Door hanger marketing is one of the best ways of reaching people directly.  You’re reaching their front door where there aren’t any other ads found which wouldn’t be the case if you were to advertise online.

What Is a Door Hanger?

A door hanger is a flyer that is designed to hang on a doorknob. This provides many benefits compared to regular flyers which get blown by the wind so often that it diminishes the expected return from the campaign.

Door hangers, on the other hand, are much more durable and won’t easily be blown away. This is just one of the many reasons why they consistently outperform every other type of marketing medium.

Why Door Hanger Marketing?

Aside from the high response rates, door hanger marketing is a tried and true method of acquiring leads. It comes down to a numbers game, just like anything else. The more flyers you put out, the more phone calls you’ll get, leading to a larger number of customers.

The goal of advertising is to bring attention to your business. You can’t get sales if people don’t know that you’re selling something. That’s where marketing comes in. Your next goal is to get your message across as directly as possible.

If you were to advertise online, you’d be bidding to have your ad on top of the first results of Google and other platforms like Facebook, Yahoo, or Bing. Your ad will receive attention, but it’s at the cost of having it alongside your competitors’.

With door hangers, you ad commands 100% of the attention. Additionally, they’ll often be saved for a later time. Suppose you own a plumbing company and a homeowner has been having problems in the past with their old plumber. They come home one day to see your professional looking flyer neatly placed on their front door. By a stroke of luck, they’ve come across an alternative!

Chances are they won’t need your services right away but you can be sure that they’ll save your flyer for the next time they’ll need it.

Cost of Door Hanger Distribution

Door hangers are naturally more expensive than their regular flyer counterparts, and for good reason. The price difference isn’t too drastic and you should always negate the fact that they’re a bit more expensive simply due to the reason that you can expect higher response rates.

It is estimated that any flyer campaign is expected to receive at least a 1% success rate. That is, for every 100 flyers you put out, you’ll get 1 order or new customer. Door hangers are known to receive response rates of 4-5%. It doesn’t sound like much when you’re speaking in terms of 100 flyers but you can see where this can get extremely profitable if we’re talking about 10,000+ distributions.

The price of printing goes down as you order more and so you should keep this in mind once you get an efficient design. Just as a rule of thumb, you can expect to pay anywhere from $0.8-0.11 cents for each one printed.

Which businesses can benefit from door hanger distribution?

There are many ways you can deliver a message to an audience and door hangers happen to be an extremely effective one. Virtually any business or event can get some kind of beneficial value from a campaign.

The obvious ones that stand out are restaurants, daycares, real estate agents, tax offices, insurance offices, and political parties to name a few.

It is basically an opportunity to get your message in front of your potential customers’ most prized possession, their home.

Real estate agents in particular benefit from door hanger distribution by finding deals that aren’t available on the market. They find houses just about to be foreclosed as well as couples who are about to divorce and may need to sell quickly.

Restaurants benefit from sending out their menus and they can be boosted by sending them in the form of coupon door hangers.

How to distribute door hangers

There’s few ways you need distribute these. If you’re targeting residential customers only, you’d pick a zip code that resembles your target demographic.

Do you have a physical business that you’re promoting? If so you would obviously choose the homes directly surrounding it. However, let’s say you’re trying to sell a 1 family home.

What you would do is to locate neighborhoods that really affluent and in a certain income bracket. You could also target zip codes based on how many residences were available before you decide how many door hangers to order.

If you’re targeting business owners, you can put them on the doors before they open. Most of the time there might be a manager opening but you’ll still be able to target a few owners.

How to track conversions

Any advertising campaign should be tracked to ensure the budget makes sense economically. Flyers are a bit harder to keep track of, especially if you don’t have a good call to action.

A good way to keep track is to have a requirement to mention or bring in the flyer in order to receive the discount that’s being advertised. Alternatively, you could type in a special code that can be used at checkout that’ll relate to the specific distribution.

How to design a good door hanger

Most copywriters will tell you to include the least amount of words on any piece of advertising material. This holds true here as we don’t want to overload anyone with too much info

Our flyers have to be short and to the point. Make the offer known up front and as large as possible. The next thing that should come is what action we want them to take.

For example, you’re running a daycare and you want new clients for the summer. You’d have a summer special going for 30% off if they call and mention the flyer.

So there’s literally 3 pieces of information. The first is the offer. Then comes the call to action. Finally, your contact information.

Choosing printing types and options

Door hangers really only come in a few sizes and paper options. If your margins are lower and budgeting concerns are an issue, you’d be better off choosing some of the smaller options without all of the frills.

If you’re lax with the budget, you could opt for higher quality papers which could spruce up the look and design. This isn’t really necessary as the message and offer are tons more important than the paper.

When searching for a printing company, make sure to choose one that offers offset printing which offers a huge economic cost at higher quantities.