Good old fashioned flyer marketing...will it work?

Never done it but it must be worth doing . Currently someone on Craigslist in Central Jersey is looking for people to do it. It must be working for them because they are promoting in several towns.. Here's a link to one of their ads. - https://cnj.craigslist.org/evg/d/bou...303836881.html

Also on the North Jersey and the Jersey Shore Craigslist sites some one else is doing flyers. https://jerseyshore.craigslist.org/l...299899170.html

& https://newjersey.craigslist.org/lbg...299899625.html Different style ads just to give you a idea. Also in the Off Line section of the forum. Discussions about flyers have taken place over the years.

!) You have to pay for the flyer to get printed.

2) You are distributing the flyers to people who did not requests information on making money.

3) You expect a 1% return....from a general audience, with a specific offer that only appeals to a very very small percentage of people.

For a few years, my main cold prospecting method was putting flyers on doors.

The flyer offered a free case of Coke or Pepsi. The person didn't have to buy anything. And we delivered. It would take me about an hour a day to put out 100 flyers.

And that was to apartments and homes that were very close together.

Anyway, what percentage of people do you think called? About 1%.....for a free case of soda, delivered to their home.

And that 1% was just the people that called. That doesn't mean they bought. I quickly decided to hire kids to put the flyers on doors.

With the cost of printing flyers and the cost of distribution, I was paying about $17 per call.

The only reason I kept doing this is that I made about $800 a sale. So, $17 for someone to call me, about 30% made an appointment, and half of them bought. So...my cost was about $113 for each sale, plus about $12 in soda, per sale. So....$125 per sale. Once I knew the figures, I scaled up, because I was still making a good profit per sale. And this was a personal sales presentation made in the prospect's home by an experienced salesman (Me). If I just sent them to a website I'd never make a sale.. This is back in the 1990s.

If I put out flyers to the general population, promoting a money making affiliate offer, I would expect about 1 in 1,000 to respond. How much does it cost to print 1,000 flyers? How much time to distribute 1,000 flyers? If you are wanting to put out 30,000 flyers a month, that's between 6 and 10 hours a day....delivering flyers. Enjoy.

And that's just responses, not sales. They still have to go through the sales process. If you are doing it all online, I would expect no more than 5% of the responses to actually buy.



The people that get a 1% response? They are mailing to highly motivated prospects that have already shown an interest in the type of offer being promoted. They are not advertising to the general public.

The people making money with flyers? Guys selling water purification equipment, roofs, windows, solar panels, offers that cost many thousands of dollars, so a 1 in 1,000 (or even 1 in 5,000) response is still highly profitable after all expenses. And then, they still have to make the sale. And these are in person sales, not online offers.


By the way, whatever you do, don't hire kids to put out the flyers, unless you drive them around, and inspect that they actually put the flyers on doors. It takes the average new flyer deliverer about 5 minutes to figure out that it takes less time to throw the flyers away, than it takes to actually deliver them. I speak from experience.


On the other hand, I think it would be a good lesson for you to learn.

I believe that old-fashioned flyers and postcards are
still a great marketing tool but I would not attempt to
convert offline people to make an online affiliate
marketing sale with flyers. You'd probably do better
renting a billboard on the side of a freeway.

If you are intent upon distributing flyers, I would
recommend finding someone local whose business
you could promote for a referral fee. Perhaps a car
dealership or the types of businesses that Claude
mentioned above. And unless you setup a special
phone number or some other tracking system, you
would be at the mercy of that flyer recipient telling
your car dealer friends that they were referred by
your lavender flyer. And then you have to hope
whoever you are promoting is honest enough to
actually pay your commission.

Finally, and this is just my own personal opinion,
if you are going to do digital marketing, then do
digital-internet-online marketing, because there
is a potential audience of BILLIONS of people.
The millions of offline civilians that haven't yet
figured out they can make money online are not
going to be converted to that concept by a flyer.

Why would you even entertain putting flyers out to a miniscule audience, with all the cost and hard work involved, when you have a captive audience of multi, multi millions online. How do you target this online audience?..... well, that information can be found all over the internet - and you're also on Warrior Forum, so if you cant find that out on here then I would seriously reconsider if internet marketing is for you.

Sorry to sound a bit harsh but those are the facts. By the way, this is the Internet Marketing forum. Questions about flyer distribution belong in the Offline Marketing forum.

Yeah, it probably wouldn't be a good ROI. However, I kind of admire your thinking ... Of going out there and doing something. Most likely that "gusto" applied to Online Marketing would be more profitable.

Good Luck.
: )

I talked about the door hanger thing versus the postcard thing once somewhere on here...

I mentioned a company that was doing door hangers and was so successful they were selling franchises and had sold quite a few. That company filed bankruptcy...but only because the two owners couldn't get along. Lots of publications carried their story...before it all fell apart. Sometimes when you get successful, things fall apart because you didn't set it up properly to start with. Plus, once big money starts to get involved, egos take over and partners can become loggerheads.

They were doing ads from local businesses. I still think it's a great business opportunity. And as I said before, it would just take some hustle.

Personally speaking, I would only do ads for local businesses. Myself, I wouldn't do some affiliate thing.

At least doing local businesses, they're paying you to have the ads printed and distributed...gives you a sure income.

Whatever you decide, I wish you the best. At least you're doing something

I'm not finished hearing myself talk....

Flyers are generally profitable for local offers with very wide appeal. Pizza, movies, oil changes...things everyone needs or wants.

OR offers that are so profitable that you can spend money distributing 5,000 flyers to get one sale.

A little context..

On this forum, how many would buy your affiliate online income offer? And you have to remember that Warrior Forum Members are already interested in online marketing, or they wouldn't be here.

Let's be incredibly generous and say that 1% of the membership here would buy your offer if they saw it.

And now here is the flyer program....where you aren't marketing to the very very small group of people interested in internet marketing...but to them, as well as the vast majority that are not interested in internet marketing at all.

It's the "marketing to people who have no chance of buying from you" that wastes all your money. And makes people quit.

Imagine that I sold text books for heart surgeons. I would advertise on websites that are where heart surgeons hang out. Medical magazines, I would mail to memberships of Heart surgeon association members.

What I would not do is hang door flyers one everyone's door, to get the very few people that are heart surgeons.

And if you want to sell an affiliate offer to online marketers, you need to concentrate on online marketers.

A mistake newbies make is trying to convert people who are not interested in online marketing, into online marketers. Like trying to convert mud into gold.

It's better to just separate the gold from the mud.

Claude is right.


If you're really daring, enterprising and good at copy, you could:


Do a shared flyer. I mean, convince a local pizza place and an oil change place to pay you the cost of the flyer + whatever you want to make, to be presented on the front, a dentist to have the top half, and you and your offer get the bottom half.


You'd have to come up with great ads for the other 3 (because they will not come back if they cannot make a profit). Yours can suck, you're still making money. If it doesn't and it converts well, that's an extra bonus for being clever. And hard-working, of course.


A few years ago, there was a guy Bob Ross on this forum, who was doing something similar (well, he was doing postcards and not putting any of his offers). Look his postcard marketing thread up.


https://www.warriorforum.com/offline...onth-hero.html


and there's a discussion here:

https://www.warriorforum.com/offline...thod-idea.html


And here's a thread by someone who used Bob Ross' system and the results he got: https://www.warriorforum.com/offline...y-results.html

I don't get why you would want to do this? You could reach a much more targeted audience online with a fraction of the time and effort. 99% of the flyers I receive go directly into the trash without even looking at them.

Not worth the resources and time. You're better off spending that money on targeted online ads.

Do you think it will be a good idea during this pandemic?

Claude has got some valuable info in his replies... I'll abstract it out.

You have a Cost Per Lead.

For Claude, it was about $17.

Abstract this out. It needn't have anything to do with the case of Pepsi, the printing costs, or the kids doorhanging, or the delivery of the soda.

You have a Cost of Customer Acquisition, aka Cost Per Sale.

For Claude, this was about $125.

You have a Revenue Per Sale figure.

For Claude, this was about $800.

Business is math.

People forget this or never learn it in the first place.

Everything else is syntax, the "how do you do it".

Syntax is less important than the math.

You have to figure out the syntax, everybody does, or you won't be able to make the math work.

But it's the math that's important.

$800 Revenue Per Sale.

That sale also has a Cost of Fulfillment, in Claude's case the frickin' vacuum cleaner he never talked about. (Shame on you, Claude. You did mention "profit", but I can't finish the math without knowing your dealer cost on the equipment.)

Anyway, let's say it's 50%, or $400. We're gonna do some mighty fine vacuumin'. Afterwards we might drive our vacuums down FDR Boulevard like Dennis Leary's bongs.

$800 - $400 = $400.

This part of the math is a known quantity BEFORE YOU GET STARTED as the seller.

Revenue Per Sale - Cost of Fulfillment = The amount I can invest on generating that sale, ie. the maximum Cost of Customer Acquisition I can sustain.

I have my marching orders as the business owner: I must figure out a way, the syntax, of generating leads and making a sale at a cost of $400 or less.

This will help me in making decisions.

Advertising in the newspaper is $4000 for a one-shot half-page Sunday installment?

I need to make 10 sales from that advertisement, and on the first try, too, just to break even.

Now as Claude himself knows and has written about, an advertisement either works or it doesn't, and so this could happen-if the circulation of the paper is large enough. But in my opinion, having been a copywriter for over 25 years, there are too many risk factors here. The offer has to be spot on. The headline has to work. Enough people actually have to see the offer. And so on. Unless you have deep pockets, ie. at least $20K to make it work though testing, I would not start on this path.

Great, decision made in under 30 seconds.

Flyers, obviously, have a declining per unit cost as you print in larger runs. But you can test at a low print run first and still be well under your desired Cost Per Lead.

For Claude, $800 - $400 - $125 = $275 Profit.

This is the takeway. Figure out your math. What Cost of Customer Acquisition can your offer support? Said another way, what's the most you can spend to get a customer?

This is why upsells and back end offers are so important. They allow you to "go negative" on your up front offer, which is why you see seller giving samples away or charging $1 (which shows them who will take out their credit card and BUY), because you know you'll make it up and go into profit on the back end.

The syntax comes next.

HOW will you get customers at a cost of under $400? (or whatever figure your funnel turns out to use).

This is also your MOAT. When you figure this out, it's yours. Competitors have to either copy you, which folks like the competitors of the Romans found they couldn't quite do simply by equipping their levies with the same weapons as the legions... or they have to come up with their own method. Either way it's going to take them time and energy.

What Claude realized, whether consciously or not, is that he didn't have a DISTRIBUTION CHANNEL.

Some way of connecting with his target market: people who would buy vacuum cleaners.

So he created his own.

Very difficult to copy, this one. Imagine being a competitor and looking at this from outside. What, there's an offer for a free case of soda? What does that have to do with vacuums? You couldn't even figure it out from that point. You'd have to sit there like a private investigator, in your car with the stale coffee and binoculars, watching to eventually notice Claude trundle on up. And only then would you see it was about vacuum cleaner sales.

That's a pretty good moat.

OK, sum up takeaway:

Every business has a Revenue Per Sale, a Cost of Fulfillment, and a Cost of Customer Acquisition. Better figure out what yours are before you start, and begin making decisions supported by those numbers.

This is not complicated.

What I've seen the vast majority of people trying to start a business do over the past decade is the opposite: run out into the jungle without a plan, and "try stuff". Then they overspend, whine that "it doesn't work", and give up.

Who would you rather be?