When asking how many leaflets a distributor can deliver in a day, we need to establish the type of delivery we are talking about first. There are two types of leaflet distribution worth mentioning.
1. Door to door
A door to door service guarantees delivery to a specific number of households in a pre-selected area. The leaflets are delivered through the letterbox directly into each home. This is our bread and butter and most of our deliveries are done this way. The amount of leaflets a single distributor can deliver in a day is approximately 800-1000.
This is a good amount that makes each delivery trip productive for the person delivering the leaflets, but it is not too physically gruelling to keep up with. Delivering too many leaflets in a single day will inevitably result in the quality of distribution declining. Speed of delivery isn’t everything.
The exact number of flyers delivered every day also depends on how many leaflets are being delivered to each house. At The Private Postman we aim to deliver
1 leaflet to houses with 1 doorbell
2 leaflets to houses with 2 doorbells
And a maximum of 3 leaflets to houses with 3 doorbells or more
These numbers are consistent with what is considered an industry standard.
2. Hand to hand
This service focuses on handing out flyers to members of the public in busy parts of London at specific times of day. The speed of delivery here is approximately 400 leaflets, per day, per distributor.
As such it is generally less effective than door to door and we tend to recommend it only in specific situations where door to door leaflet distribution is not an option.
Outside of a few use cases, door to door is superior to hand to hand in response rates and it is a more economical way to get your flyers to potential clients.
What can affect speed of delivery?
How efficiently a distributor can deliver leaflets also depends on a number of factors
1. Mapping system
When you are deciding on which company to have run your leaflet distribution, you want to check the quality of their mapping system.
Do they exclude business addresses, inaccessible properties or local authority housing?
Is the mapping system laid out in a way one can clearly understand, and does it allow the individual distributor to plan his or her rounds well to avoid wasting time?
2. Are the distributors experienced?
The level of a distributor’s experience will make a big difference on the number of flyers they can deliver in a day.
The biggest causes of slow deliveries are poor planning of a route and a need to backtrack. These are the two biggest enemies of speedy delivery.
Good mapping combined with a bit of basic planning before a distributor heads out to do a route can make a big difference to how fast one can deliver.
Having the distributors work close to their home or in areas they are familiar with can also help. Distributors with local knowledge of an area can avoid potential problems before they arise.
3. How many distributors are handling a given campaign
The most obvious multiplier for how fast your campaign will be executed is the number of distributors delivering your leaflets. When choosing a company to work with on a larger leaflet drop, check how many people they are able to assign to your campaign.
If you are looking to run campaigns of hundreds of thousands of flyers, you will need a distribution partner than can service this volume of work comfortably.
At The Private Postman, we deliver millions of leaflets in London every year and regularly handle campaigns in the hundreds of thousands of leaflets by working with a good and healthy delivering team.
