Vanity Phone Numbers and a String of “pURLs”: Tips for Optimizing Your Direct Mail ROI

SA-926_DirectMailROI

May 13, 2015 | Uncategorized

In the senior living industry, direct mail continues to play an important role in our integrated multichannel growth strategy. Direct mail offers precision targeting of key customer groups in a variety of important ways including age, income, geographic location, homeownership and more.

As with other basic staples of your marketing mix, direct mail has evolved. Today, the use of the latest best-practice tactics give it even more value through better performance and a greater return on your direct mail investment. Personalized website addresses (pURLs), (e.g. AssistedLiving4Me) and easy to remember “vanity” phone numbers (such as 800-Memory1) are helping savvy direct marketers to increase response rates to their mailings and also gain greater insight into their customer’s behavior.

The Advantages of Personalized URLs and “Vanity” Phone Numbers

Greg Marta, author of “Tracking Direct Mail Response in a Digital World,” says, “To a large degree, digital and traditional marketing channels are now comingled, creating both challenges and opportunities. The challenge is that fewer and fewer consumers follow a linear conversion path. The opportunity is that new digital solutions can help marketers gain more robust insights into consumer purchasing behavior.”

“Vanity URLs help to identify offline (i.e. mailers, print ads, radio ads, etc.) campaign traffic to a website and track corresponding visitor behavior once visitors arrive. Vanity URLs are easy to remember — for example, instead of XYZInsuranceCompany.com use XYZInsuranceForMe — and should be prominent in any mail piece. Vanity URLs can be direct links to a website or landing page, or set up to use redirects, which set a cookie in a visitor’s browser that can be tracked in a Web analytics program, such as Google Analytics.”

Likewise, vanity toll-free phone numbers provide similar benefits. They are easier for consumers to remember, and have been shown to elicit higher levels of consumer response. By placing a unique phone number on a postcard, you can easily determine how many people call that number in relation to the number of cards mailed out, i.e. your response rate.  You can also assign different vanity numbers to different versions of your mailer to test which mailer design is most effective with your target audience – be it prospective senior adults, their adult children, referral sources or other centers of influence.

Remember, tracking is an essential element of direct-marketing. You need to know what is working and what is not working. Your marketing success and your budget depend on it. Thus, well-conceived and effectively executed direct marketing strategies that incorporate vanity toll-free phone numbers and personalized web addresses offer several key advantages, including:

  • Higher response rates
  • Greater brand awareness and recall
  • Optimized tracking capabilities
  • The ability to test a variety of different headline, body copy and visual format options to determine which options pull the highest response rates among your target segments
  • Greater cost-effectiveness and return on your direct mail budget investment

Consumer Research Supports the Use of Personalized Contact Information

The performance advantages of pURLS and toll-free vanity numbers is supported by the evidence of research. In one study conducted by Infosurv, Inc. titled Advertising Analysis of Consumer Recall and Dialing Preferences,” researchers assessed the relative performance of Vanity 800 Numbers vs. Numeric Toll-free Numbers vs. Website URLs in traditional advertising media such as mail, print, radio and TV.

The primary conclusions drawn from the study were:

  • The implementation of toll-free vanity numbers in advertising campaigns has proven to increase consumer response rates and improve consumer recall of an advertising company’s phone number.
  • Consumers were found to have higher recall rates of the easy-to-remember vanity 800 numbers in both visual and audio media formats. When presented with advertisements featuring vanity 800 numbers, numeric toll-free numbers and URLs consumers showed a 75.4 percent and 57.6 percent greater recall rate for the vanity 800 numbers over the numeric phone numbers and the traditional URLs, respectively.
  • Overall, every age group studied had a higher recall rate for the toll-free vanity phone numbers in advertisements, than they did for the advertisers’ numeric phone numbers or website addresses.
  • Advertisers should use both a vanity 800 number and a URL as the direct response tools to make the most effective use of advertising budgets and lead-generation tactics. Using both tools will ensure that consumers have the means with which they prefer to make contact with a company. They’ll also have a better ability to recall the vanity phone number for future calls. Note: Other research shows that combining vanity toll-free numbers with pURLS provides an even stronger combination.
  • Consumer preference for dialing a vanity 800 number over a numeric phone number, along with consumer preference for live interactions with companies, demonstrates that it is prudent for businesses to include a vanity 800 number in their advertising campaigns. Doing so ensures customer satisfaction, higher customer recall, as well as improved lead generation and the capture of powerful consumer data through tracking reports.
  • Media consumption data shows that although there is an inherent focus on online communications and social media presence today, consumers continue to spend significant quantities of time watching tradition television, listening to the radio and reading the print edition of newspapers. This behavior continues to be especially true for the mature market.

We Would Love to Hear from You!

If you have comments or questions on the value of public events as a means of directly engaging area prospects, families and sources of influence, we’d love to hear from you. We also encourage you to share any experiences you’ve had in these areas, whether they have been successful or not. Please share your thoughts with us in the comments section below.

Proven Direct Marketing Expertise to Kickstart Your Growth Strategy

If you are a senior living community considering the need for assistance in building a stand out brand, growing your sales and enhancing your occupancy, we encourage you to contact us for more information today. SageAge Strategies is a multiple award-winning, strategic growth and marketing organization that operates exclusively in the senior living industry and was recently named one of Inc. Magazine’s Fastest-Growing Private Companies in America. For more information, please call or e-mail Adrienne Mansfield Straub at 570-601-1720 ext. 202 / adrienne@sageagestrategies.com.

Contact Us Today!

The Importance of Responding to Online Reviews

Did you know: 95% of people consult reviews before purchasing products or services. 88% of consumers are likely to use a business if they can see the business owner responds to all reviews, whether positive or negative. 87% of consumers used Google to evaluate local...

What Are the Housing Restrictions for Facebook and PPC?

As we know, technology is always changing and adapting. It’s something many of those in the senior housing and marketing fields are used to. One of the most recent changes is making a larger impact on how we target ad audiences on Facebook and through pay-per-click...

The Rise of Senior Living Occupancy

As COVID-19 created a landscape of uncertainty in senior living facilities, experts knew there would be challenges and effects that lasted long after. Although the pandemic continues, many types of senior living communities and...

4 Ways TikTok Is Redefining Senior Living Social Media

Whether you’ve heard about it, tried it out, or use it regularly, TikTok is taking the world by storm. This social media platform, which focuses on short-form video, is seemingly on everyone’s mind in one sense or another, and more often than not, people are following...

The Benefits of Working at a Remote Company

Remote working offers many benefits to employees and businesses. Today, more people are working from home than ever before, offering many benefits to both businesses and employees. Remote positions offer employees flexible work schedules and autonomy while keeping...

The Future of Analytics: What Does Next Year’s GA4 Migration Mean?

Moving Forward with New Updates Whether customer needs, viewing habits or website journeys change – or a better reporting tool emerges – one thing is for certain: Technology is always changing, and the field must adapt as a whole. Among the most recent updates include...

SageTalks

Stories of a Lifetime Senior living residents have lived amazing lives. Now, SageAge is on a quest to share those stories with those in the senior housing and senior living industry, residents and their families, adult children and anyone who wants to be inspired....

The Moment We Have Been Waiting for Is Here

WE have been working hard on something new. Check out our new website today!

Pressing Play on New Possibilities | Seniors and YouTube

Putting You In Front-Row View Gone are the days when YouTube was simply for younger generations to view funny videos. In the era of rising senior social media usage and the high engagement of video content, YouTube is becoming one of the largest search engines and...

Seniors and YouTube | Let’s Get Rolling

Exploring the Possibilities of Pre-Rolls Almost 47% of older adults ages 70 and up use their smartphones for social media access, according to our most recent white paper on seniors and technology use. Which social media platforms are most used among the senior age...
Share This