We are a print shop, so you should discount our enthusiasm appropriately. What follows is an attempt at an honest answer, including the cases where print is the wrong spend.
Where print genuinely wins
Defined geography
If your customers live within a few miles, print reaches them with almost no waste. EDDM puts a piece in every mailbox on a chosen carrier route. Digital targeting by radius is far blunter than most platforms imply, and you pay for impressions well outside your trade area.
Physical persistence
A digital ad exists for the moment it is on screen. A fridge magnet, a takeout menu or a wall calendar sits in a kitchen for months. Cost per impression over that lifespan is very difficult for digital to match.
Low competition in the channel
Nearly every local business has shifted budget to social media, which means the mailbox is emptier and the inbox is fuller than a decade ago. Scarcity in a channel is itself an advantage.
Trust and permanence
A printed piece signals a business that exists at an address and expects to still be there next year. For high-consideration purchases, contractors, medical, legal, that signal matters.
Where print is the wrong spend
- Rapid iteration. If you need to test five offers this week, digital does that and print cannot.
- Very narrow niche audiences scattered across a wide geography. Print is geographic, so a dispersed audience wastes most of the run.
- Precise conversion attribution. You can measure print, but never as granularly as a click path.
- Tiny budgets that cannot support repetition. One drop of 200 flyers is not a campaign, it is a rounding error.
Measuring print properly
The common complaint is that print cannot be tracked. It can, just less automatically.
- Unique offer codes per piece or per route.
- A dedicated phone number that only appears on the printed piece.
- A dedicated landing page URL, short enough to type, not a long tracked link.
- QR codes with campaign parameters, useful for younger audiences but do not rely on them alone.
- Simply asking at the point of sale. It is unfashionable and it works.
One drop tells you very little. Response builds through repetition, and the same household seeing your piece three times across six weeks responds at a far higher rate than three different households seeing it once. Budget for frequency or do not start.
The combination that works
The businesses getting the most from print are not choosing between channels. A postcard drives someone to search your name, they find a complete Google profile with real reviews, and they land on a fast website that confirms you are legitimate. Each channel makes the others work harder.
If your Google profile is empty and your website is broken, fix those first. A postcard that sends people to a dead end wastes the postage.
Realistic expectations
Direct mail response rates for local service businesses are typically low single digit percentages, and often below one percent for cold audiences. That sounds discouraging until you run the arithmetic on your average customer value. For a business where one new customer is worth several hundred dollars, a 0.5% response on a 1,000 piece drop is a strong return.
Do that calculation before you print, not after. If the numbers do not work at a realistic response rate, spend the money elsewhere and we will tell you so.
Need this printed? We are on Hillside Avenue in Jamaica, Queens.