Joetheplumber.com may have already been taken up, but picking domain names for your Personal URL campaigns should not be a difficult task. Here’s some tips for making sure the domain name you pick improves your marketing response.

1. Leverage your company name and domain name.

You would have already done the hard part of getting your company domain name. Use a sub-domain name to increase credibility and assure your prospects that the email is from you.

For example:

Promotions.CompanyName.com/firstname.lastname

Rewards.CompanyName.com/firstname.lastname

2. Pick a new domain name with your name in it

Use a new domain name to spread a message or use a catchy phrase to generate interest.

PayLessWithJoe.com/firstname.lastname

Joecleansyourpipes.com/firstname.lastname

3. Use the same URL with subsequent campaigns

Using the same URL in each campaign you send your prospects might be a good idea, if you do not expect them to buy immediately, but want them to remember you when they’re ready to buy. Car dealerships, Insurance companies, real estate agents… for example can get their campaign response rates limited by the low frequency of purchases. Keeping the same URL keeps you in the back of your prospect’s mind for when they’re ready to buy.

Remember to vote, Joe wants to buy the plumbing business!

Saw this event on the Tornado Marketing Blog.

Join the trio in a call this friday 24th October. Sign up even if you cannot make the call and get the recording link.

Sign up here: http://www.authorteleseminars.com/tribes2.html

Here’s a description of the live call from the sign up page.

On Friday, October 24 at 1pm Eastern Time, meet NY Times bestselling author, Seth Godin, and learn why it’s more profitable, powerful and productive to be a leader rather than to sit back and do nothing. You’ll discover why you already have the skills you need to make an incredible difference and how you can start leading right now.

You’ll not only hear from Seth, but get to hear from two other inspiring leaders who know exactly what it means to effectively lead a tribe:

John Jantsch, bestselling author of Duct Tape Marketing and columnist for Entrepreneur magazine

Dave Lakhani, author of Persuasion, Power of an Hour and Subliminal Persuasion

The Direct Creative Blog wrote a great post about “The power of color in direct marketing”. Check out their write-up on the “vocabulary of color”.

How does color affect your marketing?

I suspect that for most, color selection would already be limited to your brand colors and you would be hard pressed to change them. Using a different color would even confuse your customers (Expect to see a Coke advertisement in Blue?)

However, color still plays an important role in whether your creative sells and using it well is an important element in getting better response from your marketing.

Here are some tips for using color in your campaigns:

PPC ads is important even to marketers that rely mainly on direct mailings. They help shortcut the lead generation process by pulling in a more qualified, captive market and getting to the sale quicker.

An effective PPC ad campaign is not just about higher click-through rates or better keywords or blindly increasing spending. This is where Google’s advertising metrics fails to tell the entire story. For example, you could run an ad to give away $100 everyday and get phenomenal click-through rates but clearly it would not be an effective PPC campaign.

Tom baker wrote about how Personal URLs could be a “purple cow” for agencies.

He made some relevant points which I highlight below.

1) Personal URLs make your direct mail piece unique (something people have never seen before in your marketing)
2) Personal URLs help maximize your marketing dollar (Especially important in today’s economic climate)
3) Per the DMA, more people prefer to respond to a direct mail piece online (you should to as this gives you better and immediate response)
4) Personal URLs gives your customers/ prospects a better “experience”
Read the full article: http://www.allbusiness.com/marketing-advertising/marketing-advertising/11472197-1.html

What are Personalized URLS?
Personalized URLs, or Personal URLs are webpages with a unique identifier tied to them. Typically they take the form of www.yourwebpage.com/Firstname.Lastname or firstname.lastname.yourwebpage.com.
They allow you to more effectively segment and target different propects/ customers in a datalist. For example a campaign by Virgin could be narrowed by customers that use their travel, [...]

First saw this on BL Ochman’s blog. Couple of blog posts ago I wrote about the lack of marketing on Avril Lavigne’s hugely popular “Girlfriend” video.

See how Ben Walker adds relevant links to his blog, twitter account, mp3s and even a Twitter song shirt.

Talk about making it easier to “follow you”.

Sending yourself numerous proofs of an email campaign before it goes out is absolutely crucial. Here’s 8 mistakes (in order of how badly it can affect your response) to make sure you avoid in your email.

1. Links that are unclickable/ missing

2. Use of Spam words in the email body

3. No company address/ way to opt-out (Non-compliance with CAN-SPAM)

4. Use of unmanned “Do not reply” email addresses (Why bother to send an email that people cannot respond to?)

5. No campaign offer ( Why should they respond? )

6. Content in email and personal url does not match ( No one likes to be tricked!)

7. Incompatibility with Mozilla/ other browsers (depends on the disparity)

8. Spelling errors ( Note: Some take it more seriously than others!)