offline advertising – a cheaper alternative to PPC ?

I have been wanting to trial this properly for some time now, and after doing some basic maths, it appears that this could be very profitable if done in the right industries and in the right ways.

One of my first ventures was running a local community magazine, and it was very surprising the response rate I got from various things in that for both local businesses and websites.

Example
From memory, I think the average response rate from a flyer is 1% (some quote a 2-3% response rate, but I prefer to be as pesemistic as possible) so let me show you an example of how using this could effect your ROI.

There are thousands of offers for 5000 x A5 full colour double sided flyers, for as little as £100 if you look around on Google. Couple this with a flyer distributer who will deliver a leaflet for approx £30 per 1000 leaflets, that makes it £250 for 5000 leaflets delivered through peoples doors.

For maximum ROI, you need to concentrate on a product which is lead based, such as loans, debt consolidation, iva etc as they will all pay you just on someones information received and NOT the physical sale of the product.

Lets say that a Debt Consolidation lead will give you £50 per lead.

1% success rate from a flyer = 5000/100 = 50.
So 1% success rate would be 50 applications.
50 applications x £50 a lead = £2,500 from a £250 initial investment.

Not bad I am sure you will agree ! however it isn’t as easy as just that, as you will need to plan your areas where you target the leaflet drops to specific demographics. For example there is no point in targetting sheltered accommodation with a bunch of leaflets, as they will very unlikely have a computer to action your website.

To break even you would only need 5 leads from 5000 flyers to cover all your costs (this is only a 0.1% response rate)

I shall be trialling this out in the next few weeks, so I will report back with my findings then, but if you use your head and think outside the box, this really could make you some fantastic ROI and with very little effort at all.

TIP 1 : If you can afford to pay a little bit extra, pay for a “single flyer drop” – this means the distributor will deliver ONLY your leaflet through a door at once, instead of a “multi flyer drop” where your flyer will be posted through doors with another 3 or 4 leaflets. You are virtually guaranteed to have a better success rate doing it this way.

TIP 2 : You may think you can save yourself £150 and deliver the flyers yourself. To deliver all 5000 will take you a good few days, and is viable if you can spare the time and don’t mind all the walking, but from experience I would prefer to pay someone the £150.

Good luck and if you do trial this out, I would love to hear your results.