subject: Business Door Drop [print this page] Business Door Drop Business Door Drop
With residential door drops we have fully mapped the areas we deliver to. We take a postcode district ie AL5orCW3and then using our sophisticated GeoanlyserTactician software and the bespoke software that they wrote for us to subdivide the postcode district into DOR-2-DORDistributionZones. Typically a Post Code District will have 10,000 delivery points we break this down into delivery rounds of 750 (average), this will typically take a D2DPost Person about 4 5 hours to deliver. However with a business door drop the logistics change.
Firstlydifferent businesses have different target audiences. for example some businesses will want to target offices, some will want to target shops and some will want to target businesses on trading or industrial estates. Generally the most popular target are offices and business trading estates and the least popular are shops. Some businesses would want to target small businesses operated from home many franchises are operated in this way.
Obviously a business drop cannot target residential properties or can it? So the first task with abusiness drop is to find the locations to deliver the material. We have found a website that has free maps of business estates in Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire www.mitre.net this is a very useful site but so far I have been unable to find similar mapping for other areas either by town or county. Shops are more easy to find because they are visible and in areas that if you have a little local knowledge you will know where they are or you will be able to find them. Offices are probably the most difficult to find because they can be literally anywhere. We now have office estates like industrial estates but you have to know where they are they are not simply listed on a convenient website.
The next logistic to resolve is getting into the premises to deliver the material. Many offices don't have simply a letterbox where you can post the item(s). The individual needs to be fairly persistentand determined to get into the location. Office buildings quite often have many different businesses occupying them and the Post Person should certainly try tofind every one to post the item(s). This may be a door to walk in or a reception area or a receptionist it may not be as simply as placing an item in a letterbox. If the Post Person is delivering to shops this can be done when the shops are closed (in the evening or on a Sunday)- most shops have a letterbox(some do have shutters that will restrict access) this is the quickest way to carry out delivery the business owner or one of his staff will arrive in the morning a find your leaflet on their doormat. alternatively the door drop can be done to shops when they are open best to pick a day when they are least busy say a Monday or Wednesday. A more confident Post Person will hand the item(s) to a member of staff rather than leaving them on the counter or even worse on the floor. If you hand the items to a member of staff its best to say could you please give these to the owner or Manager. They may get asked what they are about and a gain a properly trained Post Person (delivering to businesses) will know what to say and how to deal with it. Remember though that they are deliverers not making sales calls. The job is to get the ground covered not spend all day talking to people.
To find all the business locations in a postcode it is possible to purchase a list from such websites as www.b2bprospector.co.uk the list (usually an Excel file) can then be sorted by address or post code so it is easy to see where all the businesses are located. This list will then need to be edited because it will containanything up to 25% businesses operated from residential addresses. This list will then need to be given to a properly trained Post Person who will be shown how to gain access to a maximum number of addresses. It should be remembered though that unlike a residential drop where most letterboxesare freely available for us to post into business addresses are somewhat less accessible.
A factor that should also be considered is that you can always be sure if the right person picks up the delivered item. Ideally you want the decision maker but you might get another member of staff who doesn't know who to give the items(s) to. Compare this to a residential door drop where the leaflet is most likely to be picked up from the doormat by the householder who has a high percentage of being the decision maker. With residential drops we guarantee to get to 95% of properties in the drop area, however with a business drop there could be no guaranteed percentage and in practical terms it is likely to beless than 75%. At DOR-2-DORwe charge 90 per day (10am 4pm) for a deliverer to walk office estates, industrial estates and shopping streets previously identified as target areas (there is a cost attached to finding the targeted areas). As a gestimate in a 6 hour period we could roughly deliver to 250-350 businesses, taking into consideration that the item does not need to be stamped enveloped or addressed this can be a cost effective solution compared to a maildrop using the Royal Mail.A report following the 1, 2 or 3 day activityis supplied showing the businesses we have gained access to.
Finally its worth saying that business owners live in houses somewhere and they are a much softer target at home than they are in their place of work where it is often to hectic to read a leaflet that has just been presented to them. A business drop will probably cost 25p per item to have delivered (based on costings above) whereas a residential drop targeted to business owners (headline Calling All Business Owners) will cost from 4.5p to deliver.
