Article Treasures | Ways to Advertise With Circulars

In Co-op mailing, two or more companies divide up the cost and distribution of a direct mail campaign. This may happen when two companies co-operate with each other. Obviously they will be non-competing companies but their target market will be same. They will share all the expenses of printing, collecting and mailing an advertising circular.

If you are looking for a good example of this, consider the situation when a business sends its advertisement for publication to a publisher. The publisher will print your ad on one side of the leaflet and its own ad on the back of same leaflet. You will get your company’s ad published for a reduced fee for allowing this.

Once you get all your circulars, the next step is to distribute them. If this is the first time you are going through this process, be very careful as it may cost you more money than you expect. The cost of acquiring a good quality and relevant mailing list plus the total costs of distribution by post can be very expensive. You should inform the publisher not to send them back to you, instead send the circulars to a co-op circular mailer.

The mailer will take care of the distribution and all related efforts. They will do the test mailing for you and provide you with feedback on your ads. Now the feedback depends entirely on what your ad was offering. As you are dealing with single sheet circulars you must appreciate that it is hard to sell any product valued at more than $50 with this size of circular. If you are aiming to sell more than $50, you must choose a two-step approach.

In the two-step approach, you use a single sheet circular to generate interest and questions, then follow-up with a package of sales material that is of a quality and content level that matches the customer’s expectations for the higher price you are suggesting

You will of course need to generate this package of sales material. Once again the costs can be reduced with the use of a cooperative agreement. However your publisher may not see the possibilities for a further return on their costs and thus you will need to find another partner.

If you do not want to share expenses with anyone else then share it with yourself. This is called the direct mail method. Suppose you print 1000 circulars with ads only on one side of the circular. Now take the first 100 and print another ad of yours on the back of all these circulars. Distribute these via mail and check the response to them. If the feedback is satisfactory, and the returns are at least covering the costs then repeat this process for another 100 or 200 or more. Once you have a proven advertisement set you can scale this up and be assured that the ad will bring in positive results.