How to distribute flyers

To distribute flyers, choose the channel that puts them in front of the people who can act: letterboxes in the suburbs you serve, through Australia Post’s Unaddressed Mail service, a private distributor or your own delivery; legal poster sites and community noticeboards; the counters of local businesses; and events. In Australia, skip letterboxes with no junk mail or no advertising signs, keep commercial flyers off poles and walls, and give each area its own web address or code so you can see which one responded.

The table under this article compares the methods, what they cost, the rules that apply and what each suits.

Letterbox delivery through Australia Post

Australia Post’s Unaddressed Mail service delivers flyers with the normal mail, targeted by postcode or suburb. Its page states access to up to 12.7 million letterboxes for community notices and up to 9.3 million for other advertising, and quotes its own figure that 83 percent of people take the catalogues and flyers delivered with their addressed mail into the house.

Three rules shape the flyer itself. Small items can be up to 130 by 240 mm and large items up to 260 by 360 mm, both up to 100 grams, so an A4 flyer counts as a large item and a DL as a small one. Bookings for delivery within the same state need lodging before noon, five business days before the delivery week starts. And about 3.4 million delivery points carrying a no advertising material sign are available only for community notices, not for advertising.

Posties are also instructed not to deliver unaddressed mail to letterboxes with a no junk mail or addressed mail only sign. Australia Post’s own junk mail page notes that it delivers only about ten percent of unaddressed mail in Australia, so the other distributors matter too.

Private distributors and the industry code

Private letterbox distributors cover the rest. The Distribution Standards Board is the self regulatory body for the industry in Australia and New Zealand, and its code of practice tells members and their deliverers not to place material in letterboxes displaying a sign requesting no delivery, not to litter or leave items that fall out of a box on the ground, to deliver only to receptacles designed for mail, and to clean up litter caused by poor delivery.

When comparing quotes, ask whether the distributor is a member of the board, how they check delivery, and whether you can choose streets rather than whole postcodes. A cheap drop that ends up in a stormwater drain costs more than an expensive one that reaches letterboxes.

Delivering by hand

For a new business, a few hundred letterboxes by hand is often the best first run. It costs only time, you choose every street, and you can see which houses have signs.

Follow the same rules the professionals do. Brisbane City Council’s guidance is that junk mail must be placed in a letterbox or somewhere secure where it cannot become litter, must not be left on a letterbox that is already full, and must not go into a letterbox with a no junk mail sticker, which it notes is an offence under Queensland’s waste reduction and recycling law.

The plumbing flyer is built for this channel. It is for a fictional two van plumbing business that letterboxes 5,000 homes a quarter, and each of its three designs puts the licence number, the insurance cover and a 95 dollar call-out fee where a homeowner sees them at the letterbox. The landscaping flyer takes a narrower approach, speaking to the three suburbs where its fictional business has built its gardens.

Posters, pillars and noticeboards

Most Australian cities treat posters on poles, walls, fences and hoardings as illegal bill posting. The City of Sydney issues on the spot fines from 330 dollars for individuals to 400 dollars for businesses, and the ACT Government lists penalties of 1,000 dollars for individuals and 5,000 dollars for businesses under its Crimes Act.

Both offer legal alternatives. The City of Sydney has seven poster pillars that anyone can use for free, one poster each up to A2, cleared every Tuesday. The ACT has poster silos at shopping centres that accept posters attached with flour and water paste or sticky tape, cleared in the first five days of each month, plus community noticeboards with the same rules.

Community notices are treated differently. The City of Sydney says posters for school fetes, garage sales, markets and missing animals are not bill posters and are left up for about a week. The garage sale flyer, for a fictional six house street sale, is exactly that kind of notice. Rules vary by council, so check your own before you pin anything up.

Counters, events and handovers

Some of the best distribution is to people who are already interested. A local cafe will often keep a stack of flyers for a neighbouring physio or yoga studio, especially if you return the favour. Events work for offers with a deadline and a clear action.

Handing a flyer over after contact is underrated. The cleaning service flyer splits its three designs by channel: the services flyer goes in letterboxes, and the priced service guide goes to anyone who rings for a quote. The first finds customers; the second helps them decide.

Track which area responds

Distribution without tracking is guesswork. Give each suburb or channel its own route in: a web address used nowhere else, a QR code pointing to a page only that run links to, or an offer code. Count the responses for four weeks, then put the next print run into the areas that answered.

Keep a simple record for each run: the streets or postcodes, the date delivered, the number of flyers, the code or address used and the responses counted each week. After two or three runs, that sheet tells you more about where your customers live than any demographic report.

Change one thing at a time. If a second run changes the suburbs, the flyer and the season together, you learn nothing about any of them. What the flyer itself should say to earn a response is covered in what to put on a flyer.

Common mistakes

• Ignoring no junk mail signs. It annoys residents and in Queensland it is an offence.
• Commercial posters on poles. Fines apply, and removal crews take them down anyway.
• One run, no tracking. You cannot improve what you cannot count.
• The wrong size for the channel. An oversized flyer folded badly into a slot is read creased, if at all.
• Delivering after the reason has passed. Time the drop to arrive before the event or the season.

Build it

For print, a flyer here starts on an A4 canvas of 1240 by 1754 pixels, in portrait or landscape, and exports as a PDF at 2480 by 3508 pixels, which is 300 DPI at A4. A4 portrait and landscape are the only print canvas sizes, so there is no DL or A5 preset; a printer can scale an A4 design down to A5, which has the same proportions, but a DL needs its own layout. A4 in pixels explains the working size, and the A4 flyer maker covers the print preset.

The export has no bleed, crop marks or CMYK conversion, so tell the printer when you order. The guide to creating a flyer for Instagram and print takes a flyer from brief to the exported file.