Background & Objectives
Email had been the sole channel for acquiring new subscribers for Emap's Construction News title and there was a general consensus that subscriber acquisition opportunities were being missed. In order to maximise opportunity, the marketing team at Emap wanted to determine the responsiveness of using direct mail and enable the comparison of results with email marketing on a like-for-like basis.
Campaign Components
A multi-channel campaign was created, comprising of a fully personalised digital mail piece and a corresponding email creative carrying the same offer. Using PURLs as the mechanism to drive all response for both channels, a database comprising of 50% postal records and 50% email records was procured.
Results
PURLs enabled the ability to track response both from direct mail and from email marketing and analyse the results in our reporting suite. The results from the test campaign were as follows:
| Response | Direct Mail | |
| PURL activations | 641 | 409 |
| Clickthroughs | 84 | 104 |
| Clickthrough rate | 13.10% | 25.43% |
Although email marketing delivered more PURL activations, direct mail delivered more clickthroughs and was double that of email.
Conclusion & Outcome
Direct mail proved to be twice as responsive as email marketing for subscriber acquisition. Although using direct mail has more associated cost (print, fulfilment and postage costs), the ROI attained was sufficient enough to incorporate direct mail into Emap's marketing plans, alongside email marketing.
Key Benefits
Why use PURLs?
PURLs facilitate a simple yet powerful method of campaign measurement and analysis of response from both direct mail and email channels. Each response is tracked and watched by the marketing team in real-time.
The use of PURLs enables the personalisation of each landing page, giving the impression that the website has been specifically created for a given prospect. This yields dividends in terms of response, which is further enhanced with the use of pre-populated forms.
Why use Pro-Active?
Pro-Active is one of the UK's leading direct marketing services providers incorporating fully personalised digital print, direct mail and email campaign deliverability solutions; and is a pioneer of the use of PURLs in direct marketing. For more information or to find out how PURLs can improve your direct marketing results, contact us now.