To put it simply, personalized URLs — PURLs — allow your funeral home to create custom links for your marketing efforts.

Whether it’s a direct mail campaign or social media post, there are many ways you can take advantage of PURLs. Depending on the type, they’re designed to improve user experience and help you keep track of your marketing campaigns.

Below are a few PURL tips and examples that can help make marketing your funeral home easier and more efficient.

Create Unique URLs for Marketing Campaigns

PURLs work great for your funeral home’s online and print marketing campaigns. The link’s appearance is clean and easy for users to understand right away what the PURL is for. And for print, it’s simpler for families to remember and type in the PURL rather than a long, complicated link.

For example, if you’re promoting your funeral home’s educational grief guide, your PURL may look something like this:

www.yourfuneralhomename.com/griefguide

Track the Results

PURLs make it easy to track your marketing campaign’s success, even for print. You can see who clicked on your link and completed the desired call to action. If you include a custom PURL that only appears on the direct mail marketing piece, then you know that those who visited the PURL saw your mail and typed in the link.

For example, if you send out invites for your upcoming holiday remembrance event, you can put a PURL on the invite for guests to RSVP. Or if you send a mailer about your educational grief guide, you can include a PURL to download the grief guide. This way, you can keep track of who went to your PURL to see how effective that marketing technique was at promoting your event, guide, or whatever the call to action was.

PURL Tool Examples

There are many tools out there that you can use to create PURLs and track their results, such as with Google Analytics parameters. For example, you can download the Google Analytics URL Builder to create customized URL campaigns and easily track their results.

The URL builder allows you to create specific campaigns for your funeral home’s marketing projects, such as your newsletter. You just need to give the campaign a name, such as Newsletter, and choose the campaign. You also can include other information to get even more specific with your campaign, such as the medium, or source type, which could be “email” or “print” for your newsletter depending on the medium you use to send it.

To download the Google Analytics URL Builder to Google Chrome, follow these steps:

1. Go to the Chrome Apps section of the Chrome Web Store.
2. In the search box, search for “Google Analytics URL Builder”
3. Click the “Add To Chrome” button to add it to your Google Chrome browser.

The Google Analytics URL Builder also works with Bit.ly, a URL shortening tool. Tools like Bit.ly or Rebrandly generate shortened, customized versions of your links, which we’ll talk more about it the next section.

Shorten Your Links

URL personalization tools like the ones mentioned above let you easily shorten URLs. This makes your marketing content look less cluttered and easy to use. It’s also great for posting on your funeral home’s social media pages so the long links don’t clutter up the post.

For example, some social media sites like Twitter have a character limit. By shortening the links, they can take up fewer characters and, now, you have more characters to type your post content.

You can create a Bit.ly account for free and it’s easy to use. Just copy and paste the URL that you want to shorten and it automatically generates a shortened version for you. You also can customize the link and track the results.

You also can sign up for Rebrandly for free. With this tool, you can create short and customized links that reflect your funeral home’s brand and analyze the results.