07. Intoduction to Personalized URLs

Personalized URL?

A Personalized URL (PURL) is a unique and personalized web address created especially for each recipient of your direct mail or email marketing campaign.
An example of such a PURL is:
johnsample.mydomain.com or mydomain.com/johnsample

When John Sample goes to the Internet and types in the above PURL, or click on a link in an email that takes him to the same location, he will go to a web page that is personalized to him, as discussed later in this article. At the same time, John's activities in the page, e.g., visiting a page, submitting data in a form, clicking a link etc, are tracked by MindFire and presented in the dashboard. You can set up triggers to be instantly notified of his activities, and obtain any information he submits there. MindFire's parent product Studio, with its advanced integration tool, is also capable of automatically send the data associated with form submission in a seamless manner to 3rd party systems such as SalesForce or other CRMs.

Using MindFire variables, we're able to grab specific data from your contacts and have them display on the page. For example, if you'd like a contact's First Name to appear on a landing page, you'd use the variable following variable format ##firstname##.

Why do I need this?

Many people can see that having personalization on your emails or landing pages makes it more appealing to viewers. Also, it helps add any specific data you need on any page, such as a client's address or any custom fields.

What if one or more of my contacts doesn't have any data in a specific field?

If you want to use a variable that a few contacts may not have populated, then the variable appears blank. This can be a problem if you have a landing page that begins with "Hello ##firstname##", but you don't have every contact's first name. You can work around this issue by inserting a default. Here's an example for the above issue: "Hello ##firstname default="Guest"##". The "default" string will help you inject a phrase there in case the field is blank.

How do I use PURLs in my Campaigns?

For a Drive Traffic campaign, as long as you turn on the switch to add a Personalized URL as shown in the image below, the system will take care of the rest of it.For any Direct Mail campaigns, you will have to download the PURLs from the contact management of MindFire as described in the steps below.

1. Go to Contact Management and upload the list following the process described HERE.
2. Once the list has been uploaded, open the CSV Uploads section of the Contact Management, select the list and then select the option for Downloading the list from the menu that drops down when you click the gear icon at the top right - as shown in the image below. You can use the Change my Columns option to change the list of fields you would like to have in your export file.
3. At this point, you get the following dialog box where you can download the list by clicking on the orange button called Download CSV. If you are using this list with a Direct Mail, we recommend that you select your Capture Leads campaign, which will contain the target landing page for the Direct mail, from the drop-down menu that says "Select a Campaign", so that MindFire is able to include the full URL of the PURL, inclusive of the domain that you purchased for the campaign. 
4. Regarding domains and SSLs, although MindFire generates a domain for each landing page, we recommend buying your own domains for Direct Mail campaigns. MindFire generated campaigns are good for Email campaigns coming out of the Drive Traffic blueprint. The article HERE describes how to add your own domain to MindFire. We also recommend buying SSL if you are going to collect personal and sensitive information. Please contact MindFire Support to discuss the purchase of SSL. Please note that you have to buy the SSL through MindFire since the standard SSLs that you can buy in the market will not work with the auto-scaling Cloud Technology we use.