income, what about passive marketing?

While the term has been used by some to refer to the lack of proactive-ness - not getting out to network with people, making presentations, cold calls… I would like to think passive marketing works for you in getting leads while you spend more time going out to meet people and following up with leads throughout your sales cycle.

You could do that with static microsites that ends with a form or you could get much better response and lead conversion with automatically created personal urls. L2 has been building one such site to allow marketers and digital service providers to testdrive L2’s Fuse product. Like a microsite, it involves a static data collection page ( www.1to1campaigns.com ) which collects basic information like first and last name to create a purl along with some contact information.

Once this information is filled out, prospects are taken to their very own personal url (1to1campaigns.com/firstname.lastname) which tracks interest based on what the prospect saw. For insurance companies this would be knowing whether the prospect is interested in auto insurance, health insurance or disaster insurance even before you make the call!

It also sends an automated email to remind prospects of the URL so they can return to the site easily keeping them involved and participating on the personal url.

With an entirely automated campaign like this one, you will have the time to focus on the other elements of your marketing (following up with leads, direct mailers, conferences, telemarketing…) but still ensure you get good response off PPC ads, print ads, your corporate website, etc.

Marketing that works for you 24/7, what a concept!

I’ve seen a lot of stuff written on other marketing blogs about the US election. While most came off as fluff to me, Al ries makes some convincing points on his monthly post on Adage about what marketers can learn from Obama’s campaign.

Some good points Al made:

The average guy with the right message can take on large corporations (watch out Google!)
Sticking to the same message. Telling it often makes it stick.
Different is better than better in marketing
Simplicity, consistency and relevance in your campaigns!

Read more from his post at http://adage.com/columns/article?article_id=132237

Rohit Bhagava included a visual analysis of Obama’s campaign.
Check out his post at the influential marketing blog
http://rohitbhargava.typepad.com/weblog/2008/11/how-obamas-bran.html

The biggest mistake marketers make with email campaigns is sending too much too often. “They’re cheap, so let’s blanket our prospects with our emails”. This might have worked before, but your prospects can easily protect themselves from this now.

Campaign success doesn’t only depend on email open rates, open rates won’t get you the sale. Instead you should be sending information only when you have something new to say, something big to announce, a good offer to make.

Move away from the mass marketing approach. Segment your prospects and customers into groups according to metrics like how much they like your product, (e.g. Apple fanatics get more product updates than the average ipod user) and how often they buy (borders customers that purchase once a week get offers more often).

Each business/ campaign will have an optimum campaign schedule that works. To get you started with yours, try sending out 2 emails between expected purchase dates, adjusted as the length of time increases. If your customers buy every week, send them 2 offers a week. If purchases are a yearly affair divide your campaigns into bi-monthly campaigns.

Make sure you vary your campaigns. Send them an email linked to a personal url, follow up with a direct mail piece then a call from your sales staff, send a letter thanking them for taking the time for the call, include a better offer in that letter… The methods of reaching your customers are endless, don’t abandon other channels because you think emails are cheaper.

Remember your marketing campaign goal should always be to get better response that lead to a sale not keeping campaign costs down!