Leaflet delivery business

[steve23]

I've been looking at a franchise or even staring my own leaflet delivery business, but not only am i concerned about all the 'usual' stuff (will it work etc) im having some doubts about the integrity of the business model. You charge (lets say) £50 per 1000 leaflets and pay the person delivering them £50 also. So at one leaflet you make zero profit. The money comes by delivering multiple leaflets in one drop. So 3 customers equal £150. Delivery person gets their £50 and you take £100 per thousand (or their abouts, give or take). But where im not happy is that it can take anywhere from 6-8 hours to make 1000 drops. Thats pretty much a days work. £50 for a day is terrible and i dont want to screw people like that. I was thinking a sliding scale, 1 leaflet pays the poster £50 thousand, 2 £75 thousand and 3 £85 thousand. Still not great money , but a bit better and i still get some profit to make it all worthwhile. But ive never run such a business and im thinking there is a reason the 'wages' (or invoices as i assume the posters are self employed) are so low and what i am thinking about would all be impossible. In a nutshell im trying to make it so that its a win win for both myself and those who 'work' for me - possibly a tricky thing now a days !

All the best

Steve

 

[DontAsk]

Postman delivers all the leaflets we get.

 

[MBE2017]

OP,

You need to understand the market. Single deliveries you charge more for, leaflets delivered 3-5 at a time cost less per thousand. You can also charge based on the density of the route, delivering 1000 leaflets to terrace houses takes a lot less time than private estates with driveways.

Even harder is getting the business, instilling the trust that leaflets actually get delivered in the first place etc etc. Recruitment is also a huge problem, it tends to be great for people who want 1-3 hrs a day work, but few will want to do this as a full time living.

Expect having to get out with your family to meet deadlines.

 

[steve23]

Postman delivers all the leaflets we get.

Yes, you are competing with the post office. Research shows (apparently from split testing) that leaflets delivered apart from the mail have a higher success rate. Something to do with people prioritise their mail over the other junk. But its getting customers to understand that !

 

[steve23]

OP,

You need to understand the market. Single deliveries you charge more for, leaflets delivered 3-5 at a time cost less per thousand. You can also charge based on the density of the route, delivering 1000 leaflets to terrace houses takes a lot less time than private estates with driveways.

Even harder is getting the business, instilling the trust that leaflets actually get delivered in the first place etc etc. Recruitment is also a huge problem, it tends to be great for people who want 1-3 hrs a day work, but few will want to do this as a full time living.

Expect having to get out with your family to meet deadlines.

Hi, yes solo is a tad more but to be honest not so much as to make any real difference as far as i can see. The key is the multiple drops. Perhaps paying more is harder but would help with the retention issue.

 

[DontAsk]

Hi, yes solo is a tad more but to be honest not so much as to make any real difference as far as i can see.

If you really think that, you need to seriously reconsider what you are proposing.

You could easily need to walk more than 10x the distance in an estate with driveways compared to streets of back-to-back terraces where front doors are directly facing the pavement.

 

[HFE Signs]

And this is the reason we don't see may independent leaflet distributors, the cost/profit doesn't stack up too well. Also there is a lot of trust involved.

You might be better to re-think and close in on a specific target and charge more.

For example a leaflet aimed at businesses, delivery service to industrial estates and charge £200 per 1000

 

[IanSuth]

My daughter used to deliver when a teenager until lockdown (and her going to uni)

Her standard month was to deliver to 1200 hundred homes in the month (which she did on the way to and from school by varying the route) it was 2 leaflets and paid about £120 - 1 was always for a local estate agent and the other rotated including a local newsletter quarterly. Any extra leaflets she got £50 for extra over 2.

She also persuaded a local takeaway owner to get his menus delivered when she was leafletting his house and in return she got a £100 one off bonus (then the £50 every month he wanted some doing)

She was paid by bank transfer after emailing an "invoice", she was the only young person the guy running it had the town split into areas and most of the others were covered by retirees or mums

As an aside us and a local family delivered 15k leaflets for a local music festival this summer - we did it over 2 mths and for a bunch of free tickets for us and friends (about 20 weekend tickets in total), density of housing is a HUGE thing - i did 375 houses on a brand new estate (mainly 3 floor tall thin town houses with doors straight onto a path) in under 2 hours but another day my daughter took 2 hours to do just over 100 detached houses with drives. Another thing that matters is letterbox height (and springiness) a modern door with a wide letter box at hip height is a doddle - an old narrow metal letter box at the bottom of a door is a pain in the back (literally). A block of flats with 24 mailboxes in a block outside is a godsend when leafletting paid by the leaflet. I just shoved a set of headphone on, but a podcast on I wanted to listen to and bashed them out on autopilot, kept me fit and made family happy

 

[SillyBill]

Don't.

This is a business model where you need scale (Royal Mail) or dodgy ethics (illegals working for nowt) to succeed.

I know someone who eeks out a living doing this, he'd be better off getting a job in Tesco (he makes sod all, evidently) but pride can get in the way of that.

Minimum wage likely to be £10.30-10.50 by April next year. 6 hours is the average to deliver 1000. £62.70/1000 plus employment costs on top if doing above board. Add in overheads of an actual business vs customer expectations on cost, it is a kamikaze business if wanting to run one "properly".

 

[Dory]

Same as above - daughter and I did leaflet round monthly - 1000 leaflets took 2 of us 8 hours - lots of long drives but some blocks of flats - got paid over £100 4 years ago - dont think anyone will do it for £50 for 1000 leaflets - wouldnt meet minimum wage - they will probably chuck them in a hedge - we were gps tracked to prove we had delivered them

 

[quasiKwasi]

Which city?

 

[IanSuth]

Reading Berkshire for us - mainly in the suburbs

 

[Talay]

Pre covid I had a reasonable response via leaflets for one of my businesses but the last two Royal Mail Door To Door deliveries failed miserably.

OK, there was some response but we also had failure of delivery which Royal Mail disputed, despite my own house and houses belonging to 2 employees not receiving any leaflets. Another house received two, on different days, meaning that lots more properties also received two.

However, it wasn't a changed format or the lack of a call to action, it is that people simply aren't as responsive to paper adverts as they once were. I'm not, they almost always go straight in the recycling.

 

[Directimport]

The UK Direct Marketing Association can provide you with a lot of valuable data that relates to door drops and delivery via Royal Mail.

Postcards and leaflets alone don't work as well as letters or leaflets in envelopes. In my experience this has been the case since my UK and Ireland B2B franchisees began direct mailing in 1992. We consistently achieved a response rate in excess of 4%, but I will reveal a valuable trick of the trade:

Bulky mail is more likely to generate a response. In other words stuff the envelope with more than a single leaflet.

Insert an object the presence of which prompts the recipient to open the envelope. We always included a sample, sometimes in the shape of a coin (which was part of our product range.)

Regardless of what method you use to ensure that the envelope will be opened, there must be a letter, preferably addressed to an individual, and it must have a headline the nature of which strikes a chord and therefore demands continuing to read.

Add to that a meaningful P.S. and you can expect a great response.

Franchisees in my network in several countries still use the same methods.

 

[Talay]

The UK Direct Marketing Association can provide you with a lot of valuable data that relates to door drops and delivery via Royal Mail.

Postcards and leaflets alone don't work as well as letters or leaflets in envelopes. In my experience this has been the case since my UK and Ireland B2B franchisees began direct mailing in 1992. We consistently achieved a response rate in excess of 4%, but I will reveal a valuable trick of the trade:

Bulky mail is more likely to generate a response. In other words stuff the envelope with more than a single leaflet.

Insert an object the presence of which prompts the recipient to open the envelope. We always included a sample, sometimes in the shape of a coin (which was part of our product range.)

Regardless of what method you use to ensure that the envelope will be opened, there must be a letter, preferably addressed to an individual, and it must have a headline the nature of which strikes a chord and therefore demands continuing to read.

Add to that a meaningful P.S. and you can expect a great response.

Franchisees in my network in several countries still use the same methods.

Addressed mail, free gifts, bulks envelopes, etc. Each time you add to this you get further and further away from the economics of most mailshots and that means what you are selling needs to have a larger and larger profit margin.

Fine if you're selling shite for a dollar but not good if you are selling something economical.

 

[Annoying Donkey]

Addressed mail, free gifts, bulks envelopes, etc. Each time you add to this you get further and further away from the economics of most mailshots and that means what you are selling needs to have a larger and larger profit margin.

Fine if you're selling shite for a dollar but not good if you are selling something economical.

True, But you'll be testing in small quantities first, won't you...?

 

[Directimport]

Addressed mail, free gifts, bulks envelopes, etc. Each time you add to this you get further and further away from the economics of most mailshots and that means what you are selling needs to have a larger and larger profit margin.

Fine if you're selling shite for a dollar but not good if you are selling something economical.

The Franchisees in my B2B Franchise business had an average sale amount exceeding £1,000 and most buyers went on to become repeat customers, so the value being offered is obvious. Many of those customers ordered £thousands per year, so the addressed bulky envelopes posted certainly produced a great ROI.

Direct mail proved so effective that when it came time to train new franchisees, a mailout a day or two before the training was due to start became part of our routine because we knew from experience that the phone would start ringing within that time period, and handling those real enquiries was part of the training process.

If you learn and apply sound direct marketing techniques direct mail can make your business boom, whether B2C or B2B.

 

[aguynamedguyuk]

I've done this on a self-employed basis on a very small scale. Whenever I needed to flyer for my own business, I would contact other businesses and see if they wanted in too - meaning that I got paid to deliver my own flyers, so it was win-win.

I kept meticulous records of every street I went down - number of flyers delivered, number of "no junk mail" signs, and the time taken for each area. I could then use that data strategically.

You can make it work if people are happy with the areas where you can deliver high numbers in a small amount of time. For example, I found that in Brighton & Hove, 250 per hour was my average.

This was made up of an average of about 160 in the areas with large houses, long pathways, an average of about 200 in the areas with lots of maisonettes on hills (one upstairs, one downstairs), but then I could do 350 per hour in certain areas of Hove where there were lots of terraced houses on flat roads.

I never saw a sustainable business in it - just an additional bit of income. As others have said, the volumes at which you'd need to work make it very difficult, and you'll end up doing a lot of the work yourself.

 

[Trundle]

I am on the other side of the door and I have to admit that any unsolicited advertising that comes through the door goes straight in the bin unread. I can't believe that I am alone in that.

I don't own a TV or read the newspapers so I may be fairly unique there. There is an ad blocker on my browser and on YouTube with a plugin on Firefox so I am exposed to little in the way of advertising per se.

The way that I tend to get lured into buying something is through reading a product review on forums populated by people with similar interests as me.

 

[steviemac]

It's not a complicated business to start, so I'd personally go it alone, rather than pay a franchise fee for someone to tell, me how to print leaflets and deliver them through doors. The hundreds (or thousands) you would save on fees, would more than pay you for your first lot of printing and deliveries. You might be better looking at a model of a 3-page glossy leaflet/booklet, with multiple ads on it. It works pretty well in the area I live in...been running for years, which means it has to be successful.

 

[Talay]

True, But you'll be testing in small quantities first, won't you...?

The trouble is unless you're doing it yourself you cannot really as there are minimums for delivery or the costs ramp up significantly.

 

[Talay]

I've done this on a self-employed basis on a very small scale. Whenever I needed to flyer for my own business, I would contact other businesses and see if they wanted in too - meaning that I got paid to deliver my own flyers, so it was win-win.

I kept meticulous records of every street I went down - number of flyers delivered, number of "no junk mail" signs, and the time taken for each area. I could then use that data strategically.

You can make it work if people are happy with the areas where you can deliver high numbers in a small amount of time. For example, I found that in Brighton & Hove, 250 per hour was my average.

This was made up of an average of about 160 in the areas with large houses, long pathways, an average of about 200 in the areas with lots of maisonettes on hills (one upstairs, one downstairs), but then I could do 350 per hour in certain areas of Hove where there were lots of terraced houses on flat roads.

I never saw a sustainable business in it - just an additional bit of income. As others have said, the volumes at which you'd need to work make it very difficult, and you'll end up doing a lot of the work yourself.

When I was about 11 years old, I used to deliver the local free paper for 1p a copy and we got 0.5p per leaflet, which we couldn't put inside the paper (though we did).

Around 300 houses could be done in a about 2 hours on a Thursday evening after school because the houses were mostly terraced or semi detached with easy walkways between them and no traipsing up and down long gardens.

Contrast that to some places where I live and you wouldn't do 15 to 20 an hour because they are detached properties with fairly large gardens and well set back from the road. There is no economic to deliver to those houses outside Royal Mail.

 

[Talay]

The Franchisees in my B2B Franchise business had an average sale amount exceeding £1,000 and most buyers went on to become repeat customers, so the value being offered is obvious. Many of those customers ordered £thousands per year, so the addressed bulky envelopes posted certainly produced a great ROI.

Direct mail proved so effective that when it came time to train new franchisees, a mailout a day or two before the training was due to start became part of our routine because we knew from experience that the phone would start ringing within that time period, and handling those real enquiries was part of the training process.

If you learn and apply sound direct marketing techniques direct mail can make your business boom, whether B2C or B2B.

If you are selling B2B what would you be doing going door to door, to a totally different demographic ?

No household buys £000s a year with repeat business from leaflet adverts and has an average sale over £1000.

People don't pick up the phone either very much these days either. They expect a web presence and probably a QR code.

 

[Directimport]

If you are selling B2B what would you be doing going door to door, to a totally different demographic ?

No household buys £000s a year with repeat business from leaflet adverts and has an average sale over £1000.

People don't pick up the phone either very much these days either. They expect a web presence and probably a QR code.

You have misunderstood me. Delivery door to door through the letterbox is not suitable for B2B, but addressed letters delivered to businesses via Royal Mail are a totally different matter . They have proven to be highly productive and cost effective.

 

[Directimport]

I am on the other side of the door and I have to admit that any unsolicited advertising that comes through the door goes straight in the bin unread. I can't believe that I am alone in that.

I don't own a TV or read the newspapers so I may be fairly unique there. There is an ad blocker on my browser and on YouTube with a plugin on Firefox so I am exposed to little in the way of advertising per se.

The way that I tend to get lured into buying something is through reading a product review on forums populated by people with similar interests as me.

I agree with your thoughts on unsolicited advertising by way of flyers dropped in letterboxes. I do the same as you.

Businesses selling B2B would be crazy to waste their money on that, but for B2C businesses The UK Direct Marketing Association and other sources report that advertising material in envelopes does get a good response. Again, such B2C advertising coming in an enevelope would not influence me. You can guess where it ends up. I know what I want to buy and I have no trouble finding it, whether in B&M stores or online.

My only interest in this discussion is regarding mail addressed to businesses, and that can be a high ROI gold mine for businesses that know how to do it effectively. I am not promoting direct mail for B2B, simply commenting on its usefulness.

 

[Talay]

You have misunderstood me. Delivery door to door through the letterbox is not suitable for B2B, but addressed letters delivered to businesses via Royal Mail are a totally different matter . They have proven to be highly productive and cost effective.

I have a dozen or so companies, some with physical trading addresses and some without and we get an endless stream of crap through the post. Do I read any of it ? Not really, 1 in X hundred perhaps, on a good day in a good month.

However, if I wanted to target bridal retailers, to the exclusion of everyone else, which would be fantastically precise, I don't think Royal Mail can do that level of accuracy and they certainly cannot deliver as they say, because they lie, even when proven and evidence supplied.

I could however, get someone in the IT world to use a cheap overseas labour IT person to scrape information off the web presence of every UK based bridal retailer and build a database that I owned, with email addresses, websites, physical addresses, phone numbers etc. which would offer me either digital or physical marketing at the cost of supply, which with digital is near zero.

Not saying one route is the only route as the hook and call to action are key in either.

 

[Casually made]

An acquaintances has a "business" with this model he seemed to give the impression it was a very lucrative industry and i didn't really question it as it's not something ive ever thought about

But after reading some of the replies here i'm not so convinced

The margins appear pitiful and it truly a model of volume not margin

It seems like a lot of work, planning , recruitment to produce very little

 

[Financial-Modeller]

@steve23 someone on here was asking about door-to-door canvassing teams recently.

If you're considering forming a team of delivery people, it might be worth exploring paying a bit more to get good canvassers to offer that service to organisations, with straightforward leaflet delivery as a sideline when the teams have a quiet time. Obviously spending time with customers to sell should creat more value and would be rewarded more highly than simple leaflet drops.

 

[Talay]

An acquaintances has a "business" with this model he seemed to give the impression it was a very lucrative industry and i didn't really question it as it's not something ive ever thought about

But after reading some of the replies here i'm not so convinced

The margins appear pitiful and it truly a model of volume not margin

It seems like a lot of work, planning , recruitment to produce very little

It is one of those near zero investment capital "businesses" which spawned out of the 2008 recession when people started to work for themselves rather than purely seeking a salaried position. Dog walkers, house cleaners, etc.

 

[Marbman]

sorry to put a negative slant on this Steve but the business model seems a lot of work for not much profit and as with any business you wont be the only one in town doing this.

 

[MBE2017]

@steve23 someone on here was asking about door-to-door canvassing teams recently.

If you're considering forming a team of delivery people, it might be worth exploring paying a bit more to get good canvassers to offer that service to organisations, with straightforward leaflet delivery as a sideline when the teams have a quiet time. Obviously spending time with customers to sell should creat more value and would be rewarded more highly than simple leaflet drops.

As someone who used to have a lot of door to door sales teams, this comment amused myself. Door to door salespeople and canvassing teams DO NOT have ANY quiet times, unless they choose not to work.

You are hardly ever going to find a single person who could seriously claim they have run out of properties to call on. I never met one in twenty years, and those sales guys were making £30-80k pa with myself depending how good they were, thirty years ago.

They wouldn’t waste their time trying to offer delivering leaflets if they had a brain.

 

[wayzgoose]

Bulky mail is more likely to generate a response. In other words stuff the envelope with more than a single leaflet.

Insert an object the presence of which prompts the recipient to open the envelope. We always included a sample, sometimes in the shape of a coin (which was part of our product range.)

Remember the old Readers Digest days?

 

[SuperHarry]

We used to deliver 5000 leaflets every week for our business. We used a local free issue newspaper who would insert leaflets inside their free newspaper which got delivered in our area. I selected a different local area each time.
Cost about £25 per thousand.

I had an A4 folded leaflet double sided, which was shared with other Traders so we all had an A5 size Ad or A6 sized ad. You can also include your own ad advertising leaflets delivery.

I paid the newspaper distibution cost and leaflets cost. I used to make a fair profit doing this, and no distribution headaches.

 

[4getaboutit]

I used to run a leaflet delivery business. I’ll throw in my 2 cents. I’d echo what has been said above by a few, it’s hard work for not a lot of money.

For solo distribution it looks like it’s around £80 per thousand for delivery at the moment. You might be able to get £100 per thousand but keep in mind who many of your customers are, small businesses, and most will likely be takeaways (larger companies tend to play it safe and use the Royal Mail, although they are terrible for actually delivering the leaflets). Many of your customers will want it done for impossibly low prices.

You can do what others have suggested and bundle leaflets together. However this creates its own issues. Customers want different areas, different delivery dates, don’t want delivered with other leaflets, staff want more money for doing more leaflets, trying to make sure the different leaflets are posted every time also slows down the leafleters and also creates more prep work. It’s workable price wise though, say £50 per thousand for sharing the drop, get 3 or 4 leaflets out there and suddenly it’s £200 per thousand. But as said the leafleters will end up doing less doors as it’s more hassle doing the multiple leaflets and they won’t get through 1,000 doors in a day.

Your main competitors will be other small leaflet businesses trying to scratch a living and local cash in hand guys. The local cash in hand guys (some will just dump the leaflets, others will deliver for “pocket money”) are the ones that kill the industry and really make it next to impossible to make a decent profit. Your customers will have these guys visit their businesses all the time, offering to do the leaflets for half the price. Be prepared for customers to disappear then come back to you time and time again as they keep trying the cheap guys, only to get burned, and then comes back to you, but still ask for a cheaper price from you to “compete”. I had a customer tell me he got a cash in hand guy to deliver some menus when he “couldn’t get me on the phone”, the guy took the menus and cash, walked to the back of the customers own shop and put his menus in the customers own bins. The customer then came back to me and asked if I could match that guys impossibly low price!

Your biggest headache will be the leafleters themselves. No matter what you do they will dump leaflets, skip difficult houses or streets and you will go through a lot of difficult staff moments. It’s tempting to employ younger people to save money but it’s just a false economy. Even when their gps tracked and told they’re being checked they will think they’re smarter and will get away with it. Your then left trying to save the contract or pay money back to unhappy customers while they still expect to be paid for dumping the leaflets and costing you a fortune.

Add to that the industry has continued to shrink over the years and customers have got harder to get it’s a tough gig to make a success of. Most cities have established leaflet companies and are known to the limited customer base.

Someone above suggested a magazine or multi ads on a single leaflet. That looks like the only viable way of doing it these days and seem to do a decent trade.

It’s good to get into if your starting out in business and don’t have many options/start up funds, you can make it a small business that pays the bills, but for the work effort and stress you could make a lot more doing something else.