7 Door Hanger Marketing Secrets to Eye-Popping ROI

We all want marketing that works. Good marketing motivates customers and contacts to take action that benefits them and produces revenue for you. Door hanger marketing is one of the most effective ways to do this because it bypasses so many of the usual barriers.

What barriers does door hanger marketing evade so well?

There’s no competition for eyeballs at the front door. No other ads, no popups, no endless scroll of social posts, no cascade of emails, and no other envelopes. There are no visual distractions. Front door marketing earns nearly 100% of what online marketers call ‘impressions,’ because pretty much everyone who finds something on their front door will look at it.

For today, let’s take something that already works well — door hanger marketing — and turn it into something exceptional.

Here is your Seven-step blueprint to creating a top-performing door hanger marketing campaign.

1. Specify your marketing objective

So much marketing attempts to be all things to all people. It’s vague. It’s general. And it doesn’t work. Or, even if it does work, it’s hard to attribute an ROI to the campaign because it lacks a traceable metric by which success can be measured.

The best door hanger marketing campaigns are built around one specific objective.

For example, you might want to:

Attract new customers
Sell a new product or service
Sign up more monthly subscribers
Generate in-store leads
Increase revenue from existing customers

There are quite a few marketing objectives you could pursue in a door to door marketing campaign. Pick one, focus the entire campaign around it, and build from there.

Here’s a discussion of ten door hanger campaign ideas that are each built around a specific marketing objective. For example, wanting new customers is an objective, but there are many ways to pursue them. One idea is a ‘bring a friend’ campaign. The purpose is to get new customers. But if you’re using that specific strategy, your door hanger copy and design will be built around motivating your current customers to bring a friend into one of your locations.

2. Identify your target audience

With door hanger marketing, you can use exceptional targeting capabilities, especially when you work with Power Direct. We offer hundreds — yes, hundreds — of demographic and other types of targeting variables, including advanced, direct marketing targeting methods that direct mail can’t touch.

Want to target Spanish speaking families with kids living within a particular city? You can do that. Or how about retirees in 55-and-up communities who have two cars and no mortgage?

Your targeting depends on your marketing objective. Who do you want to attract with this offer? Why them? And where are they located in the highest concentrations? This will affect the copy and design on your door hangers. Any photos or graphics should reflect the type of person your campaign is pursuing.

In some cases, targeting can take you so much farther than just demographics. With Power Direct, you can also use descriptive modeling if you already have good customer data. Learn more about targeting analytics for direct marketing.

3. Plan your creative – copy, design, and cut

With the purpose of your marketing clarified and your audience defined, you can now begin working on the campaign itself. At the core, a good door hanger marketing piece accomplishes three things:

It grabs attention

You can grab attention in a number of ways. A great headline gets attention, especially one that calls out the target audience. Headlines can also provoke intense curiosity and wonder, or fear of missing out. You can also use a headline to make the recipient feel special, because hardly anyone else got this offer or knows these secrets.

Another way to get attention is with the right photo or graphic. The type of image that makes people ask, “What is that?” Anything that elicits emotion can make the recipient take a closer look.

With door hangers, another attention-getting strategy is to choose a customized cut. We’ve had clients create custom shapes for their door hanger campaigns in the form of pancakes, toilets, dog bones, and coffee bags, just to name a few.

If you came home to find a toilet-shaped ad hanging on your front door, could you resist looking at it?

It makes a clear and specific offer and call to action

Save 20% on your first order. Bring a friend and get a free meal. Write a review and get entered to win a prize. Start your free trial within the next 30 days and get a second month free.

All of these offers are clear and specific. The prospect knows exactly what’s being offered to them, and if it resonates, they won’t hesitate to act. There’s no confusion.

The rest of your copy and design must be built around this sort of offer and language. If you’re offering a free trial, don’t waste precious door hanger space going on about anything else that doesn’t directly relate to motivating the person to sign up for that free trial.

It gives clear directions

Especially with print advertising where they can’t return to the email or bookmark the page for later, you need to make sure that anyone who wants to act on your offer knows exactly what to do.

Give a step-by-step procedure that is easy to understand. For example:

Step 1: Visit our website at this URL
Step 2: Fill out the form and click the ‘Sign Me Up’ button
Step 3: Check your email and claim your reward for signing up
Step 4: Visit our online store and use your reward

Do you see how that approach works so much better than tiny print in the corner that tells them to “act now” and then gives the URL, with no further instructions?

When you leave room for confusion, you’re going to cause it.

4. Plan your distribution strategy

Door hanger distribution can be driven by several possible factors such as:

Deadlines on your offer
Dates such as grand openings or specific events
New product or service roll-outs
Coordination with marketing campaigns in other media channels
Holidays
Inventory — quantities in-stock online or in-store
And more

In some situations, you might want to distribute door hangers area by area, around each store location. In other situations, your door hanger distribution plan could prioritize speed and volume — get it done as fast as possible in the shortest amount of time. You could also do city by city if it’s a national campaign.

Another possibility is that you first run a ‘test’ campaign with, say, 20,000 addresses, with future plans to send out a larger campaign to several hundred thousand more. The test campaign might run 2-4 different versions of your door hanger marketing. Once you have the results, you could then distribute the rest.

But where you choose to send that test campaign matters. The test audience has to be representative of the larger audience you intend to use later. Otherwise the testing data wouldn’t be valid.

Distribution can be done in a few days for smaller campaigns, and sometimes over weeks for larger ones. For door hanger marketing, your distribution plan is a critical component if you want to experience the best possible results.

5. Audit your distribution as it happens

Planning your door hanger distribution is one thing. But how are you going to know if your plan is actually being followed? You’re relying on a team of delivery specialists to go one address at a time with your door hangers.

Unlike just plastering whole zip codes with flimsy flyers that flap in the breeze, you are targeting specific households and block groups for specific reasons, as already discussed. And with Power Direct, you’re placing sturdy, large, high quality door hangers that are more like mini-billboards than what most people think of as flyers and door hangers.

So you need an auditing plan to make sure the delivery specialists are placing your door hangers at the correct addresses — every time.

You don’t want 80%, 90%, or even 95% delivery. You want as close to 100% correct delivery as possible.

Our service includes 3 levels of door hanger delivery auditing, and that comes with a digital tracking portal that all of our clients can use to monitor their door hanger distribution as it happens. This goes way beyond mere GPS.

The more door hangers that get delivered to the correct addresses, the more money your campaign can bring in. That’s why auditing matters.

6. Track your door hanger marketing results

If you’ve set up your campaign well, you’ll be able to track how many recipients take action. You can use most of the techniques that you’re probably familiar with in the digital world. too:

Unique coupon codes
Trackable QR codes
Unique landing pages
Unique opt-in form pages
Trackable phone numbers

Just about all the tracking tools available in digital marketing can be used with door hanger marketing. This is why door hanger marketing doesn’t exist in isolation.

On the contrary, door hangers will make your digital marketing efforts that much more productive. You’ll have more site visitors and more conversions because you’ll have way more impressions from your ideal audience. And those impressions will actually see the details of your offer, rather than a passing social media ad that’s gone before you can blink (yet those somehow count as impressions… yikes).

Track your results so you can build on this campaign with future marketing efforts, and so you’ll know how well this one has worked.

7. Follow up with your new leads and customers

Lastly, whatever the goals of your door hanger marketing campaign, it doesn’t stop there. You just acquired a new batch of customers or leads. Or, you re-connected with some existing customers.

Whoever responded to your marketing, follow up with them using appropriate methods of communication. That could be email, text, direct mail, or another door hanger campaign. And for the people who didn’t respond to the door hanger campaign, perhaps you can design another campaign to go after them in a different way.

Do whatever makes sense depending on the details of your campaign. But do something. Follow up, and you will increase the lifetime customer value of the people who respond to your door hanger campaign.

Get a quote for a door hanger marketing campaign

Is your company ready to supercharge impressions for your target audience using door hanger marketing?

Article by Power Direct Marketing

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i2i@i2idirectmarketing.com