One topic that often comes up when talking to new clients about leaflet distribution are questions about the speed of delivery. Sometimes companies feel like they need their leaflets delivered within a very short time frame.
This could be due to insufficient planning on their part (ie. “Our sale starts next week and we’ve just had our flyers printed”) or because they are simply eager to see the results of they leafleting campaign quickly.
How to avoid having to rush your leaflet distribution
We try to advise our clients to plan their campaigns as much ahead of time as reasonably possible.
If you are planning to advertise a sale in April because your business needs the boost in clientele at that time, It’s a good idea to get your design done in early March. Run it by your distribution company. Make any changes necessary. Print your flyers and have everything ready 1-2 weeks ahead of time.
This is especially true if your business has predictable periods in the year where you need to run flyer campaigns. (Gyms in January, after-school clubs in September etc…)
Try to keep the design projects for flyers that have worked well for you in the past. (Or keep a good relationship with your designer) If the need for a quick campaigns arises unexpectedly, you can simply change the dates on your flyer and move on to printing. This can help cut the time you need to get things moving for a surprise campaign.
Speedy deliveries are still possible
The speed of delivery for your campaigns depends on how well your distribution company is organised.
The way we operate at The Private Postman is by mostly focusing on long term regular deliveries with the highest precision and lowest percentage of wasted leaflets possible.
We do have the ability to deliver a considerable amount of leaflets in a relatively short time frame but there is a difference between delivering a large number of leaflet and rushing a campaign.
Planning your campaign ahead of time and having 20 distributors delivering your flyers at the same time all over London will allow for a large number of your leaflets to be delivered very quickly. This is fast and speedy delivery.
Realising on a Friday, that you need your leaflets out and delivered by Wednesday next week will likely result in sub-par rushed distribution attempts.
This way you can have a large campaign of a 100,000 leaflets delivered quickly and without mistakes and a single 5000 flyers campaign crash and burn due to being rushed in the same time period.
We try to help our clients plan their leafleting efforts ahead so that no last minute ramp-up in deliveries is necessary.
What can happen?
The way a typical delivery works is as follows. Each distributor will traditionally deliver somewhere between 1000-1500 leaflets per day. Each distributor gets through about 5000 leaflets each week this way.
This is done by design. We want to make sure not to ask for unreasonable things from the distributors that work with us. Since leaflet distribution is a physical job – fatigue is a factor. Even with the fittest people, delivering more than the above mentioned number of leaflets in a single day can become very tiring and the delivery quality itself can start to suffer.
Normally attentive and diligent people can start skipping homes/letterboxes and the high standard of delivery we try to adhere to can slip.
We make sure that all the leaflets we handle are delivered through each door in the best shape possible. We do not deliver in the rain to make sure the paper isn’t damaged by water and we never fold leaflets unless absolutely necessary.
Our system doesn’t require magnificent feats of endurance from distributors and that’s what allows for a consistent quality of delivery.
This doesn’t mean that delivering larger amounts of leaflets is a problem for us. We work with a considerable number of distributors and as such we can deliver hundreds of thousands of leaflets a month for some of our clients.
The best way to get good results with leaflet distribution is constant pressure and regular repeated deliveries, not rushed, one-off operations.
Events
The clients that are the most commonly affected by the need for very fast deliveries are events companies. Whether this is a local church, a school event or larger national shows, we regularly get calls from event organizers with last minute delivery requests.
We normally advise our clients in this line of business to plan their deliveries to take place ideally three weeks before the event starts. This allows the residents of the area to make plans for the day of the event while keeping some buffer before the event day in case of very bad weather or last minute print issues.
This system has allowed us to keep long standing relationships with events companies of all kinds and deliver millions of leaflets for some of the finest events in London.
