Today we’re going to discuss the most important ideas to consider when planning a leafleting campaign for a laundry or a dry cleaning business.
- 1. Focus Locally
- 2. Pickup and Delivery?
- 3. The timing of your campaigns
- 4. Delivering more than once?
- 5. Are leaflets good for B2B marketing?
- 6. What should my dry cleaning leaflet look like?
- 7. Offline marketing for dry cleaning companies overall
Focus Locally
The most important thing to consider when marketing a dry cleaning business is to identify the best targets for your flyers.
If you run a local dry cleaning business or a laundrette you want to make sure that the people you are targeting with your marketing can get to you easily.
This is either by very convenient public transport connection or on foot.
There is no point spending money on drops targeting areas that are too far from your location. It’s best to focus on your own local area and advertise to people within it.
You can use the money saved by doing smaller campaigns for doing multiple drops to the households in your local area instead.
Pickup and Delivery?
If you offer laundry pickup and delivery services to your clients, your “local area” might look quite a bit different.
At this point your local area becomes anywhere you can comfortably reach with your pickup and delivery service. This could easily be the whole of London.
Even in this situation however you want to consider the character of each area you are targeting. Your designs and delivery schedule should reflect this.
Even if the service you are offering is the same everywhere, different design cues work in different places.
Using a recognisable local landmark in your design can put people at ease.
You can also plan more drops in busy parts of London that are used to more leaflets coming through their door and fewer drops in quieter locations.
If you are planning a large city-wide campaign you still want to look at it as 8 smaller campaigns with different designs and approaches to delivery. This way you can truly maximise the potential of your leaflet drops.
This approach requires considerably more in terms of logistics and planning compared to a single drop. As such it is a good idea to look for a distribution company that can help you with as many of the elements required as possible.
Ideally your distributor should be able to tweak your designs for each area and arrange printing and storage for you.
They should be able to keep you informed about the levels of stock of each version of your leaflet and help you make decisions about delivery schedules based on their knowledge of London.
The timing of your campaigns
Another important element that will have an impact on the success of your campaigns is the timing you choose for each drop.
Laundry and dry cleaning companies can attract clients throughout the year. However there are still crucial times of year that you shouldn’t ignore.
Doing two drops of leaflets to West Hampstead five and two weeks before Christmas is an example of this.
West Hampstead has many large houses where people often host their families for Christmas. Doing so can be demanding on the hosts due to the cooking and cleaning involved.
Offering your services at a time when people need clean bed and kitchen linens and are stressed about time is a good idea.
The households that will be leaving West Hampstead for Christmas will often be taking some form of more formal clothing with them. This is for social events following Christmas and leading up to New Year’s Eve.
This is also at a time when people are less price sensitive than usual.
There are many opportunities like this throughout the year and it’s up to you to take advantage of them.
If you have any ideas regarding the timing of your campaigns consult with your distribution company again. They should be able to help you iron out your plans.
Delivering more than once?
In this article we’ve already mentioned the idea of delivering your leaflets more than once to the same households.
This has become a common practice in the last few years. Reaching out to the same addresses multiple times helps improve overall response rates.
It however needs to be done correctly. In general we tend to keep at least two or three weeks between drops. Sometimes even more.
The goal here is to utilise the effects of repeated exposure without overexposing.
We can achieve this by leaving long enough brakes between drops as we mentioned above. We can also vary your designs from drop to drop to minimise exposure fatigue.
With some tact and restraint repeated campaigns can be a complete game changer in terms of response rates for laundry and dry cleaning companies.
Are leaflets good for B2B marketing?
The short answer is Yes. B2B leaflet delivery operates differently to traditional household drops.
The numbers of flyers delivered are considerably lower, the distribution happens slower and cost per flyer delivered is higher.
However B2B services can be a big part of the business laundry and dry cleaning companies do.
As such an effective B2B drop that brings one or two orders from a hotel and a restaurant can be very impactful.
The best businesses to target are Gyms, Spas, Physiotherapy clinics, Hotels and Restaurants.
A good distribution company should have special maps for B2B campaigns they can show you. These should highlight the parts of London with the highest density of the types of businesses we mentioned above.
There is slightly more competence required from each distributor during a B2B campaign compared to household drops. They need to be able to identify the right businesses to deliver to.
They need to have the social skills to walk into a business and explain what they are doing and leave your flyers with the manager or in reception.
This is why you need to find a serious partner for your leaflet drops. Find a good company that doesn’t use agency workers. Have a look at the kinds of workers we look for at The Private Postman for example.
What should my dry cleaning leaflet look like?
In the last few years flyer design has largely moved to using high quality photography with minimal design elements.
This simplicity in design will apply to dry cleaning leaflets as well. You want to make sure to find a photo that best represents the services you offer.
Using images of beautiful clean linens and clothes in a nice environment is generally better than images of industrial washing machines.
Before you commit to an idea for design however make sure to consult your distribution company and designer.
Your target demographics and areas you are going to be focusing on will inform what your designs should look like.
Niches within dry cleaning
If you also offer some more niche services like sneaker cleaning you might want to consider creating a flyer specifically for this service.
You can run small campaigns of a few thousand leaflets in strategically selected areas focusing on advertising a single niche idea.
Offline marketing for dry cleaning companies overall
Granularity and attention to detail are the most important ideas in offline advertising in the modern world.
Advertising is expensive and we all need to make sure that every pound we spend is put to good use.
This applies to laundry and dry cleaning companies as much as everyone else.
It is generally better to run 4 smaller targeted campaigns than one large one.
It is better to deliver 10,000 flyers to the same households twice than 20,000 flyers to a larger area once. The more local you can get with your approach the better.
