Five Ways To Maximise Your Leaflet Campaigns

When it comes to building awareness around your business, leaflet printing is still a great way to get your message or special offer in the hands of your target audience. Thanks to the ubiquity of email, receiving letters or leaflets in the post has become somewhat of a novelty, which is a great way of making your company stand out.

However, a successful campaign needs to be well thought out to insure there is a measurable return on investment. Here are five ways you can ensure your leaflet campaign achieves its objectives and increases the bottom line in your business.

Target The Right People

Not only is spam mail something almost everyone hates, it is also very ineffective in achieving results for your business. While it might be tempting to target anyone and everyone with your leaflet campaign and hope that a sufficient number respond, it’s much more effective to strategically target certain groups of people who you already know will have an interest in what you have to say, helping you cut costs.

The first step is to identify who should receive a leaflet. If you’re targeting businesses, you may already have a list of contacts. Some quick research on list members using LinkedIn is a great way to make sure they are the right recipient within the company for your leaflet, helping to increase your response ratio.

On the other hand if you're targeting consumers, you may not yet have a list of recipients, especially if you are looking to expand your business and attract new customers. Companies like Experian offer services for businesses to research local demographics, for example age groups, average income, etc. Matching this data with your own research about who your existing customers are can help you specifically target the right kinds of households.

Both of these methods are essential to help you cut costs, eliminating the need to print and distribute flyers to people who wouldn’t have an interest in your service. Secondly, targeting people who live in similar demographic areas as your existing customers mean a higher percentage of responses, increasing your return on investment.

Get The Right Message

Getting the right message in your leaflet printing campaign is about knowing who your target audience is, what they like about you, and making sure your copy text is appealing.

It’s important that your flyer is designed to be consistent with your existing branding. Do the graphics match your website design? Are your usual tag lines or slogans present? Does the leaflet’s message reflect your brand’s values? As with all marketing, your leaflet campaign is a key touch point of your business, meaning it’s message must fit in with your existing marketing.

Next, does the leaflet’s message appeal to it’s audience? In the previous step, we talked about targeting the right people based on knowing who your existing customers are. What do they like about you, and does your leaflet design project this?

Include A Call To Action

This is essential in ensuring your leaflet campaign generates a good return on investment, and importantly, tracking your success. While you could send out a leaflet containing information about your product or service, but no call to action for the reader to take the next step in becoming a customer, how would you know if your campaign was successful?

A call to action could be to invite your readers to give you a call to discuss their requirements. You could track the response rate by asking every inbound caller where they heard about you, but that could be unreliable date, since people often forget. A better method of tracking your leaflet’s response rate would be to list a special phone number that you only use on your leaflet campaigns. That way, you know inbound calls to that number are a direct result of your leaflet printing campaign. You can correlate this data with your sales data, and the number of inbound calls on your usual phone number, helping you work out how your leaflet campaign has affected your bottom line.

Reflect Your Brand With The Right Paper

Often, the decision on what paper to use takes a back seat. Many companies put lots of thought into the content of their leaflets, but when it comes to printing, they look to cut costs. This is the wrong approach.

Why spend lots of time and money planning a leaflet campaign, only to use cheap paper and poor quality ink, ruining the finished design? Instead, think about how you could use the type of paper to reflect your brand.

For example, if you have a luxury brand, how about incorporating textured paper or card into your leaflet design? What about a glossy or matte finish better match a modern design language? Could an unconventional leaflet shape attract more attention when your prospect receives the leaflet?

While it’s tempting to cut corners to save money, it's the extra details like this that really help your leaflet get noticed. It’s synonymous to your own personal appearance or corporate image. How would you dress when meeting an important new client? It’s the same for your marketing material, if you want to get a good response. If budget is an issue, it’s better to take a closer look at your target recipients, ensuring the right people are being sent your leaflet, to cut costs instead.

Coordinate Your Approach

Finally, you can maximise the effectiveness of your campaign by coordinating your other marketing efforts. Using multi-channel marketing can help you increase the awareness generated by your campaign overall. Think about how many times you’ve seen an ad on the TV for a major brand, then seen an online version of it on a website banner, then receive a leaflet about it through the post?

Small businesses can get in on this too, thanks to falling prices of marketing channels. At the very least, you should make a mention of the promotion on your website, whether in a blog article or with a banner. But how about incorporating email marketing and social media into the promotion? Your target leaflet recipients may already be on your email list or like your brand on Facebook, and if so, reminding them of your promotion here is a great secondary prompt for them to act on it or to build familiarity with your brand.