Introduction
Every leaflet distribution campaign stands on four pillars. A quality design, well selected area for distribution, properly executed delivery and repetition.
A lot of attention is generally devoted to the first three aspects mentioned above. The last one, repetition, is often overlooked. It is however one of the most important things to consider for anyone looking into advertising their services with leaflet distribution.
Repetition is an important part of most forms of advertising. Whether we are talking about TV ads, social media or print ads. You can read up some more on repetition in marketing in general here.
Let’s have a look at how this works for leaflet distribution specifically.
How do repeated leaflet drops work?
Delivering your flyers to the same households multiple times in a controlled way with exact breaks between drops has not been historically possible.
The control over timings of deliveries and tracking just wasn’t there. With modern tracking, distribution and stock control systems we can plan and execute repeated drops much better.
It is always a good idea to leave multiple weeks between each drop to avoid exposure fatigue.
We generally recommend up to three separate leaflet drops to fully saturate an area.
The way this works is as follows.
The first drop will have a percentage of recipient keep the leaflet or act on the offer included. A sizeable portion of the leaflets will however be discarded. (If you are interested in more statistics about how many keep leaflets have a look at our blog focused on the topic)
With the two subsequent drops spread out 3-5 weeks apart the branding on the leaflet will get more embedded in the minds of local residents.
This develops familiarity and awareness. The percentages of people acting on whatever the leaflet is offering should grow with every drop.
Doing three leaflet drops within a fifteen week period is a common way to run a campaign for many new restaurants or a cafes moving into an area.
To fully inform all local residents of the location of a restaurant multiple drops can be very helpful.
What are the benefits?
One of the unique powers of leaflet distribution is the fact that you can reach every single household in your local area. There is no other marketing method that can do this in quite the same way as flyers.
By delivering your leaflets repeatedly you can get through to even the small percentage of households that did not see your leaflets on your first drop.
This could be happening in an area with larger homes and households that receive a lot of mail. Some parts of London are just more interesting to marketers and as a result there is more inbound material coming through the door.
In these cases it’s possible that your flyers get missed. Repeated deliveries take the most effective things about leaflet distribution and supercharge it.
Only multiple repeated drops will ultimately make sure that everyone in your local area is as informed of your new location as possible.
After the three initial drops we normally recommend sticking to two to four drops a year to maintain ones position in the local market and stay competitive. This will all depend on the kind of service or product your business is offering and which area of London you are operating in.
Developing mindshare is another product of repeated drops. You can read up more on mindshare in this great article. If you keep your designs and branding consistent you can get to a point where people in your local area have seen your flyers enough that you become the default choice for your kind of service.
A good example would be a local vet clinic (see more about flyer delivery for veteterinary clinics in this blog). If the clinic delivers their flyers to every household within walking distance four times a year and no one else does so, the clinic holds a real advantage. They might effectively become THE local vet in people’s minds.
This is especially true when you combine repeated leaflet campaigns with other forms of advertising like geographically targeted social media ads as well.
Who should use repeated leaflet drops?
Some types of businesses benefit from repeated flyer drops more than others. Events, Venues or Estate Agents rarely need a similar approach. There is some application but other methodologies are often more suitable for these kinds of businesses.
However any business dealing with household related products and services, window or blinds companies, restaurants, cafes or takeaways will benefit hugely from a well-designed repeated leaflet distribution campaign.
The best way to determine whether your business is suitable for a similar service is getting in touch with your local reputable flyer delivery company.
At The Private Postman we can draw from a large amount of data based on millions of leaflets delivered by us every year.
We can help you decide what kind of campaign would be most suitable for you type of business and location. After that we can help you plan the campaign and keep you informed as the deliveries are happening.
This we do with our proprietary detailed mapping system and our Mercury Live Tracking System. The combination of these two techniques will make sure that you understand the decisions made in the process of planning each campaign and that you are informed about the progress of each delivery.
We go as far as making sure that you receive live messages letting you know exactly where your leaflets are being delivered every day.
Use a variety of designs
One of the great things about modern stock control systems is that they allow you to use multiple designs for repeated campaigns. You can use this to have a slightly different design delivered each time.
This can be used to reduce exposure fatigue, focus on a different service/product with each drop or to build up to an event.
For example, if you are opening a new Italian restaurant in your local area, you can use the first drop to let everyone know your opening date. The second drop can advertise your three best dishes and your third drop can advertise a wine tasting event that is going to be taking place in two weeks at your location.
If you are able to get mulitple designs produced you can plan fairly complex campaigns that can yield fantastic results.
What should you look out for?
When you’re deciding on which company you are going to use to conduct your repeated flyer drops you want to pay attention to a few things.
You want to make sure that your distributor has a way of resolving and logging any complaints from people who don’t want to be receiving flyers.
If someone complains about receiving leaflets, your distributor should take their address out from any future deliveries. This is important as your flyers are going to be coming through each door repeatedly.
Talk to your distributors and ask them how they handle complaints and how they make sure that they can honour any requests to exclude an address from deliveries.
Another thing you need to check before you decide to have a distributor do a repeated drop for you is the mapping system they are using.
The mapping system needs to be accurate and detailed. In general having a company use their own proprietary mapping system is better than having them go by postal sectors and government numbers.
The number of pamphlets you should be using for each area or postal sector will depend on many variables. How many businesses are in each area? How many undeliverable apartment buildings and local authority housing addresses are being removed from the system?
Your distribution company should be able to answer these questions for you to ensure that your leaflets are not being wasted.
If you’re working with a good leaflet design and a quality distribution company all you need to do is have a careful look at the mapping system, select your delivery areas right, create a plan for multiple drops and you should see results.
