Five reasons leaflets still work, and one reason they fail
Leaflets have been written off for twenty years and are still delivered because, for certain businesses, nothing else reaches the same people for the same money.
1. They reach a place, not an audience
If you are a takeaway, a barber, a gym, a garden service or a plumber, your customers are the people who live within a couple of miles. Online, that is a targeting setting you pay extra for and still miss. On paper, it is a walk with a bag.
2. Nothing blocks them
No ad blocker, no spam filter, no algorithm deciding whether today is your day. If it goes through the letterbox, it is in the house.
3. They linger
An advert is gone the moment it is scrolled past. A leaflet with a menu or a price list sits on a worktop, goes on the fridge, ends up in a drawer, and gets found again in three weeks when the boiler stops working.
4. They are cheap enough to test
A few hundred leaflets is a small outlay. Print two versions with different offers, drop them in two similar streets, and see which phone number rings. That is a real experiment for the price of a night out.
5. They make you local
A printed leaflet from a business in the next parish reads differently from an advert from a company that could be anywhere. For trades especially, being visibly nearby is the selling point.
The one reason they fail
No reason to act. Most leaflets that fail are not badly printed; they simply announce that a business exists. A leaflet has to give someone a reason to do something now: an offer with an end date, a price, a free first visit, a code to mention. It also needs to be readable at the speed of a walk from the front door to the kitchen: one headline, one offer, one phone number, big.
The second most common mistake is dropping too few, once. A single drop to 300 houses proves nothing. The same 900 leaflets delivered to the same 300 houses three times, a fortnight apart, is how you find out whether it works.
Printing them
We print flyers and leaflets in every common size, full colour, on 130gsm or 170gsm gloss. A5 suits most offers and A5 flat leaflets are where most people start. Design is free with a new order, you approve a proof first, and delivery is free across Ireland.
