5 Tips to Optimize Response Rates From Your Flyers

As Marc Twain might have said if he was a traditional print marketer, “the reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated”. While print marketing in general may have suffered with the emergence of online media, traditional direct response marketing through the mail is still an extremely effective and underrated way to generate leads and sales.

The good old fashioned flyer can still be used as an effective marketing tool. Just ask any local realtor in an up and coming neighborhood. Although in this day and age, your print marketing should be used to compliment an online strategy, it works great as an additional marketing channel that compliments your online efforts. You can even reach an older demographic that might be inaccessible via online marketing channels.

If you’re thinking of sending out flyers or you’re not getting the results you want with your current campaign, here are 5 tips you can use to improve the response rates and sales from your flyer campaign.

1. Put A Benefit In Your Headline

A great headline is the key to success in any form of direct response marketing. Over 83% of people will only read your headline and nothing else, so you had better make those few words count. Most people know that the headline should be big, bold, and easy to read, but people often forget that the headline needs to communicate a benefit of their product or service. Far too many amateur marketers waste their only communication with a potential customer on a catchy slogan or even worse, their company name.

When you write your headline, ask yourself, what can I do to get my customer to read the offer in my flyer? It should be obvious that “Valuable Coupons Inside” or “Save 50% Off Your Dry Cleaning” will generate more reader interest than “More Savings, More Deals” or “John’s Dry Cleaning”. The former examples offer specific benefits to the reader, the latter two examples do not.

2. Use Bright Colored Or Unique Paper & Shapes

When the average person checks their mail, the first thing they do is automatically filter for junk mail. It’s almost a subconscious process – flip through mail, if I don’t recognize the company or it doesn’t have my name on it, separate it for disposal.

If your flyer is made out of a round piece of cardstock or bright yellow paper, you break the reader out of this automatic, subconscious filtering process and improve the chances that the reader will take an extra second to read your headline. Of course, if your headline doesn’t offer a benefit that’s compelling to the reader, they will still discard your flyer. That’s why having a benefit in your headline was the #1 tip.

3. Include A Coupon

Having a coupon in your flyer serves two purposes. First, it gives your prospect a reason to take you up on your offer, especially if the coupon is perceived as valuable and there is a sense of urgency with your coupon e.g. it expires in a few days or the offer is limited to the first 50 customers. The second, less obvious benefit is that it allows you to track and test your campaign.

One of the revolutionary aspects of online marketing is that it’s easy to track every click and see exactly how customers respond to different ads. This is obviously more difficult with print advertising where you don’t always know where a customer discovered your business, but with coupons you can track your customer responses to help optimize future marketing campaigns.

4. Split Test Your Campaign

Instead of just designing a flyer, writing the copy, and sending out the same information over and over again, you should be continually split testing different elements of your flyer campaign. Try sending two of the same flyers with different headlines, or send two flyers with the same copy but with different colors or shapes. Use coupons to help gauge the response rate of the different flyer designs. By continuously split testing elements of your flyer design, you’ll eventually have a flyer that’s been proven to convert.

5. Include A Picture Of A Person Looking At The Reader

Studies have proven time and time again that having a photo of a person looking directly at the reader builds trust and grabs attention. The human mind is wired to look back at someone that’s looking directly at them, and it’s also wired to scan faces to build rapport (of course, hopefully the person you choose looks trustworthy!). If your current flyer is just a wall of text, try incorporating a smiling, head-on photo of someone in your company (perhaps yourself?) and you should see your response rates improve.

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