Here at the Private Postman, we continually emphasize the importance of undertaking leaflet drops at regular intervals. The idea is to create a regular and consistent mental beat to keep your company’s name in the minds of potential customers so that when they are in a buying situation they will turn to you. These days a lot of our leaflets have some sort of call to action for the customers to find our clients on social media as an additional way for our customers to use TPP to build a relationship with their customers. While there are some companies of all shapes and sizes who are superbly good at using social media, companies have to remember that creating or even curating great content takes time and effort and that time and effort will be completely wasted unless people actually see it. This is why we generally recommend a two- or three-pronged strategy – leaflet drops + e-mail newsletters and/or a social media presence. The leaflet drops both prod your customers to open your e-mail newsletter and/or access your social media content and give your company a physical presence in their home. This is useful for most companies and critical for some such as local restaurants.
Properly-managed e-mail newsletters help to reinforce the physical leaflet drops. The key phrase here is properly-managed. Here at TPP, we have years of experience in advising customers how to hit the sweet spot between leaflet-dropping too frequently and leaving it too long between leaflet drops. As a rule of thumb, it’s around four to six weeks. In the digital world, the standard guideline is either once a week or once a fortnight. For companies with time, interest, energy and budget, there are techniques for testing the absolute optimum frequency. We suspect, however, that many of our customers would prefer a simpler, low-tech approach. With this in mind and contrary to much of what is on the internet, we would suggest once a month on a specific weekday, e.g. the first Wednesday of every month or the third Tuesday of every month, something along those lines. Customers should think about what day is most suitable for their business, for example restaurants might want to aim for the end of the week, when customers are making plans for the weekend, whereas companies selling goods and services related to the home might want to aim for the start of the week, when people are in a more homely mood after the weekend.
We’re well aware that this is far less frequently than most e-mail newsletters and far less frequently than is suggested in a lot of blog posts on this topic, but we have written this article for the benefit of our customers, who are working within a very specific niche, namely catering to the needs and wants of affluent customers in London, who are often cash rich and time poor. These are also likely to be people who receive a lot of e-mail for both work and leisure and who may well have made their way (legitimately or otherwise) onto various e-mail lists already. We’d also suspect that a number of these newsletters wind up being completely ignored for various reasons. They may be filtered into spam, deleted unread either by accident or by someone who had neither time nor inclination to read them or set aside to be read later, with later never coming. To avoid all of this and to ensure your effort is rewarded, you want to produce a newsletter full of great content, which people actually want to read so that seeing it pop up into an inbox is seen as a treat rather than just another something to read. Next week, we’ll give you some tips on how to make this happen.
