While most leaflet distribution companies will not specify an exact delivery hour or indeed be able to allocate a given day of the week for leaflet delivery, this article looks at best practice in terms of timelining leaflet campaigns to gain highest returns for your investment.
So When is the Best Time for Leaflet Distribution?
There will be no steadfast rule but naturally as a marketeer you need to factor in a given lead time to allow recipients to take you up on your offer. Demographics, seasonality and the service offering itself will also logically be a key consideration.
Demographics – depending on your target audience (read more on target audience research here), you will need to consider the age, incomes and purchasing intent of your audience. Some age group brackets may need a longer decision process, whilst other audiences may have more disposable income and be time poor so may be more reactive and impulsive in nature.
Seasonality – this is particularly relevant to the service and trade industries such as gardeners, boiler services and the such and marketeers should consider what is the best time to plan a leaflet distribution campaign for maximum efficiency. As a broad rule, work back from your busiest seasonal period and factor in several weeks or months ahead of this. In the examples given, a gardening company should want to position themselves and their services several weeks ahead of Spring and a boiler servicing company should start looking to promote their brand locally ahead of Autumn.
Service/Product Offering – high ticket service offerings or products will naturally take a longer period to mature into an enquiry or sale as they cannot be impulse buys. Again, marketeers need to calculate – based on previous experiences – how long it might take for an initial leaflet drop to develop into an intention to buy. These sectors may also benefit most from drip-feeding a leaflet drop campaign. A two stage advertising campaign is one where, after the initial campaign, a further drop is then run to nudge the original recipients and push your brand back into the forefront of their minds.
A very important statistic to takeaway is that while large parts of the population are experiencing digital marketing apathy, traditional mail marketing is a constant if not growing means to reach your audience. There is latency in response which marketeers will also have to factor in, but most encouragingly is the fact that 45% of recipients tend to hold on to leaflets in their households for use at a later stage.
