We have established that door dropping is a highly cost-efficient method of advertising goods and services for companies and organisation of various sizes.
Door drops have been used by national companies, SME’s (Small to Medium Enterprises), partnerships, sole traders and one man bands.
All of these businesses have realised the power of door dropping and have reaped the financial rewards of successful door drop campaigns.
But although there is a good ROI (Return On Investments), it is still vital those advertisers who use door drop leaflets should keep a sharp eye on the cost of producing their leaflets, and in the case of leaflet door dropping, means printing costs.
Be cost conscious
Most cost-conscious advertisers will have already established a good relationship with one or more printers for their leaflet printing, and always go through the motion of obtaining at least three quotes for each job.
The printers they have been using for the last few years would be those using offset litho.
Without going into too much technical detail of the litho process, I have included a brief description of it to illustrate why it has become important to the expansion of the colour printing being used by those companies who favour door dropping.
The difference between two printing processes
Litho superseded letterpress as the favoured method of printing used by advertisers who wished to use printed literature to spread the word.
Simply put, letterpress used a heavy expensive metal block for illustration set in a frame along with the type used for text.
It printed the image directly onto the paper.
Litho uses flexible metal plates to carry both text and illustrations, and prints the image onto a rubber cylinder which then transfers the image to the paper.
This means litho machines can print faster than letterpress machines. This combined with the cheaper cost of metal plates against the heavy copper blocks makes litho a more attractive proposition for printing colour leaflets.
Litho is being challenged
However, despite all the advantages litho held over letterpress, litho still has some drawbacks. With the cost of plates and start-up costs, it has not lent itself too favourably to small runs of colour leaflets.
So those people who may require a small number of leaflets have found it relatively expensive.
However, over the past few years, things have begun to change, and there is a new kid on the block challenging litho’s supremacy: digital printing.
Benefits of digital printing
To be brief, digital printing does not require metal plates and has a lower startup or make-ready costs. This gives them an advantage over litho on small quantities of leaflets.
It would be possible to have 2000 A5 full-colour leaflets printed digitally far cheaper than having them printed litho.
This would allow an advertiser to test a door drop leaflet in selected areas and compare the response before rolling out a larger print run.
My advice to all those people engaged in door drop leafleting is to seek out a reliable digital printer and see what they have to offer you.
Keeping the costs down is paramount to keeping your margins up.
