You have listened to and followed the EC Business Success Blue Print and crafted the perfect leaflet.
Several boxes have just arrived at your office. Your new leaflets are here!
It has:
- A great headline on both sides
- An attention catching image.
- It has been professionally designed
- It is printed on the right stock.
- You have a compelling call to action
- You remembered to put in a time limited offer
- And you even have a unique tracking phone number in place.
Excellent work – 10/10.
Now, go ahead and screw it all up with unplanned (but probably cheap), unprofessional delivery.
Find a kid on a chopper, give him a few quid and wait for the response. You won’t be pleased with the outcome.
Lessons From The Trenches
If your delivery strategy is poor or even worse non-existent, any results you do get back will be virtually meaningless and unable to be replicated and built on.
I see it every week. Businesses order boxes of leaflets that turn up at their offices. They have no idea what to do with them, how to deliver them, what they should expect.
You need a plan!
A great delivery plan and an average leaflet will win over a great leaflet and a rubbish delivery plan.
Here is our ‘Blue Print’.
Demographics. You must know the total number of letterboxes in your target area. Conduct a house count. Don’t be too hasty to eliminate areas – even the best demographic software gives you a high level view of the makeup of an area / suburb or street.
Insiders Tip: Zoopla has a nice little feature for conducting a house count street by street. Use the current values menu and enter the street name or postcode and it gives you a property count.
Printing
Having got the number of households sorted, you now know how many to print. Here is the formula we recommend.
Households x 3 = Total Print Run
A drop area of less than 5,000 isn’t going to give you much value in terms of learning, feedback and enhancements for future campaigns.
Insiders Tip: Find the ‘sweet spot’ for quantities with your print provider. 15 – 30,000 is about the point at which the price advantages for going to larger quantities diminish. The other plus of printing in 20,000 runs for example is you have flexibility to change a headline, offer or, god forbid, correct a mistake.
The Ultimate First Impression
Make sure your leaflet reflects the way you want your business seen. Here is how to get it right.
Imagine you are hosting a launch event or special function for your business. It is a very important event for your business. You must make the right impression.
You are greeting people at the door and handing them information about your business. Their expectations need to be met.
How does the paper feel that you hand over?
A leaflet arriving on someone’s door mat is the ultimate first impression challenge!
Print on the best / heaviest paper you can with the best finish you can. We recommend at least 250gsm and often do 350gsm. 170gsm is on the lower end of acceptable.
Start getting down to 130gsm or lower and you are compromising far too much to make it worthwhile. Cheap, flimsy paper is never a saving in reality. The lesson here: Don’t print on loo paper – even if it is Andrex!
Size matters
Don’t follow the crowd. We get great results from an A7 – roughly the size of a couple of credit cardsside by side. Why – because it is novel and very easy to keep! Most leaflets have far too much information. You aren’t selling your product here – you are stimulating the contact so you can sell your product.
Insiders Tip: Designing your leaflet to work on A7 size is a great exercise. It will force you to really think what you are doing. Then scale it up to A6 or A5 if you want to.
Campaign Thinking
Repetition = Reputation.
In almost every situation the default delivery plan should be a campaign, not a one off drop. I have seen it hundreds of times.
Drop 1. Should get a specific type of response. Your timing has been fortunate. These folk were ready to buy and you have landed on their doormat at the right time.
Drop 2. Done soon enough to create the vaguely familiar to early recognition responses from your targets. Now you start to get the more considered buyers coming in – those that were thinking about what you have and now wish to go ahead.
Drop 3. Recognition starts to bite. Response levels 2 – 5 times what they were at drop 1. It looks like you are serious. You are starting to ‘own’ the area.
Trust comes with recognition. Your flyer will be getting stuck to more fridges and notice boards.
Insiders Tip: Better to identify and own an area through regular drops than spread it all across town once.
The other thing that we really like about leaflet campaigns is that they are almost invisible to your competitors. They won’t know how many you have dropped, where or when.
Time between drops
It will vary, but err on the side of more frequent if in doubt. It also depends on your leaflet, how well it stands out and most importantly how memorable it is.
Memory Effect
A subconscious recognition at first then building to a conscious recognition and acknowledgement when your leaflet drops. It is very unlikely you will build the memory effect (and advantages) by dropping quarterly.
The best results we see come with a frequency between 10 and 25 days. another plus is you will be able to learn quickly what is working and what isn’t for future campaigns.
How to kill leaflet response in one easy move.
Have it delivered inside something else – a free newspaper or magazine. NEVER do it. Expect to get between 38% and 60% lower response rates if you go down this track.
Yes it’s cheap. But it won’t help! If you want to be in the paper take out an advert.
Shared or Solus?
Both can work well… but if you want the best results, there is only one way to go.
Solus will never do any worse and is likely to work significantly better. It is more expensive to buy in, but the list of advantage soon offsets an extra cost.
Test each approach if you wish to, but I always recommend starting with Solus delivery. Why would you want to compromise?
Shared
If you do go onto a shared delivery plan make sure:
- You know what the timings are going to be for all your campaign drops. Screwing around with the frequency isn’t going to help the memory effect.
- Make sure you know what else is going to be on the drop and that it isn’t competitive or otherwise harmful to your business.
- Check the leaflet delivery company policy – how many others will be on the same drop.
- Do they ‘Nest’? Royal Mail nest – because it’s much easier for their posties. In other words, will your beautifully crafted leaflet be stuck inside the larger pizza menu or local builders merchant brochure? You want a NO NESTING policy – and no more than 4 leaflets in total. (While on the subject of Royal Mail, the other major issue is that your leaflets will arrive with the mail. The mail is important – so by default, your leaflet is made to look unimportant and lower priority. Not helpful.)
Solus
- You have control on the timings
- You remove potential risks around shared delivery
- You will get much better more reliable intelligence back
- You will get better response
No brainer. Maximise your returns, don’t compromise them.
Expectations
It is hard work delivering leaflets. Trust me, you will get fed up way before you hit 1,000 households.
Given that most drops should be at least 5,000 households in order to have meaningful impact and produce useful learnings (10 and 20,000 is more recommended) here is what you should expect and check with your delivery company.
- Who do they use? Employees, sub contactors, adults, children?
- How do they pay their delivery people and how much?
- What is their delivery capacity for a week /month in your areas of interest?
- How many do they expect their people to deliver in a day / per hour on average?
Some facts – and we know!
Adult delivery staff are better.
The likelihood of running into a problem increases as age falls below 20 and will get worse as you head to 13 – the legal minimum age. It doesn’t mean there aren’t great kids out there and I am sure yours are. It does mean that the risk goes up, so be aware of it. To deliver to 1,000 households in a typical suburban area will require a walk of between 20 and 22 miles. I have 1000’s of GPS tracks to prove it. Most people can’t do that in a day and certainly not for several days in a row.
A delivery rate in an easy area might get as high as 3 a minute – 180 an hour. To keep that up, you have to be very focused and fit. A more realistic rate is around 120 an hour.
Posh areas take longer! Driveways are longer, properties are further apart.
GPS Tracking
If your potential delivery company doesn’t GPS track its delivery people and provide you with that tracking to verify delivery, raise a red flag – and probably run!
They won’t know what is going on – so how can they tell you?
There are very good free GPS aps that will suffice. There really is no excuse not to have it all tracked. We use professional trackers rather than apps because of reliability issues, battery life and consistency for reporting.
Insider Tip: Map My Walk is a great free app you can use for tracking.
Back Checking
Some companies claim that they audit their delivery folk by physically back checking. In other words knocking on the door and asking the householders if they have received the leaflet.
As a method of verification it is next to hopeless! We have tested it many times and it is just not reliable.
And Finally… Gather feedback, responses and trackable data from each drop. Spend one of your 90 minute sessions extracting the lessons, apply them to the next campaign and improve.
It is perfectly possible to get your leaflet marketing pillar to a position where you know what it will produce before you commence the drop.
