5 Things You Must Know Before Distributing Flyers

By placing advertising flyers in the hands and homes of your target audience, you can reach people who might not use other marketing channels and build awareness of your brand. But having an eye-catching flyer is only the start. To attract and engage customers, you need to make sure your flyers reach the right audience through targeted letterbox marketing campaigns.

Here are the five essential things you need to know about flyer distribution to get the biggest response and the best return on your marketing investment.

Before printing your flyer, there are some basic fundamentals which you need to consider, such as print resolution, flyer size and paper stock. Your flyer represents your business, so it needs to look professional and engaging.

Ideal resolution for print documents is around 300 dpi (300 dots per inch). Lower resolution will leave your flyer’s design looking pixelated. Higher resolution will result in a larger file size, without making a huge visual difference to the final flyer. Most printers will also want a file that has a CMYK colour mode and a PDF file format, but you should check everything with your printer to confirm specifications they require.

Another practical decision you’ll need to make is the size of your flyers. While a larger flyer will be more eye-catching and can include more information, smaller flyers are usually cheaper to print, giving you more bang for your buck.

The print quality and type of paper stock you choose will also influence how people perceive your brand. One element of paper quality is paper weight. Paper weight is measured in GSM (grams per square inch) and is something your printer will ask you about when you choose your ideal paper stock. Other options, such as a glossy or matte finish will also need to be considered. If you need help making these decisions or you want to make sure your flyers are as engaging as possible, IVE’s print management services provide an end-to-end solution from design to print to distribution.

The number of flyers you need depends on the size of your target audience and what you can afford. The options are quite flexible – IVE’s distribution network covers 6.7 million homes and reaches 17 million people. But we also have enough data and control over distribution that you can target as few as 200 households in a single campaign.

Knowing your target audience and distribution area is key before planning campaigns and doing print runs – this means you’re not wasting money printing more than you need. If you don’t know where to start you can always speak to a representative from IVE who can guide you in the right direction.

What’s the response rate for flyers?

There are no hard and fast rules around flyer response rate. Letterbox marketing campaigns are very individual and depend largely on the effectiveness of your flyer. There are a number of measures you can take to ensure your flyer gets the best response rate possible:

• Effective targeting
• Strong offer
• Eye-catching design
• High quality copy (especially a powerful headline and a strong call-to-action)

Effective copy is more than just catchy phrases. It should be clear, concise and tap into your target audience’s needs. Using persuasion techniques like social proof and a clear call-to-action can also improve response rates.

In a nutshell, you need to distribute your flyers to the homes of your target audience. But how do you know where they live? Well, the first step is to accurately identify your target market. The better you do this, the more accurately you can identify where your target market lives (IVE can help you with this because we have access to vast amounts of geographic and demographic data for letterbox distribution).

For many smaller businesses, their target market is concentrated in their local area (e.g. bakeries). However, this isn’t always the case. Many businesses have products or services which are only suitable for certain demographics (e.g. dog walkers only service dog owners). Letterbox marketing can help both types of business:

Targeting your Local Area with Flyers

Local area marketing is a great way for local franchises and other small businesses (e.g. electricians, accountants, local stores, restaurants etc.) to promote themselves. If you choose to distribute your flyers in your local area, IVE’s Swiftplan can help you target your audience based on demographics. Swiftplan is a powerful geo-targeting media planning piece of software. It uses over 50 variables to help you target your audience. Amongst other things, it can be used to identify letterbox distribution areas within your local area or within a certain proximity to your store. This proximity can be calculated by radius (for example, within a 5km boundary as the crow flies) or by driving distance. Depending on your campaign, you can target as few as 200 households with Letterbox Marketing, although local businesses tend to choose a larger distribution area than that.

Targeting Specific Demographics with Flyers

In addition to a local letterbox campaign, Swiftplan can also help you target your flyer campaign by Marketfind segments and Census data. For example, if you are targeting families with young children, IVE can identify which suburbs have the highest density of young families and then isolate your flyer distribution to those areas. Marketfind segments can target audiences based on demographics like buying behaviour, aspirations and affluence. You can even use different datasets in coordination, such as using particular Marketfind segments together with proximity boundaries. The audience data available for flyer distribution is more advanced than what most people realise, so whether your target market is millennials, baby boomers, young parents, singles, etc, there are flyer distribution options which can help you find and target your ideal audience.

Targeting a Large Geographical Area

If you have a large budget it’s possible to target entire cities or even the whole of Australia. This is generally the domain of large businesses and an Australia-wide distribution can reach as many as 6.7 million homes – approximately 17 million people!

Like other marketing channels, distributing flyers is a multi-step process which requires a bit of planning and follow-through.

The first step to distributing flyers is to research different letterbox marketing companies to deliver your flyer. Not all letterbox marketing companies deliver exactly the same service. When researching different suppliers, things you should check for include: price, reach of distribution, targeting, typical deliverability rates, deliverability tracking and the ability to offer complementary services like design and printing.

While using separate suppliers for your design and printing isn’t an issue, you will save time if you can book these through your letterbox distributor. That way you can manage everything through a single point of contact. As with all things in business, time saved is also money saved.

Once you choose an appropriate supplier, the second step to distributing flyers is to book your job. Once your job is booked, the flyers can then be printed (either by your letterbox distributor or a third-party printer) and stock delivered to your target audience.

A letterbox marketing campaign doesn’t end with the distribution of your flyers. You also want to track the success of your campaign.

There are two levels to this: firstly, you should track the distribution of your campaign and secondly you should track whether the campaign helped you reach your objective you set at the beginning (e.g. sales, brand awareness etc.)

When it comes to distribution tracking, IVE has strong measures in place so this is taken care of for you. One measure we use for distribution tracking is IVEhub, a powerful GPS mapping app which monitors the distribution of flyers and then supplies a post-campaign report. Another measure we use for distribution tracking is the audits and spot checks and this is coupled with independent audits to ensure the highest levels of compliance. Random audits are carried out by a maximum of 500 Field Agents each month, on a random week, where the agents record which advertising items they received in the mail that week. The audits are done in random locations in suburbs within IVE’s network.

While your distributor should do everything in their power to track distribution, you will need to track sales or awareness yourself because it requires access to your business’ proprietary information. Awareness can be very difficult to track and most businesses will opt to track sales or store or website traffic instead. The easiest way to track this is by using a promo code for a special offer, such as a discount. The discount code you use on your flyers should be different from the promo codes you use in other marketing channels. This way you can distinguish exactly which sales have come specifically from your flyer. It’s also important that your systems are set up to only apply the discount when the promo code is used. This will help ensure that the information is always captured by your system, so you can accurately analyse the results later.

With the right planning your flyer distribution has the potential to be a great success. Letterbox marketing is a measurable, effective and engaging way to promote your business. And if you need help, IVE can help you at every step of your journey.

To find out more about how IVE can help your flyers reach your target audience Australia wide, give us a call on 1300 725 628 or get a quote today.