Tips for digitizing the traditional door-to-door leaflet

By Dirk van Eunen, retail strategy & creativity

For many retailers and companies, the traditional door-to-door flyer is still one of the most important tools to generate traffic and sales. For some companies, it is almost the lifeline to guarantee revenue. Yet, the end of this "cash cow" is in sight, and other tools will need to be deployed to maintain revenue and promotional share. The digital version of the door-to-door flyer is often pointed to as the solution, but that path is riddled with obstacles.

That the traditional door-to-door flyer is becoming less effective is acknowledged by most experts. A key reason for this is the introduction of the “yes/yes” sticker, whereby households must actively indicate that they wish to receive the flyer. Of the municipalities that enforce this policy, only 20% of households choose this sticker. In hard numbers, this means that 2 million households are no longer being reached—a significant portion of the 8.4 million households in the Netherlands.

In addition to the “yes/yes” sticker, production costs continue to rise, while traffic in shopping streets has been declining for years, shifting instead to online. Online traffic is stimulated far less by distributing offline flyers. The effectiveness of the physical flyer is therefore decreasing, while costs are increasing.

Every retailer senses that alternatives must be considered, and the online flyer seems like a logical and straightforward step. By quickly (and cheaply) translating the physical flyer—already designed anyway—you almost instantly have an online version. It sounds simple, but unfortunately, once again the rule applies: simple solutions rarely exist.

Yes, when you choose to digitize your existing flyer one-to-one, you end up with a browsable version. However, no consumer will enjoy reading such a flyer, and enormous sales opportunities are missed!

Key considerations for an online flyer

The most important point when creating an online flyer is that most flyers are viewed on mobile. Designing mobile-first is therefore essential, which means there is only one format for your online flyer: a vertical rectangle!

Whatever format your physical flyer may have, it will need to be scaled into a vertical, rectangular format. This immediately poses a challenge for more horizontally designed flyers, or at the very least requires extra time to adapt the design for mobile.

It is also important that an online flyer shows only one page at a time; the practice of designing in spreads, as often happens with physical flyers, is inefficient. Images that span two pages will inevitably be cut off in the online flyer when generated as a PDF. Headlines suffer the same fate, and disclaimers may suddenly point to nowhere. To avoid these kinds of errors, we recommend reviewing the design of a digital flyer directly on a mobile device. This ensures that the layout is assessed in the right medium, rather than on a large (landscape) laptop or computer screen.

An online flyer is on average 4x smaller than a physical flyer

What also becomes immediately clear when reviewing an online flyer on a mobile device is that the screen size of your phone is much smaller than that of the physical flyer. On average, it is 4x smaller (excluding promotional newspapers).

This means that careful thought must be given to the number of products you can display on a single online page. In a physical flyer, it makes sense to include as many products as possible to showcase the full range. Since the number of pages is not unlimited, retailers want to use the available space as efficiently as possible. But when the online flyer is a one-to-one translation of the physical flyer, the many products on a single page become extremely small and cluttered. This results in an unattractive flyer where consumers struggle to find offers and the impulse to buy is lost.

Fortunately, online pages in an online flyer are “free.” You don’t need to buy more paper, and the weight or size of distribution no longer affects the price. You can therefore allow your online flyer to have more pages than the physical version. It is advisable to create templates with a maximum number of products per page for your digital flyer. This way, you create clarity for the consumer and restore impulse purchasing. Even better, in digital you can add animation and movement, giving extra attention to key promotions. Within the media strategy, such animations could even be offered as an additional opportunity for suppliers.

The hierarchy of promotional pages

Another point of attention for digital flyers is the reading order. For physical flyers, the most important pages are the front and back covers. These always contain the most important promotions—a logical choice, since they are also the most viewed pages.

In a digital flyer, however, this is not the case! The front cover remains the most viewed page, but the back cover in an online flyer is the least read. Consumers scroll through the flyer page by page, and with every swipe, part of the readership drops off. By the end, only a small percentage actually sees the back cover. This changes the hierarchy of promotional pages—something to keep in mind when designing. A simple solution is to move the back cover forward and present it as page 2. You could then create a new back cover focused more on branding or featuring a newsletter sign-up field.

In summary

Offering a high-quality digital flyer goes beyond simply converting your physical design into an online version. It’s smart to work with specific online flyer templates, think carefully about page order, and make use of digital possibilities such as animation, video, and smart click-throughs.

This is the first step needed in the rapidly changing world of promotional flyers. Once you have these essentials in place, many next steps are possible: dynamic content, time-based product offerings, personalization based on personas, or even on transaction history—and much more.

Start by bringing together designers and e-commerce managers to create optimal synergy and maximize the transition.

Do you want to know how to take the step from the traditional flyer to an effective digital version? We are happy to help. Feel free to contact us to explore the possibilities together.