Five thousand menus and a shrug
Every few months you get menus printed and pay someone to deliver them door to door. Sometimes it is the whole town, sometimes a new estate. The next week feels a bit busier, or it does not. You have no idea whether the estate on the hill ordered, whether the menus were actually delivered or whether the busier week was the weather.
So the decision on the next print run is a guess. You do it because you always have, or you stop because it feels like money wasted. Neither is based on anything.
Why nobody can measure leaflets
A leaflet leads to an order through the phone, the website, the counter or even a delivery app. None of those channels asks where the customer heard about you, and customers do not volunteer it. Printed menus often carry a single phone number and web address, the same for every area, so there is nothing to tell one drop from another.
Delivery app orders are the hardest. A customer might read your leaflet and then search for you on an app, which you will never be able to link to the drop. But direct orders can be measured, and those are the ones that matter most, because they are the ones leaflets are meant to encourage.
What goes unmeasured
| Question | Why you cannot answer it now |
|---|---|
| Did a drop bring orders? | No link between the leaflet and the order |
| Which areas respond best? | Orders not grouped by the area of the drop |
| Were the leaflets delivered? | No evidence apart from the distributor's word |
| Did new customers reorder? | No record of when a customer first ordered |
| Is a discount code worth it? | Codes not tracked by drop or area |
Printing and distribution are a real monthly spend for many takeaways, and without measurement it is impossible to tell a drop that brought in a new estate of regulars from one that went straight into recycling bins. The same budget spent in the right streets could do far more.
Giving each drop a way to show up
- Each drop area gets its own short offer code and web link, printed on that batch of menus. A QR code can carry the link so phone users land straight on your ordering page.
- On your website, the link or code is recorded against the order. On the phone order screen, staff are prompted to ask for the code when an offer is mentioned.
- Orders are also matched by delivery postcode to the drop areas, so orders from the area in the weeks after a drop are visible even without a code.
- First-time customers are flagged by phone number or email, so you can see how many new customers each drop produced, and whether they came back.
- A report shows each drop, its print and delivery cost as you enter it, and the direct orders, new customers and repeat orders from that area over the following weeks, compared with the weeks before.
App orders cannot be tied to a leaflet, and some customers will ignore the code, so the figures show a floor rather than the full picture. We make that clear on the report.
Planning the next print run
Three months later the report shows that the new estate produced a steady run of first orders, many with the code, and a good number came back. The streets closest to the shop hardly changed, because they already knew you. The next run goes to two more new areas instead of the whole town.
- Each leaflet drop measured against direct orders
- New customers counted per area
- Evidence for where to spend the next print budget
- Codes and links that drive customers to order direct
Do you spend on leaflets blind?
- You print and drop menus regularly.
- Every leaflet has the same phone number and web address.
- You cannot say which area responded to the last drop.
- You do not know how many new customers you gained last month.
- Deciding where to drop leaflets is a guess.