The case for paper based direct marketing therefore is clearly proven. However as everyone knows we are all bombarded with marketing messages as we live our daily lives. The vast majority of us accept this as part of living in the 21^st century and understand the arguments above. If we want a better economy and the better society that this brings us we need to accept the ‘no free lunch’ reality of the world we live in. However most people in marketing accept that individuals have the right to minimise (as much as they can) the amount of messages they get. There are many ways in which they can do this, ie they can reduce TV adverts by only watching recorded TV and fast forward through the breaks. Listen to BBC radio or other stations without adverts, turn up the spam filter on the email server. However when we push a leaflet or newspaper through their letterbox some of these people see this as a waste of trees and a waste of paper. People mistakenly think paper making is a voracious energy consumer but look more closely and you’ll discover some surprisingly small statistics about energy and paper. The paper industry is one of the biggest users of renewable, low carbon energy and over half the energy used to make paper in Europe comes from renewable sources. European forests have grown by over 30% since 1950 and are increasing by 1.5 million football pitches every year – an area 4 times the size of London. The paper industry is a relatively small user of wood. Of the wood extracted from the world’s forests, 53% is used for energy production, 28% is used by sawmills and only around 11% is used directly by the paper industry.

So these simple facts go a long way to showing that Door Drops do little damage overall to the environment but getting this message to the public at large is difficult. However although there is a relatively small number of people who object to paper being used in marketing their voice and the protestations they make are often louder than the facts about the industry show. However the Direct Marketing Association has engaged with the government via its agency DEFRA and agreed to beef up the Your Choice preference scheme with a new scheme due to launch in April. This is all very well and proper – we should not deliver printed material to letterboxes of householders that don’t want it, should we? There are however some logistical problems to achieving the objectors request eg if there is more than one person in a home –  by agreeing to stop delivering we deny the rights of other occupants in the home who may very well want the leaflets we deliver. Similarly some of those objectors only want to exclude certain types of leaflets but the current Your Choice scheme and its planned successor will block everything if the address is registered. So assuming that a preference scheme can be developed and operated to go some way to assuage the objectors anger will this actually have any noticeable effect on reducing paper waste or minimising its effect on the environment. Quite frankly the answer is no. I personally suggest that 5 years after the start of the new door drop preference scheme the noticeable difference to the amount of waste paper around will be zero there may even be more.

So what should DEFRA and the government do? Well, outside of the industry it is little known or appreciated that Royal Mail (currently 100% UK government owned) delivers to UK letterboxes somewhere in the region of 30 -35% of all unsolicited unaddressed mail or letterbox targeted advertising material. The government could in one fail swoop achieve its reduction targets for the next few years if it told the Royal Mail to stop delivering leaflets and concentrate on addressed mail only. The cost of a First Class stamp would probably have to go up to £1.50 but Householders would see an instant and dramatic fall in the amount of paper through their letterboxes, some of the material would be diverted to independent companies but a fair chunk of Royal Mails’ volumes would divert to TV, Radio, Magazine and Internet Marketing and possibly disappear forever. It’s ironic the government is on one side of the coin (through Royal Mail) a substantial competitor of small independent door to door delivery companies and on the other side demanding (through Your Choice and its successor)  that we reduce the amount of material we deliver.

powerful place in people’s lives, with 45% keeping leaflets on a pinboard or in
the kitchen drawer.

These are just two of many key findings
in the survey, all of which prove that door drops are relevant, well received
and a powerful channel in today’s multichannel landscape.

Other key findings of the study
include:

Retail leads other sectors on consumer demand
for door drops

Nine in ten people are happy to
regularly receive unaddressed mail from retailers

81% said their preferred frequency was
up to twice a month. One quarter said they are happy to receive unaddressed
mailings a few times a week or more from retailers

Door drops from FMCG brands are the
next most popular with consumers. Nearly three quarters (74%) are happy to
receive mailings up to twice a month

This was followed by restaurants where
the score was 50% and local services on 46%

Philip Ricketts,

Royal Mail’s head of strategy, marketing and sales for Door to Door, said:
“This research demonstrates the numerous strengths of door drops. Key is the
fact it is a physical and tactile media, making it highly memorable.

“Unaddressed communication is also
proving to be a particularly important method of delivering information that is
locally relevant. It is a form of advertising that is set to play an

increasingly important role in local communications with the footprint of local
newspapers in decline.”

I love it when people make pronouncements about particular marketing strategies, things like…
· Direct Mail doesn’t work!
· Google AdWords is expensive!
· Yellow Pages are history!
· No one reads Emails!
· Junk mail is dead!

Whenever I hear utterances like that, a cheeky little voice inside me says “yeah – who says?”.

That is quickly replaced with a more professional thought and response (the result of years of training and hard won experience) – “is that an opinion or based on market tests?”. Asking that question often leads to marketing breakthroughs, as all too often it turns out that the person making the statement is reflecting their own PERSONAL like or dislike of that type of marketing.

It’s fine to have personal views, I have them too, but it’s deadly to bring them into the office and impose them on your marketing strategy.

The simple fact is, your views and mine are just opinions.
They do not reflect market sentiment. They are no guide to marketing success or failure.

To find out what your market thinks about how they prefer to source suppliers of your products and services, you’d better be open to testing, otherwise you will limit your marketing, and your business.

Here’s a good case in point.
Plenty of people think that flyers and leaflets are dead.
But that didn’t stop Lana and Stewart Brown of Vibralife from being prepared to run a small test when it was recommended by her Business Builder Program advisor. Vibralife are a new type of fitness clinic offering vibration training technology with luxurious and high-class members facilities.
The key to their success is generating good quality, low cost leads and getting prospects through the door (they are really good at converting).
As part of the overall development of a marketing system for their business they worked with Simon to create and test a flyer to be distributed to 5,000 local households.
The total cost of the A5 flyer (you can see the front below) including design, print and delivery was £307.

The Result?
Within the first month, the first 5,000 flyers generated 18 new enquiries. So far, they have converted 10 new clients, worth £3,631.

That’s a 10x return on investment, and they are still getting enquiries and conversions.

By extrapolating these numbers (which Simon has done with Lana), they have worked out that if the flyers were sent every month for 6 months to the original 5,000 households, plus an additional 10,000 households in the area, this flyer strategy could earn Vibralife a return of over £65,000 for an outlay or around £5,000!
But the best bit is what this successful test could now mean for the future success and growth of Vibralife.

As you can imagine, they are now busy rolling this out.
Needless to say this is not the only strategy that Lana is implementing as she works with Simon. They are busy creating a marketing machine for their business of which leaflets and flyers will be an important part.

2) UNADDRESSED ITEMS – Who is the recipient
 With a door drop we are delivering material that is unaddressed and not to any particular person or individual at the address and your material  may be being delivered with other leaflets. We cannot guarantee that the resident who picks up the leaflets will pass the leaflets to other or all members of the household. In fact many leaflets are consigned to the dustbin immediately. Research (by the Direct Marketing Association – DMA) has shown that the average response to a door drop across a wide range of product areas and geographical locations is 0.9%. Our experience is that Pizza Parlours can get as much as 10%, whilst window installation companies (usually with a high individual sale value) may only get .05% It is still a highly effective form of advertising.

3) EFFECTIVE BACKCHECKING – Specific techniques must be employed
 It has been proven by The Front Door Ltd (the premier door to door research company and, member of the Direct Marketing Association) that on average 50% of householders do not remember receiving the material that comes through the letter box. When backchecking is undertaken, to be anywhere near effective it must be carried out scientifically. This means that the canvasser must not only ask the householder if they have received a particular leaflet in question but they must also ask the householder if they remember seeing any other of the leaflets that were delivered with it. The individual leaflet in question must be shown to the householder and if they don’t remember receiving that leaflet all the other leaflets in turn must be shown to the householder. Door step or other face to face backchecking using any other techniques will produce inaccurate information.

4)  MANAGED DELIVERERS (Post-People) – Careful training
 DOR-2-DOR Post People quite often do not live in the area they are delivering to. It is possible due to non familiarity with the area that the odd house – on a corner, tucked away in a cul-de-sac, two households that look like one, or a property with a ferocious dog warning -  may not be delivered to. At DOR-2-DOR we carefully train our deliverers how to put the leaflets through the letterboxes for maximum impact on the doormat. We give the deliverer a detailed map of the area they are delivering to with the streets shown. This is based on the very latest information, but it should be remembered that maps can often be out of date the day they are published. New properties and housing estates (both large and small) are being built all the time. However DOR-2-DOR deliverers are given a report sheet on which they are required to state exactly how many properties they have delivered to and any building etc that they could not gain access to.

5) DOR-2-DOR  Backchecking
 At DOR-2-DOR we give the deliverer one of our own leaflets to accompany the customer leaflets. Our leaflets advertise our services and our requirements for Post-People. We also have a leaflet called Are We Delivering? which asks the householder to tell us if we are doing our job properly, eg did we push the leaflets right through the letterbox? And did we shut the gate? householders are also asked to become Secret Shoppers and can be asked if they have been delivered to by DOR-2-DOR. Surprisingly perhaps a useful number of people are prepared to do this for us and this system has proved effective over a number of years.

With residential door drops we have fully mapped the areas we deliver to. We take a postcode district ie AL5 orCW3 and then using our sophisticated Geoanlyser Tactician software and the bespoke software that they wrote for us to subdivide the postcode district into DOR-2-DOR Distribution  Zones. Typically a Post Code District will have 10,000 delivery points we break this down into delivery rounds of 750 (average), this will typically take a D2D Post Person about 4 – 5 hours to deliver. However with a business door drop the logistics change.

Firstly different businesses have different target audiences. for example some businesses will want to target offices, some will want to target shops and some will want to target businesses on trading or industrial estates. Generally the most popular target are offices and business trading estates and the least popular are shops. Some businesses would want to target small businesses operated from home – many franchises are operated in this way.

Obviously a business drop cannot target residential properties – or can it? So the first task with a business drop is to find the locations to deliver the material. We have found a website that has free maps of business estates in Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire www.mitre.net this is a very useful site but so far I have been unable to find similar mapping for other areas either by town or county. Shops are more easy to find because they are visible and in areas that if you have a little local knowledge you will know where they are or you will be able to find them. Offices are probably the most difficult to find because they can be literally anywhere. We now have office estates like industrial estates but you have to know where they are they are not simply listed on a convenient website.

The next logistic to resolve is getting into the premises to deliver the material. Many offices don’t have simply a letterbox where you can post the item(s). The individual needs to be fairly persistent and determined to get into the location. Office buildings quite often have many different businesses occupying them and the Post Person should certainly try to find every one to post the item(s). This may be a door to walk in or a reception area or a receptionist it may not be as simply as placing an item in a letterbox. If the Post Person is delivering to shops this can be done when the shops are closed (in the evening or on a Sunday) - most shops have a letterbox (some do have shutters that will restrict access) this is the quickest way to carry out delivery – the business owner or one of his staff will arrive in the morning a find your leaflet on their doormat. alternatively the door drop can be done to shops when they are open – best to pick a day when they are least busy – say a Monday or Wednesday. A more confident Post Person will hand the item(s) to a member of staff rather than leaving them on the counter or even worse on the floor. If you hand the items to a member of staff its best to say could you please give these to the owner or Manager. They may get asked what they are about and a gain a properly trained Post Person (delivering to businesses) will know what to say and how to deal with it. Remember though that they are deliverers  not making sales calls. The job is to get the ground covered not spend all day talking to people.

To find all the business locations in a postcode it is possible to purchase a list from such websites as www.b2bprospector.co.uk the list (usually an Excel file) can then be sorted by address or post code so it is easy to see where all the businesses are located. This list will then need to be edited because it will contain anything up to 25% businesses operated from residential addresses. This list will then need to be given to a properly trained Post Person who will be shown how to gain access to a maximum number of addresses. It should be remembered though that unlike a residential drop where most letterboxes are freely available for us to post into business addresses are somewhat less accessible.

A factor that should also be considered is that you can always be sure if the right person picks up the delivered item. Ideally you want the decision maker but you might get another member of staff who doesn’t know who to give the items(s) to. Compare this to a residential door drop where the leaflet is most likely to be picked up from the doormat by the householder who has a high percentage of being the decision maker. With residential drops we guarantee to get to 95% of properties in the drop area, however with a business drop there could be no guaranteed percentage and in practical terms it is likely to be less than 75%. At DOR-2-DOR we charge £90 per day (10am – 4pm) for a deliverer to walk office estates, industrial estates and shopping streets previously identified as target areas (there is a cost attached to finding the targeted areas). As a gestimate in a 6 hour period  we could roughly deliver to 250-350 businesses, taking into consideration that the item does not need to be stamped enveloped or addressed this can be a cost effective solution compared to a maildrop using the Royal Mail. A report following the 1, 2 or 3 day activity is supplied showing the businesses we have gained access to.

Finally its worth saying that business owners live in houses somewhere and they are a much softer target at home than they are in their place of work – where it is often to hectic to read a leaflet that has just been presented to them. A business drop will probably cost 25p per item to have delivered (based on costings above) whereas a residential drop targeted to business owners (headline – Calling All Business Owners) will cost from 4.5p to deliver.