When our clients first start looking into leaflet distribution and how it could help their business they tend to run into a lot of jargon and industry-speak.
Even in later stages of planning a campaign we often get asked – What is Door to door leaflet distribution?
Door to door leaflet distribution is a service that allows you to deliver your flyers directly to people’s homes through their letterbox.
The flyers delivered are unaddressed and the homes are generally selected in groups of 5,000 thousand based on their location and demographics rather than selecting individual households.
It is a direct marketing strategy and it uses physical leaflets to both build your brand and drive sales.
There are two main categories of leaflet distribution. Shared and solo delivery.
Shared Delivery
Shared delivery is the most common way of distributing flyers in London. Your leaflets are delivered to homes in a pre-selected area with flyers of one or two other companies.
These would be companies that are in a different industry to you and offer completely different services to you.
For example there will never be two restaurants or estate agents on one shared delivery round. The typical breakdown of a shared leaflet drop would look something like this.
Leaflet 1 – Restaurant
Leaflet 2 – Estate Agent
Leaflet 3 – Local florist
Shared delivery is cost-efficient since the cost of delivery is being spread over two or three clients.
It also allows for large numbers of leaflets to be delivered relatively quickly and gets just as much response as solo delivery.We always recommend shared delivery for these reasons.
Solo Delivery
Sometimes also called solus delivery this service delivers your leaflet to household in a pre-selected area while it is only your flyer that is being delivered at one time. No other leaflets will be delivered together with yours.
Running a solo delivery has some advantages. There is an increased level of flexibility if your leaflet is the only one being delivered.
You can select areas that are remote or not often delivered to and you can be more specific with the exact timings of your deliveries.
The main disadvantage of solus distribution is the price. It is simply not as cost-effective as shared distribution and as such should be looked at only when shared distribution is not an option.
This would be in situations with very tight deadlines or areas not commonly covered by shared delivery.
Solo delivery does not make any difference to repose rates.
Why Door to door?
Flyers can be delivered in a variety of ways. They can be handed out to people passing by on a busy street, delivered directly to people’s homes, or left on a front wind shield of a car. Only one of these however is always effective and recommended by us.
Delivering directly to people’s homes is what we specialise in.
We help our clients design the best and most effective flyers, find the most appropriate area to advertise their services or products to and build a reliable distribution strategy with repeated drops. This is how marketing with flyers should be done in the 21st century.
Flyers on Cars and Hand to Hand distribution
To understand what is door to door leaflet distribution it is helpful to see examples of delivery techniques that do not fall into this category.
There are other ways of delivering leaflets than directly into the letterbox but they tend to be not as reliable or cost-effective.
Leaving leaflets on cars is something we not only don’t recommend but actively discourage.
This distribution technique doesn’t work and should never be something you do. The results are not more business but only irritated locals and a street full of your marketing materials that turn into paper mush in the London rain.
Hand to Hand distribution is something that is practical only in very specific cases and otherwise tends to be quite cost-inefficient. You can find out more about this in our article about hand-to-hand leaflet distribution here.
We hope this blog post helped you understand what is door to door leaflet distribution. To book a leaflet drop with us or just inquire about how they could help your business get in touch with us here.
