At Easypurl, we are often asked by marketing agencies and printers about how much they should charge for PURL campaigns.
Much like the question “how long is a string?” – the answer to the question “How much should I charge for PURLs?” depends on a variety of factors. In this blog post, we will describe how we coach our reseller customers to charge for a PURL campaign.
How Agencies and Printers Charge for PURLs
Generally speaking, agencies charge for campaigns based on three components: PURL Generation, Landing Page Deployment, and Reports Dashboard Access.
PURL Generation. First, we recommend that one component of your PURL Campaign pricing should be for Personalized URL (PURL) generation – a per-record cost for provisioning PURLs for each recipient of your email or direct mail campaign.
Generating personalized URLs should add just a few cents per piece to a print run (or per message for email deployment, if you are not sending direct mail). Much like printing or email deployment costs, the per-PURL cost will be lower at higher volumes. For campaigns with just a few hundred records, we recommend charging a “minimum PURL generation fee” to cover the effort.
Landing Page Deployment. Next, we recommend that you charge for the creation of the dynamic landing page or microsite which appears when recipients visit their PURL. Because these pages can be of varying complexity – and involve individualization as well as data integrations with other systems – we recommend charging for such pages on a time-and-materials basis.
Your estimate should include an hourly rate for the creation, testing, and any anticipated revisions to this template. What you charge for landing pages depends on what your time is worth. Agencies with high fixed costs may have a higher billing rate and therefore charge more for landing page production than smaller printers and agencies. Typically, agencies estimate the and allow for enough margin to make a profit on the buildout – even when considering revisions
Reports Dashboard Access & Real-time Notifications. With Easypurl, our resellers get a private-labelled dashboard where clients can log in to view real-time results of their cross-channel campaigns. Our system can also be configured to alert your client sales or marketing staff with the details of each response, delivered via email or SMS, as it is received.
Many clients will offer reports dashboard access at no charge to their customers – and provide access to their branded dashboard as a value-add for their printing or other marketing services. Other agencies and marketing service providers charge a fee for access for the duration of the PURL campaign (usually 3 months).
As a best practice, Easypurl recommends waiving fees for access to your branded Reports dashboard – as it tends to make your customers feel like they are getting more value from your services.
Putting it All Together
No matter the type of PURL campaign – whether you are using PURLs for email, PURLs for direct mail, or both — we recommend that our resellers price PURL generation, landing page setup, and reporting access separately to get the most flexibility when pricing campaigns for clients.
But most of all, remember: the key to determining price is the value of each conversion. A direct marketing campaign for a commercial aircraft manufacturer will yield a different dollar value for each conversion than a campaign that sells lawn-care services – and so you should price each campaign accordingly.
Do you have questions about PURL costs, or about how to price an upcoming marketing campaign for a client? As the industry leader in PURL marketing, we likely have the answers.
Call Easypurl Today to talk to a solution specialist to find out more!
*Please note that prices, costs and margins mentioned here are for illustrative purposes only, and do not reflect Easypurl.com’s or other vendors’ pricing.
