Leaflet distribution campaigns will naturally vary in effectiveness and the return on investment they generate. Several factors will influence success including making sure the leaflet design catches your audience’s attention, targeting the right households and the product or service offering itself. A critical planning factor is ensuring you have the means in place to measure the value a leaflet distribution campaign.
Ensure you Measure How Effective your Leaflet Advertising Campaigns
Depending on your company and its products, there are multiple way to plan for measurement including: -
- Dedicated telephone line – setup a dedicated telephone line that is only printed on the leaflet itself and track calls and conversions through this line. Remember that some people like free so consider an 0800 number. Some audiences do however like a local number as well as this instils trust.
- Set Annotations in Google Analytics – if you are in ecommerce or trying to drive traffic to your website, place annotations in Google Analytics to coincide with when your leaflets will be reaching your target audience. This will allow you to see if there are any spikes in Direct Traffic to the site.
- Use a unique Discount/Promotional Code – a code system can help with both internet visits and telephone calls that result from a leaflet advertising campaign. If callers repeat the code printed on the leaflet, call takers within your company can keep track on leads and conversions. If an exclusive (to the leaflet) discount code is provided, then Google Analytics or other digital tracking platforms can see how many sales resulted when customers used the code on discount. (Be mindful to put a time limit on the code. Time limits are a means to making the Call to Action stronger)
- Ask the call takers to find out how the caller found you – while a bit of an old school technique, train you call takers to always enquire how potential customers have reached out to your company and services.
Measuring ROI of Leaflet Distribution
If you are confident that you have setup the means to track conversions resulting from leaflet advertising, calculating the return on investment for these campaigns should be easy.
Take revenue generated minus the cost of the leaflet campaign and this will be the ROI it generated. Naturally there will be other factors such as staff wages etc., but if the staff are already employed in other areas you may want to go attribute a certain percentile of wage costs to the leaflet advertising drop.
Take Learnings from Measurement
Assuming that you run multiple campaigns throughout the year, be sure to take learnings and adapt your next leaflet drops.
Consider elements such as: -
- Seasonality – if you provide services that may be impacted by seasonal weather changes, did you time it right? Was there too much or too little lead time?
- Times of year – did you target consumers too close to Christmas when budgets may be tight? Did you provide enough time ahead of promoting your travel services?
- Times of the month – if selling products did you try and time your best impact when consumers have received their pay?
- Location – did certain areas perform better than others? Are you getting requests from areas that aren’t ideal from a profitability perspective?
- Target audience – are you targeting the right age and income groups – do these need refining?
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6. Making Leaflet Distribution Campaigns Count