Door Drops explained

The role of targeting in door-to-door campaigns is very simple: it is to help you reach the people most likely to respond, and avoid wasting money on delivering mail to those who won't.

The end result of targeting should be to increase your campaign's response rate, and therefore your return on investment.
Don't waste money
For any given door drop, only a proportion of people will respond to an offer. Reasons for not responding may be many. Here are a few common reasons:
They may not actually want or need your product or service - vegetarians won't respond to news of your Burger Bar! Your timing may be wrong - they may have just bought that conservatory!
If you deliver a mailing to anyone who fits any of the above, you are wasting your money. Targeting will help your door drop be more relevant to the right people.

Where are your customers?
Door drops don't need name and address details of customers, so they're ideal for acquiring new customers, building awareness, or generating trial.
Instead you target your mailing by choosing areas where response to your offer should be highest. To do this you first need to understand what type of people your target audience are - their profile - and where they tend to live.

Profiles and postcodes
Put simply, a profile is a set of characteristics that help identify and group your target audience. Profiling customers is invaluable, because people who have similar tastes and needs tend to live in similar areas - which means if you know where your audience tends to live, you should be able to find more of them.

You can profile in a number of ways:
Look at existing customers and analyse their buying habits. Can these be extrapolated to find other, similar people in the area?
For new businesses, sometimes profiling is common sense (for example, a new supermarket will usually door-drop the area that surrounds it), but you can also be more lateral in your approach: if you know your customers buy brand x, you can find more people like them using more sophisticated tools like (TGI), which holds profiles of people who buy major brands.

Royal Mail Audience Selector
Generally, the more accurate your targeting, the better the results. Advanced targeting systems such as Royal Mail Audience Selector offer sophisticated methods to help find the right people to talk to. Audience Selector helps you:
Use criteria-based profiling tools such as MOSAIC to target prospects: age, income, and social, economic, cultural and behavioural data can all help define where different types of customers cluster
Use Postcode analysis to help match customer profiles to postcode sectors
There's also a bespoke modelling service available, to produce as tightly targeted a list as possible.

What size of area can you target?
Royal Mail Door to Door - our nationwide door-drop distribution service - allows you to deliver to just about every door in the UK. But obviously you can target specific areas such as:
Individual postcode sectors, consisting of approximately 2,500 households. A postcode sector is the first half of the postcode and the numeral in the second half, for example: OX7 6--.
Any of 1,500 postcode districts, denoted by the first half of the postcode only: OX7 ---.
Any of 122 postcode areas, denoted by the first two letters only: OX- ---.
Post towns, as they appear in the address
One or more counties
England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland
The whole of Great Britain - only Royal Mail delivers to the entire country
You can also target around:
Radio catchment areas
Commuter routes around a specific area
TV regions
Or any combination of the above

Frank Golden
Print Hut!
Plenty of Print for Everyone!
The UK's ONLY Ultra Wholesale Printing Company
0800 9545 014