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Pamphlet drops are an effective marketing strategy for targeting local areas in London. Local tradesmen and small companies as well as multinational giants use pamphlets on a daily basis to reach clients in their homes.
Pamphlet distribution has been an important part of marketing campaigns around London for decades. It has remained very relevant through all the technological changes we’ve seen in this time.
Let’s go through all the steps of planning and creating a pamphlet campaign one by one.
Planning
Before you start designing and printing your pamphlets it is good to first establish the exact goal of your campaign.
– You can run pamphlet drops that we design to develop mind share in your local area.
– On the other hand you can run a flyer campaign in order to advertise a specific new service you are offering.
– Or you might be looking to reactivate your potential customers at a critical time of year with a coupon.
What outcome do you want?
There are many potential outcomes you might be looking for. The most important thing at this planning stage is for you to define exactly what the goal of your pamphlet drop is.
Even more importantly, try to stick to a single main goal. Your design, distribution area and schedule will be heavily influenced by the ultimate result you are looking to get.
Pamphlet campaigns that we build to develop local mind share will focus on repeated deliveries to the same households. Your distribution company will plan these sensitively with predefined rest periods between each drop.
If you are aiming at advertising one very specific service with your pamphlets the selection of London areas you will be targeting will be more narrow. Your pamphlet company will get more specific with demographic research for this kind of campaign.
If you are looking to reactivate your customers with a coupon at a specific time you will want to plan your campaign long ahead. You can do this with the help of your distributor and make sure to hit at the perfect time and not a day later.
The most important thing you can do is to define the goal of your pamphlet campaign clearly and stick to a single main goal.
Pamphlet design
Now that you know what the goal of your pamphlet drop is you can move into the design process.
The most important element of modern pamphlet design is the photography you use. Pamphlet design has been trending towards simplification of elements for a long time.
As such modern pamphlets that work well tend to use large high quality photographs and a small amount of text.
Depending on the type of business you are operating you can choose between
– Using a professional photographer to create custom photos for you
– Downloading stock images from one of the many high quality stock image services
Fortunately many of the stock images that are now available even for free are of very high quality.
Use a professional designer
Whether you use a professional photographer or not you definitely want to make sure you are using a professional designer. Pamphlet design is not complicated but you have to get it right and with a professional touch.
Resist the temptation to download a pamphlet template from the internet and tweak it yourself.
Talk to a professional graphic designer, consult your distribution company and create a high quality custom pamphlet. The quality of your pamphlet design will have a great impact on the success of your campaign as a whole.
We at The Private Postman offer free design consultation to all clients. We analyse and offer advice to any client that is working with an external designer. We also offer full pamphlet design services.
Pamphlet printing
So far we’ve spoken about simplifying each step of the process. Pamphlet printing is no different.
Make sure to keep your pamphlet printing process simple. We recommend choosing a standard A5 format with GSM between 200-300GSM. Always sticking to a single page, non-folded leaflet.
There are rare situations where a more complicated format for your pamphlet might be appropriate. However, these are exceptions to the rule.
A5 pamphlets are
– Inexpensive to produce
– Easy to transport
– Easy to store
– Easy to deliver
– Effective in generating response from your clients
Getting your pamphlets to people in perfect shape is very important. A single page A5 leaflet of reasonable thickness is the best format for deliveries. It doesn’t get damaged.
Single page, A5 flyers at 250GSM can handle transport and delivery without any damage easily and reliably.
As you are likely to be printing many tens or hundreds of thousands of pamphlets you want to make sure that your distribution company can store your leaflets for you.
Having 100,000 pamphlets showing up to your address could be a stressful experience.
Make sure to select a pamphlet distribution company that will store your flyers in-house. This will streamline the whole process. Your printing date and the first distribution day can be only 48 hours apart with a system like this.
Areas for pamphlet drops
The type of business you run will have a big impact on which areas you should select for your pamphlet drop.
If you run a restaurant your pamphlets you will deliver to households within your delivery radius.
On the other hand if you are a personal trainer who focuses on KettleBell training in parks you will be targeting households close to parks in areas with a high percentage of people that can afford your services.
You always want to plan the locations of your pamphlet drops with the help of your distribution company.
You want to make sure that your distribution company has a high quality, proprietary mapping system they can use.
They should know where to find various demographics and how many leaflets you will need for each area. This might seem trivial but working with a company whose numbers you can trust is very important.
Talk to your distributor about how often they update their mapping system and if they ever revise their numbers. A place like London is very dynamic and new buildings can spring up within a year.
A couple of years is enough to completely change the nature of a local area. These changes will have a big impact on the amount of pamphlets you need to print for your campaigns.
Most mapping systems of this kind will focus only on privately owned residential addresses and exclude
– Businesses
– Local Authority Housing
– Industrial Areas
– Large locked apartment buildings
If you want to have your pamphlets delivered to any of these places make sure to talk to your distribution company.
Pamphlet distribution
Pamphlet drops should focus on privately owned residential addresses. This is sometimes called door to door pamphlet distribution.
You can deliver your pamphlets as a part of a Solus delivery of Shared distribution.
Solus
– the distributor delivers your pamphlets on their own
Shared
– the distributor delivers your pamphlets with 2-3 other flyers
There are no differences in response rates between solus and shared distribution campaigns.
Shared distribution is going to be considerably cheaper as multiple clients share the cost of delivery.
Solus pamphlet distribution is relevant only in areas where your distribution company can’t find anyone to share your drop with. This can happen in areas in which other clients don’t have much interest.
You might also select Solus deliveries for campaigns that are very specific and small in size. A very good example of this is an estate agent advertising a successful sale of a house to the local community.
Drops like this might consist of only a couple hundred pamphlets and no shares.
With larger shared campaigns there are almost no limits on the numbers of leaflets you can have delivered each week. Literally hundreds of thousands of your pamphlets can be delivered every week.
On the other end you can go more targeted and deliver only 5,000 pamphlets every week to very carefully selected areas while still being on a shared system.
Advantages of pamphlets
Reach Everyone
One of the biggest advantages of using pamphlets is the ability to reach every single household in your area.
You can reach every single demographic and every single household close to your business. You can do this reliably and repeatedly. And you can do this using a carefully designed physical piece of advertising.
This is a unique ability that no other advertising method gives you.
Combine your online and offline advertising
You can also tie your offline pamphlet drops with your online presence. By using QR codes you can send people to your website, social media or mobile app of choice.
A. If you are a restaurant using food delivery apps you can use a QR code that sends people to your app profile to order
B. If you are a charity you can use the QR code to direct people to your donation page
You can use this technology any way you want and find the right approach for you.
Mind share
Repeated pamphlet deliveries to your local area are a great mind share building tool. It is hard to compete with the ability to have your physical pamphlet coming to people’s home repeatedly with careful rest intervals between each drop.
You can change your design up every month and thus reduce the exposure fatigue.
Repeated drops are a great tool and almost no other marketing method will allow you to develop mind share like pamphlet distribution
