Page 173 - 101 Ways to Market Your Business

101 WAYS TO MARKET YOUR BUSINESS

75 Doing your first letterbox drop

Letterbox drops can be a very effective and economical way
to canvass potential customers in your area. As always,
when you rummage through today’s junk mail, look at the
big name corporations that have decided you need to see
their catalogues. If it’s good enough for them it’s good
enough for you.

To do a letterbox drop all you really need is a flyer of
some sort, photocopied in lots of a thousand. I prefer an
A5 size for flyers, which is an A4 normal sheet of paper
folded in half. To get a thousand of these flyers you will
need to get 500 pages photocopied at about 5 cents per
page—making a cost of about $25.

The next thing you need is a good pair of walking
shoes, a bag of some sort and maybe a map. Now the
marketing campaign can begin. You may want to start with
the houses close to your business and slowly move further
afield.

If you want to cover a lot more area, you may require
the services of professional letterbox droppers. Professional
letterbox drop companies charge per thousand and it is
normally only a minimal charge. You can normally choose
which areas you would like covered. You can find the
companies that do letterbox deliveries in the Yellow Pages
(under letterbox).

It is always a good idea to do a few test drops first of
all to make certain your promotional material works. Make
up a number of flyers with different headings. Pick a
suburb, have a letterbox drop and then monitor the results.
Repeat this exercise in several suburbs and see which flyer
produces the best results and then do a mass letterbox drop.
The overall response will be much higher if you adopt this
method of trial and error on a small scale first and then
go for a larger-scale mass mail-out once you have ironed
out the bugs.

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