Our extensive experience within leaflet delivery has taught us many valuable lessons, here we discuss the five biggest mistakes people make during leaflet delivery.

1. Getting children friends and family to deliver your leaflets.

Often the first thing we are asked is “How do I know my leaflets are going to be delivered?” (See Satellite tracking and How we work) Often behind this statement is a memory of being 13 years old and being asked by an adult to deliver leaflets for some pocket money and then perhaps taking the money and dumping the leaflets. Or getting your mates involved.

Your leaflet campaign needs to be a well thought out part of your marketing plan. The success of your business relies on the success of your marketing plan. It’s not something you leave in the hands of a 13-year-old.

2. Not getting the leaflet proofread.

No one sees their own mistakes. We have had clients with leaflets with the wrong or no phone number on them, spelling mistakes in the email address, wrong prices, out of date offers. If it’s just the odd spelling mistake you might think “we’ll let them go out anyway.” How would that look to a potential customer? If they are choosing between you and a competitor and the competitor’s advert has no spelling mistakes and yours does? You need someone else, someone who didn’t write the copy or have anything to do with the design, to check the leaflet and to call the telephone number and send an email. These are standard, commonsense rules.

The most sensible thing to do is to get a professional copywriter to write your copy, or at the very least check it. Designers and copywriters will cost a few pounds, but you only pay them once. You can reuse a good ad again and again. We recommend mymotherscoat for copywriting and proofreading and we recommend Savvy for design.

3. Only using one side.

These days it pretty much costs the same to have a leaflet printed on both sides as it does to have it printed on one side. When your leaflet goes through the letterbox you don’t know which way up it is going to fall. Use both sides. And both sides must grab your potential new customers’ attention whilst they are on their way to their bins.

Make both sides of your leaflet an effective attention-grabbing tool.

4. Occasionally clients want to share the cost with a colleague and put their ad on one side of the leaflet and their colleague’s on the other.

This makes sense until you look at the cost per response rather than the cost per thousand. Because you can’t know which way the leaflet will fall, you also can’t know what people are going to see. It is dangerous to assume that your potential clients will turn the leaflets over on their way to their bins.

If you do this you are likely to halve your response.

5. Losing the business because the backup wasn’t there.

You’ve done a comprehensive plan, you have a professionally designed leaflet, and you’ve paid to get leaflets delivered. Then when the phone starts ringing it goes to answer machine. Or the potential new customer’s call isn’t returned because your sales process needs tweaking. Or only some of your customer-facing team know about the offer on the leaflets.

The leaflet will only get people through the door, or to the website, or on the phone – after that you need to be ready to complete their experience and close the deal.

If the leaflet’s task is to send people to the website, the website must work. If the task is to get people to call, then the phone must be answered by a real person. If the task is to get people though the door, then you’ll need a sales process to make sure you close the deal. If there is a special offer on the leaflet, your team needs to know about it and understand it. If you need a human to answer your phone we recommend Factotum. If your web site needs sorting out we recommend flok. If your loosing sales because of an in effective sales process, or lack of sales skills, we recommend Tim Gale consulting.