Top Door Hanger Distribution Tips for Maximum Response Rate

Best Door Hanger Distribution Tips to Boost Response Rates

If you’re getting ready to create a door hanger campaign, you’re already on the right track. Door hangers face less competition for attention than any other form of media. But door hanger distribution isn’t as simple as just canvassing neighborhoods. You can do better. Much better, in fact. 

In this article, we’re going to take a look at the top door hanger distribution tips that Power Direct has perfected over our many years in the business. It’s why America’s top brands, with the most mission critical campaigns, work with us when they need the job done right. 

What is door hanger distribution?

First, let’s be clear on our terms. Door hanger distribution refers to the entire process of creating and distributing door hangers to a chosen target audience. 

The goal is response. You aren’t passing out literature here. This is direct response advertising. You may be after new customers. Or, you may be marketing to existing ones. Optimized door hanger distribution seeks to do everything possible to maximize response. 

So, when it comes to door hanger distribution best practices and tips, you want to focus on a few aspects of the process:

• Audience targeting. Choose the right people to send your door hanger campaign to.
• Effective media. What are you sending prospects and why would they respond to it?
• Flyer distribution and placement. Get the door hangers to the right doors. All of them.
• Follow-up. This begins on the day of delivery and continues afterwards.

You need a plan for all of this if you want the maximum response rate, most efficient use of budget, and the highest return on investment.

Door hanger distribution tips

The following door hanger distribution best practices all relate to the four components listed above. Doing your target audience research on the front end, ensuring complete and accurate delivery of the right media, and following up will all result in more successful door hanger campaigns. 

Target by demographics

Door hanger distribution begins with audience targeting. The spray and pray marketing strategy is less efficient, more costly, and less effective. Whatever product or service your door hangers are pitching, not everyone is in the target market for it. 

If your product is for families with kids, there’s no reason to put a door hanger on a retired person’s front porch. If your product is meat-based, there’s no reason to deliver flyers to vegetarian households. With proper demographic analysis and planning, you can focus your door hanger campaign on the households where it has a greater chance of being relevant.

With Power Direct, you can target by hundreds — yes hundreds — of demographic variables and consumer behavior analytics such as:

• Age
• Expenditures by category  — telecom, utilities, QSR, etc.
• Home situation — rent, own, condo, etc
• Family structure — kids, divorced, multi-generational, retired, etc
• Racial background
• Language
• Occupation and employment status
• Car ownership status — including how many vehicles
• And many more

By targeting such specific categories, you can personalize your marketing messages to get an even better response.

Target by location

In some door hanger distribution campaigns, the most effective target market will be found in certain locations. Sometimes specific neighborhoods, zip codes, or what Power Direct refers to as block groups — individual segments within neighborhoods. 

If your marketing campaign’s call to action is to visit a particular company store, or locations within a certain radius, you want to distribute your flyers to most houses within a reasonable distance. Apply a filter within that radius that eliminates block groups filled with households who don’t qualify for your offer or meet your most common customer demographic, and you’ve got a much more refined, profitable door hanger campaign on your hands. 

Target from your customer database

For other companies, effective audience targeting requires a look at your in-house customer lists. You could look at active or former customers.

For example, suppose you’re a telecom company and you want to target potential customers who currently use a different service. There’s no reason to distribute door hangers to your active customers. They’re already with you! So, find households in particular areas who are not on your customer list, and send the door hangers to them. 

You could also target former customers and send them a “we want you back” marketing campaign with a special offer just for them. 

In other scenarios, you could send a campaign to your existing customers and offer them the special deals, the option to upgrade their service, invitations to an event, or other deals your customers will love to know about, but might miss if you only advertise about them on social media or email.

The Power Direct data department can also create custom lists for address-specific distributions. These combine your first party data with our access to the world’s most advanced databases along with manual analysis and refinement by our in-house, California-based team. The result is incredibly-effective lists for door hanger campaigns, and a new data asset you can take with you and use again and again, even long after distribution ends. 

Be memorable

Having your marketing show up on the front porch is memorable enough, because pretty much no other businesses are doing it. But you can do even better. What you want is a ‘double-take.’ Something to grab attention. 

The prospect sees your door hanger, picks it up (because they have to), and carries it inside. But then, they look at it again – a double-take – because it’s so crazy, unique, interesting, eye-catching, original, unusual, or funny.

Power Direct’s standard door hangers are oversized, sturdy, ‘mini billboards’ that won’t fly away in the breeze. With those, you have lots of room to create a really captivating visual. 

But if you want to amp the creativity, you certainly can. You can use

• Custom die-cut door hangers made to look like unique shapes
• Interactive door hangers with scents or scratch-offs
• Free gifts included such as samples or tokens to bring in to the store
• Catalogs 
• Perforations for coupons, magnets, and more

Here are some memorable door hanger campaigns we’ve created for other companies.

Track your results

You can run your door hanger distribution campaign in stages, and track your success rate as you go. After each stage, see what generated the best response rate. You might do an A/B test in the first stage, and then use the winning version in the next stage, tested against another option. 

What does a campaign cost?

Get a custom-built sample campaign with real targeting data, ad creative, cost estimates, and distribution plans.

Use the Project Estimator

In a campaign with multiple stages, especially national campaigns in different cities, you might be able to increase response rate and revenue with each stage and apply what you learn to future campaigns as well.

The Power Direct team can help set all of this up for you.

Ensure near 100% delivery with distribution auditing

Distributing door hangers doesn’t work if the door hangers don’t….get distributed. 

It might sound silly, but if you don’t have a reliable flyer distribution team and proper supervision, some of your door hangers may end up in a dumpster, or added to the recycling if the delivery guy gets tired.

Some addresses are harder to find. Some homes have front porches that are harder to reach. Some streets are less easy to navigate. And, people get tired. They might do one side of the street but shrug off doing the other. For all sorts of reasons, an unreliable distribution crew can upend an otherwise brilliant door hanger marketing campaign.

You need a reliable door to door team, someone to supervise them, and a way to audit their work to ensure you distribute all the door hangers to the right addresses. 

Is GPS enough?

Using GPS tracking to monitor your door to door delivery team is a good first step, but it’s not enough. GPS only tells you where they’ve gone. But it doesn’t verify actual delivery of the flyers. 

Power Direct has developed a 6-point audit system that virtually guarantees 100% door hanger delivery. Here’s how we do it:

• Delivery crews use a clicker every time they place a door hanger and clicks are time-stamped so you know when it was delivered. 
• Clicks have to happen within a small radius of the marked house – otherwise it gets flagged in the system as problematic
• Data like the speed of delivery crews are known by combining GPS with click data
• Our in-house, California-based monitoring team continuously reviews data to catch anomalies in real-time and issue immediate corrections
• Photos of delivery crews, door hangers on houses, and map data are all shared through our client portal for customer monitoring at all times.
• Employee auditors monitor all distributions in person and provide physical verification and communicate with the monitoring center to perform corrections as needed (more on this in a minute).

You know which specific person is distributing the door hangers to each street address. Any problems that show up can be traced to the individual worker, because it will be their click data that’s having problems. And our 24/7 customer service team can handle issues that happen after distribution (as rare as they are). 

Here’s more about our real-time verification system

Use on-site supervisors

As mentioned above, Power Direct employs supervisors who can go around and visually verify the door hangers have been placed on the correct doors. And if any problems show up in the GPS click data, the supervisor can personally visit those locations to verify successful delivery, rather than just call the walker and hope they are honest and accurate in their reporting.

Put these methods in place, and your door hanger distribution process will sparkle.

Create a follow-up plan

This is the last and possibly most overlooked strategy for boosting response from your door hanger marketing campaign, or any other marketing for that matter.

In most cases, follow-up begins with the door hanger itself. By including some sort of response mechanism for people who don’t buy but are interested, you can carve out a segment of new leads who will be more receptive to follow-up.

For example, suppose you’re having a huge in-store sale at a brick and mortar location, and distribute door hangers to selected residences within a certain radius. Your flyer campaign includes a coupon people can bring in to the store. For anyone who uses that coupon, you can measure the immediate ROI for the campaign. 

But you could also include a secondary call to action (CTA). It might be:

• Vote for your favorite flavor of product at this website
• Call this number to get your questions answered
• Bring this flyer in to claim a free gift — no purchase necessary
• Enter a drawing to win

None of these actions lead directly to a purchase. The third one is most likely lead to one, because once they come into the store, you can expect many people will end up buying something. But either way, the point is that you can collect the contact information for the potential customers who respond to these sorts of CTAs, and you can then follow up with additional marketing.

You could send another flyer campaign just to them, or a direct mail follow-up like a postcard. You could send emails or texts if you have that contact information and they’ve subscribed. You could even call them, if that fits your business model,

But this all begins by including the appropriate response options on the original door hanger. You plan for your follow-up strategy before you send out the first campaign. 

Get more door hanger marketing campaign consulting

Power Direct is the national leader, by far, for door hanger marketing and distribution. We can help you run campaigns across the entire country. 

When you work with us, we’ll consult with you to make sure your door hanger marketing reaches your ideal target market, and with near 100% deliverability.

In fact, you can get a free Ad Targeting Report (showing the exact locations of your most valuable prospects) just by requesting a project quote. And you get to keep it and use this very valuable resource even if you don’t end up working with us.

With a project quote, you’ll get that free Ad Targeting Report, but also information on the costs for distribution, plans for smooth, effective delivery, ideas for the door hanger creative itself, and more!