Leaflets and pamphlets have been successfully used as marketing tools for many years. In this blog post, we’ll talk about the advantages and disadvantages of using pamphlets, examine their ability to capture attention and deliver information in the context of local advertising.
Learn more about London leaflet distribution with The Private Postman.
What are leaflets and pamphlets?
Leaflets or pamphlets are printed pieces of paper that a distributor can deliver to people’s homes or hand out to potential customers on the street. Leaflet marketing is a physical form of advertising that has held an important place in local marketing in the UK for decades.
At The Private Postman, we will most commonly advise you to keep your pamphlets to an A5 or A6 format. There are exceptions to this, but we generally tend to discourage larger or more complex formats.
Which companies use leaflets and pamphlets?
Companies of all sizes can use leaflets or pamphlets.
Local tradesmen, self-employed individuals and small businesses often run modest targeted campaigns of 5,000 – 50,000 leaflets or pamphlets.
In a place like London, large multinational corporations and chains run large campaigns of 100,000+ leaflets.
Companies across many industries use pamphlets. The most common types of businesses include
- Restaurants and other food establishments
- Gyms and personal trainers
- Estate agents
- Care homes
- Private Tutors
- Schools
- Roofers
- Agencies, events and festivals
- Healthcare providers
- Veterinary clinics
- Plumbers and other tradesmen
- Painters and decorators
- Local councils
- B2C oriented startups
Are leaflets and pamphlets still relevant?
Even through some dramatic technological changes in the advertising world (like the arrival of social media and online marketing) leaflets have remained commonly used as a form of local advertising. Businesses have been using pamphlets more or less in their current form for many decades.
Advantages of leaflets and pamphlets
Let’s have a look at the advantages of pamphlets for local businesses.
Physical nature
Like we’ve already mentioned, leaflets and pamphlets are a physical piece of advertising. The fact that your potential customers have to pick your pamphlet up and interact with it is a great advantage compared to some forms of online advertising which one can easily ignore.
Even if in some households your pamphlets are thrown away, this is done through a physical interaction with the flyer. With smart repeated deliveries and design changes, these impressions can add up and lead to positive results.
If the recipient is interested in your services, they can keep your pamphlet physically in their home to reference later.
Local market penetration
Delivering pamphlets or canvassing should allow you to reach every type of household with an accessible letterbox in your selected area .
If a household has a door or a letterbox that can be delivered through, it should receive your flyer. This allows you to reach households without a significant demographic skew.
Can be combined with your online efforts
Online marketing can be an incredibly powerful way of building a customer base. With that said, you can combine your online marketing efforts like geographically targeted Facebook campaigns with the use of pamphlets.
Targeting the same areas with canvassing and Facebook ads at the same time can help you increase exposure.
You can also use QR codes to direct people from your pamphlets to your online presence. A good example of this working in the real world are delivery restaurants linking to their delivery app profiles from their leaflets with QR codes.
This way, a restaurant can bring their local customers to their delivery app profiles through a channel it has some control over.
No VAT
In the UK, the printing of some leaflets, pamphlets and brochures can be free of VAT. You can find a good explanation of the general UK VAT rules around the production of leaflets here.
Targets specific demographics
Targeting of specific demographics is possible with your canvassing efforts. The types of demographics you can focus on are a little different to what you can do online.
You are not going to be able to get as granular with pamphlets as you can with some online marketing tools.
The selections of households you can focus on with your pamphlets will look something like this
- Households within a specific distance from your business’ location
- Homes in areas with a large proportion of young families with children
- Areas with a high proportion of houses with specific architectural features (Sash Windows, Victorian Terraced homes…)
- Areas with a high proportion of homes with gardens
- Households in an affluent area
- Etc…
Some demographic groups that you will be able to reach with canvassing are also difficult to reach through other means. A good example is the 70+ age group.
Scalable costs
The general rule is that the larger your campaigns are, the more cost-effective they are likely to be.
This is especially true about the production process. You have to pay your graphic designer only once to get a great design. It is up to you whether you then print this design 5,000 times or 300,000 times. The cost of design remains the same, but you get more value for larger campaigns.
When you are checking for prices with the various UK printing houses, you will quickly see that the per pamphlet printing cost can drop significantly for larger orders.
The larger your order is, the more you are going to save on a per-unit basis.
Distribution itself tends to have set prices that don’t scale quite the same way. However, with large campaigns, sometimes lower prices can be negotiated.
Cost effective
If you are not looking to spend a lot of money, you can start with a small campaign of 5,000 pamphlets in your local area. The costs for these campaigns are not huge, and you can scale up from this point.
It’s very much possible to try a few 10,000 leaflet campaigns to see how the process works before jumping in with a large order.
You can manage the costs of your campaigns and scale up your efforts when you feel comfortable.
Repeatability
The great thing about modern distribution systems is that they give you the ability to repeat your campaigns fairly accurately.
This means that you can target the same homes repeatedly, with carefully planned rest periods between each drop.
This way you can bring the advantages of repeated exposure into your canvassing.
As these campaigns are repeatable, you can even change your designs for each delivery round and minimise exposure fatigue.
Repeatedly delivering to households in your area with varying designs can be a powerful marketing strategy for a local business.
Read more about handing out flyers effectively.
Disadvantages of leaflets and pamphlets
So far we’ve discussed only the advantages of pamphleting. Let’s have a look at some disadvantages compared to the other marketing methods out there.
Potential for failure
If your design and planning process are not executed properly, it is possible that your campaign will fail.
Due to the logistics involved, it is hard to stop a distribution campaign once it’s happening. If you therefore find out that your design isn’t working, and you are not getting any responses, there is not much that can be done.
This can be remedied by consulting professionals with a good track record during your design and planning process. To avoid the worst case scenario, allow your distribution company to examine your designs and plans and to critique them before you make a commitment.
Read our blog on increasing leaflet distribution success rates.
Some people dislike them
It is true that some people strongly dislike pamphlets and might complain, when some are delivered to their home. With large campaigns with hundreds of thousands of pamphlets, this is going to happen at some point.
You need to make sure that your distribution company has a good system for dealing with this. At The Private Postman, we automatically exclude addresses from our system, if we receive a complaint about a flyer. Once a household complains to us, they should receive no more leaflets in the future.
Thanks to this, we can minimise the number of complaints over time.
Permits and regulation
Door to door deliveries generally do not require any permits or adherence to complicated regulations. Delivering sensible pieces of advertising through people’s letterboxes is a straightforward business and common sense is often enough.
Handing out leaflets and pamphlets, however, is a bit different. If you want the distributor to stand in a public space and hand out your pamphlets to people passing by, it is likely that some form of permit will be required.
This complicates these campaigns somewhat.
Cost of entry
Commonly, 5,000 leaflets/pamphlets is the smallest campaign any distribution company will be willing to deliver for you.
This means that there is a minimum cost of entry.
At a cost of £52/1000 pamphlets + VAT, you are looking at £260+VAT minimum cost for delivery. On top of this you will need to pay for the printing of your pamphlets which could be around £100 at this volume.
This means that, unlike some of the online advertising methods, you can’t start with £20 and tinker away. You will need to commit at least somewhere in the region of £360. The good news is that with larger campaigns the relative production costs go down.
Some of the disadvantages mentioned here can be remedied through careful planning and consulting with professionals.
This highlights the importance of using a reputable distribution company with a good track record for your campaigns.
Even more importantly, you want to make sure that you are working with a distribution company that is willing to discuss your plans and designs and share input. Automated systems and online-only services are not something we would recommend in the world of pamphlet delivery.
Why choose The Private Postman for leaflet distribution?
We offer a variety of services, including leaflet print and design, door to door leaflet distribution, B2B leaflet distribution, and more. Our GPS leaflet tracking ensures you’re fully informed about the progress of your campaign.
Get a free online quote today to see how we can help you, and learn more about why you should choose The Private Postman.
More helpful blogs
- 10 Practical leaflet distribution tips that really work
- How many leaflets can you deliver in an hour?
- Flyer distribution statistics and facts
- How much do leaflet delivery workers earn?
