DUKKY

Last year, Backroads, an adventure travel company based in Berkeley, California, decided to revamp its direct mail strategy and make it more personalized.  So, instead of sending generic postcards and catalogs to its previous customers, the company decided to send customized postcards that used PURLs to encourage them to rebook.

The company mailed out 40,000 postcards to people who had booked trips from the company before. Each postcard had a picture of the last destination that the customer visited with Backroads, plus 3 pictures of other destinations that their travel history indicated they might be interested in visiting in the future.

In a case study of the campaign on the Chief Marketer blog,  Massimo Prioreschi, vice president of sales and marketing, explained why the PURLs were such an important part of the strategy:

“Basically, we were trying to elicit a bit of an emotional response from them based on their experiences. If they can remember what they’ve done in the past and we can rekindle those memories, then they have a greater chance of traveling with us again. The variable print portion and the PURLs are important for that.”

The results of the campaign were quite impressive: the initial mailing, in March, generated conversion and response rates better than 12%, according to the Chief Marketer blog. That’s twice what Backroads was accustomed to based on previous mailings!

Also, in another  case study of the campaign on DM News ,  Prioeschi said that the company noticed  “100% lift in response of clicks through to the PURL and browsing, and 50% increase in sales over generic postcard.”

Looking for an easy way to incorporate PURLS into your next campaign? At Dukky, our unique multi-channel toolkit can help you harness the power of PURLs in just a few clicks.  Even better, our platform also allows you to further increase the reach of your campaign by making offers shareable through email and social media. Get the scoop on the solutions we offer here.

Tags: direct mail, pURLs

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 24th, 2010 at 4:55 pm and is filed under Case Studies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.