Door Drop Marketing for Ecommerce

Ecommerce brands are increasingly turning to letterbox marketing to drive acquisition and build their brand.

So, we’ve put together a quick guide to help you understand some of the benefits and show how you can start using letterbox marketing – specifically door drops – to drive sales and build customer loyalty.

What is a Door Drop?

Door drops are where your customers receive targeted print through the letterbox. They’re usually a postcard, leaflet or small catalogue which aren’t addressed but promote brand, products and services.

Door drops used to be seen as a simple direct response-generating tool, probably including a voucher or offer and very little else. But now, brands are starting to realise the benefits of door drops for customer acquisition, promoting offers, driving online traffic and sales as well as building their brand – all in an entirely GDPR-compliant way.

Door drops are effective whether they’re used on their own or as part of an integrated campaign: research shows 90% of campaigns that use door drops see an increase in new customers.[1] Not only this, door drops guarantee 100% coverage of your chosen areas and can be scheduled to fit in with an integrated campaign timeline.

Online’s Crowded. Offline Isn’t.

One of the biggest issues facing e-commerce brands is that online’s incredibly noisy. If you’re working in a successful niche online, chances are it’s so crowded and there’s so much marketing noise, it’s difficult (and expensive!) to make your messaging stand out and achieve the cut through it deserves.

On the other hand, letterbox marketing techniques – including door drop – bypass this digital noise and give marketers granular targeting while dropping messaging straight into the hands of their customers inside their homes, not on their phones.

All in all, many e-commerce brands are finding door drop offers an unchallenged route to new and existing customers and is offering an incredibly cost-effective alternative to digital.

It’s Physical

Whilst brick-and-mortar stores are expensive to have, they do offer a good benefit – they’re a physical representation of the brand before purchase. E-commerce doesn’t have this kind of physical connection to their customers until after a purchase has been made.

Door drops can be a great and cost-effective alternative to create that link with your customers from the get-go. Not only is this great for reinforcing your brand’s legitimacy, but it also helps eliminate any lingering doubts about the security of buying online from you.

This is important for building brand trust, and ultimately brand loyalty for your new customers.

Door Drop Design

How could we ignore the impact that a tangible piece of marketing has? Naturally, the tactile aspect means it will resonate more with your customers. Better yet, it offers more flexibility for you to show off your brand than you have on the screen.

With a bit of ingenuity with design and layout, and a good choice in stock and other finishes – all things Webmart can help with – you‘ll find yourself with a hugely effective and memorable marketing piece.

Impact in the Home

While innovative design and content will push your brand above the rest, letterbox marketing will get it more eyeballs than most other channels.

Mail is better remembered by customers, with 35% better recall than a social media advert and 49% than email.[2] And door drops have a longer lifespan in the home and offer an opportunity to make multiple impressions on prospective customers.

As long as your door drop is helpful, informative and/or relevant, it is likely to be kept in the house for days, potentially even weeks. This is invaluable in comparison to a banner advert on a website, which has only a matter of seconds to try grab customer attention.

Door Drop Statistics

The stats really do speak for themselves. On average, a door drop will have a reach of 1.05 people, and a frequency of interactions of 2.76.[3] This means a door drop of 100,000 will reach an extra 5,000 potential customers, and will be engaged with by each of them an average of 2.76 times.

Unsurprisingly, this has only gone up during the COVID-19 pandemic with more people at home, resulting in an increase of 2% in reach and 15% in frequency. Lifespan of the door drop remaining in the house has also gone up, now to an impressive 6.9 days.[4]

That means there are multiple chances to get your brand in front of prospective customers. By targeting them in their homes, where they can interact with your brand on their own terms, your brand makes much more of an impression.

Targeting and Testing

There is the potential to use advanced targeting to pick out your ideal customer base, through aspects like geography, demographics, or even average household consumption.

Before committing to a full campaign, it’s a good idea to trial a small run of door drops to a specific area to see which design and content is the most effective. It is also incredibly measurable, with A/B testing helping you see which resonates best with customers.

Plus, ROI is very straightforward to work out, especially if you include an offer or code or deliver them straight to a personalised URL.

So, Let’s Put Numbers on It

As an example, looking at a door drop campaign for 100,000 4pp A4s to your target audience, you might expect:

• Print and distribution costs (based on 100gsm silk): £9,725 for 100,000
• Design costs: £275
• Total cost: £10,000

In this example, the average order value from your new customers on the back of the campaign is £200, and you have a profit margin of 50%. This means you would need 100 sales, or a 0.1% response rate, to break even.

That equates to 100 new customers who you can continue to talk and sell to.

Even better, a 0.5% response rate would yield a £40,000+ profit and 500 new customers.

And let’s not forget that your brand has reached 100,000 households, who are more likely to later think of you when they need to make a purchase.

E-commerce is really starting to embrace the idea that letterbox marketing is a fantastic channel for all parts of your customers’ lifecycle – acquisition, retention and reactivation. With a bit of clever design, appropriate targeting and impactful content, it can form a crucial part of your marketing strategy.

[1] Royal Mail Guide to Door Drops

[2] Royal Mail Guide to Door Drops

[3] JICMAIL Data, Q3 Key Metrics 2018

[4] JICMAIL Data, Q2 Key Metrics 2020