Do you ever think about the effects leaflet distribution has for your community?
Did you know that 30% of unaddressed leaflets, magazines and local government information is delivered to you by the Royal Mail, a national company we all know and love?
DOR-2-DOR, established in the early ’90s to offer local businesses an alternative solution to getting their marketing message to residential householders in their chosen catchment area.
DOR-2-DOR operates in over 65 franchised areas across the UK. The independent local owners of DOR-2-DOR are performing a valuable and local service to their business community.
If you don’t like leaflets – simply recycle them
The European Union and the UK government want to see paper going into landfill reduced and recycling increased. They are keen for efficient systems to be put in place to lessen the number of unwanted leaflets inserted in magazines sold at your local newsagents and leaflets and other material that’s posted through your letterbox reduced and minimised.
The Direct Marketing Association (DMA) is currently in negotiation with the government via DEFRA (Department for the Environment, Farming & Rural Affairs) to put in place efficient systems with inserts in magazines and door to door deliveries. This will achieve substantial reductions in any unnecessary waste paper.
The problems to overcome are how do you have newsagents selling publications, some with inserts for readers that want them and some without inserts for those readers who don’t. It’s a fact that some do because it works which is why advertisers do it.
No junk mail stickers don’t always work
With door drops the main logistical problem is making sure our Post Person doesn’t put the leaflet through the letterbox of the homes that don’t want it.
Now you may think this is simple, but in practice there are issues. DOR-2-DOR give their Post People a map of the delivery area showing streets for the drop area, and the deliverer happily goes on their round. The delivery process is entirely mechanical and automatic, and they sometimes have headphones on listening to the radio
or their favourite tunes. If there is a notice on the letterbox our Post Person could miss it and push the unwanted leaflet through the letterbox anyway.
We use the recommended method from the DMA, which is to give the deliverer a list of addresses not to delivered to and we, in fact, mark it on the map that they are following. This works well, but sometimes if the Post Person loses concentration for one reason or another, unwanted letterboxes can still get included in the delivery.
Direct marketing industry injects over £45 billion annually into the UK economy
Why does junk mail have to exist at all? Why don’t we just ban it?
Well, the truth is it works and over 90% of the population don’t mind getting the latest Pizza menu from their local restaurant or a special offer from a fitness club, or a message from a garden maintenance man or a plumber plying his trade.
The fact is it works, and it primarily works for local businesses. It’s relatively inexpensive so it is helping the local business community and creates jobs.
The people who work in DOR-2-DOR have a job, its franchisees have a job, the Post Person has a job. Moreover, more people working means more taxes collected, and this results in better hospitals and schools, more nurses, teachers doctors, and better social services, infrastructure, etc. In fact, the DMA statistics show that the direct marketing industry injects over £45 billion annually into the national economy, and that’s a lot of schools and hospitals.
So a little bit of unwanted ‘junk mail’, that perhaps you don’t want, actually does a lot of good for a lot of people.
Is paper production destroying forests and harming the environment?
Finally some facts regarding paper and trees.
Two Sides, the print industry voice, tells us that 94.4% of the paper we use comes from European forests. These forests are growing by an area the size of Greece – every year; that’s 1.5 million football fields or 4 times the area of Greater London and paper can easily be recycled. More trees for paper means less CO2, so it’s having a positive effect on the environment, not a negative one.
One final thought
Communities survive and develop by communication. However, the data farms of Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. are doing far more damage to the planet and the environment with the megawatts of electricity they are burning than the use of paper ever will. Paper is a minuscule issue by comparison.
