Having recently printed 5000 flyers to promote the website and get some more clients, I was then faced with the dilemma of how and where to distribute them, and how many.

The problem was trying to predict the level of response I might get from the campaign. There are plenty of leaflet drop services, and I was looking at around £300 for having all 5000 dropped through people’s doors in my local area (no company would do less than 5000 anyway).

But what if the response ratio was, say, 1%? That would have generated 50 enquiries. Optimistic, probably, but then any kind of projection would inevitably just be an educated guess. And if I got 50 enquiries, at the moment I would never be able to fulfill them and I would lose potential customers.

In the end, I resolved to start mapping out my local area and drop the leaflets myself, street by street. I started with about 30 flyers and then waited a couple of days to see what would happen.

I got one email enquiry, though it wasn’t strictly a web design job, rather an offer of business collaboration. Still, any response is a good thing. And I now know that, in terms of getting web design enquiries, 30 leaflets don’t go a long way, so next time I’ll try 100. That way, if I get 1 enquiry, I can say the response rate is about 1%. Of course these things are never an exact science and there’s a lot of random factors at play, but it’s important to have a system in place which will serve as a reference point for future campaigns.

As for the actual job of dropping the flyers, it’s not something I particularly enjoy: the prospect of coming face to face with one of the many people who hate junk mail and enjoy confronting the culprits is not a nice one. But I’m thinking of it as a much needed self-confidence exercise. Always look at the positives. Anyway, it’s got to be done…