We at The Private Postman believe in the importance of a well trained team. When it comes to executing effective leaflet distribution campaigns on regular basis individual decisions made by distributors on the ground are extremely important. Sometimes the focus in this business can shift to technology like GPS and live tracking systems or the level of oversight from back-checkers and supervisors in the field. Even though these are useful techniques to catch mistakes in deliveries and ensure that the quality of deliveries doesn’t decline if the workforce is not trained correctly the back-checking system will be overloaded. On top of that there are hundreds of decisions made by every single distributor throughout the day that (when approached by a prepared distributor) can save money and time for our clients in ways that are otherwise impossible to achieve.
Some of these decisions are as follows.
Skipping houses
Even though we don’t skip houses in 99.9% of cases, there are specific instances where not delivering can be crucial. We do not give the distributors the authority to decide they will be skipping houses all the time, however there are specific properties we do not deliver to. We exclude all businesses from our distribution cycles. In some London areas distinguishing a business entrance from a residential address can be tough to do. We make sure to train our distributors to know exactly which doors should not have leaflets put through because they might be adjacent to a business or an office.
Our distributors are trained to negotiate access to larger apartment buildings with a concierge. Sometimes the concierge can however decide to deny us access and our Private Postmen need to make a decision exactly when to leave the situation. The trick is to push as hard as possible to gain access to the building so we can deliver but leave before any further attempts at persuasion would be inappropriate.
We basically never skip single door residential addresses. The one exception that we do train our distributors to identify are homes with people that are very likely to make a complaint about ‘junk mail’. Large numbers of ‘No Junk Mail’ signs on the door, hand made signs warning the distributor from delivering or excessive amount of other warning signs and placards could indicate that an individual who is likely to raise a disproportionate amount of complaints might be living at this address. These homes need to be skipped to make sure to avoid unnecessary complications with complaints. We also make sure to mark our distribution maps with addresses that need to be skipped due to previous issues. This requires a level of attention and understanding from our distributors that is above what one might expect.
The last category of addresses that need to be identified and skipped are council properties and local authority housing. These can again be quite tricky to spot and our distributors know what to look for to find signs of local authority ownership. This is especially challenging in London nowadays due to the high numbers of these properties being sold to private owners.
