The Rules around Leaflet Distribution and GDPR Regulation Compliance

59% of people have visited a company’s website to find out more after receiving a door drop

What is GDPR?

GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) came into play in 2018 with the aim of improving the level of protection surrounding personal information of individuals both online and offline. This impacted many businesses negatively with regards to their marketing strategies. All of a sudden the rules changed on how they could legally collect, store, share and keep the personal information of their customers.

With regards to digital marketing, marketing tools such as email marketing sign-up forms required clear opt-in’s to ensure that website users could give clear consent to marketing materials. Databases across the world took a dramatic hit as businesses had to re-opt-in their entire mailing lists, and many customers chose to opt-out.

The impact of GDPR is still developing even now, as SME’s require more and more consent from users to collect information that they can use towards marketing materials. Unfortunately for marketing teams, this means they have less control over what and to whom they can advertise. As a result, it becomes more difficult to ensure you are advertising to the right audience, whilst not breaching the rules of GDPR.

What are the rules between leaflet dropping and GDPR?

Now for the good news. Generally speaking, leaflet distribution as a marketing activity does not require the personal information of individuals. Bearing in mind that you normally need a permit to distribute leaflets, leaflet distributors normally either distribute at random or choose to plan their leaflet drop strategically using Leafletdrop’s targeting tool.

Distributing leaflets at random has its obvious disadvantages. Without knowing if you are marketing to the right people, you are likely wasting your precious business capital with a poor ROI rate. By targeting your leaflet distribution strategy, you are delivering information about your products and services to the people who will be interested to read about them.

As GDPR regulations dictate, you cannot market to an individual based on their personal information (or any identifying information). However, Leafletdrop’s targeting tool utilises anonymous government data to identify geographical areas as having certain demographics. With Leafletdrop, as we don’t collect personal information of your customers, the only data you need to handle GDPR compliant will be the sign-ups that you get off the back of your leaflet campaign.

With the knowledge of your target audience and the convenience of our leaflet campaign targeting tool, you can market directly to your potential customers right into their houses, completely GDPR compliant without even trying!

Why Leafletdrop?

Leafletdrop, unlike other leaflet delivery companies, gives you access to nearly every home in the country. Launch an entire campaign from your desktop and get a leaflet distribution and print price instantly. We manage the entire campaign including the delivery of your leaflets to your target households by Royal Mail alongside peoples post.

Leafletdrop is brought to you by Whistl, market leaders in audience targeting and leaflet services. We work with many clients from big to small, local to national and understand that audience targeting delivers better response rates and stronger return on investment. That’s why Leafletdrop gives you an easy-to-use audience targeting tool to help you find the right audience who will more likely engage and respond to your leaflet campaign. With access to over 27 million UK households, our simple targeting tool lets you build up leaflet distribution by postcode area.

Sign up to test our free campaign targeting tool today!