Leaflet drops: the advertising people can't scroll past

A roofer told us recently that a leaflet round beats everything else he has tried: Facebook ads, Google ads, the lot. One drop, and the phone rings for weeks. He is not wrong, and it is not just roofers. The national numbers say the same thing: a printed leaflet through the right doors is the hardest-working pound in local advertising.

While everyone else fights for attention in a feed that refreshes every second, a leaflet sits on a kitchen table for a month. Here is the proof.

The numbers, not the nostalgia

These are not our figures. They come from JICMAIL, the body that measures mail for the whole UK advertising industry, and the DMA's Door Drop Report 2025.

A few more that surprise people: 13.9% of door drops prompt a commercial action (a call, a visit, a voucher redeemed) and that figure has climbed for six years straight. 9.3% start a conversation inside the household. And it is not an older person's channel: under-35s now interact with door drops more than any other age group. Advertisers spent £182 million on door drops last year, the first growth in three years, because it works.

Why a leaflet beats the feed locally

• No ad blocker, no algorithm. Every door on your chosen streets gets it. Ads get skipped; letters get picked up.
• It reaches people who never search for you. The customer who needs a roofer, a takeaway or a gym but hasn't typed it into Google yet? They see your name first.
• It's physical, so it's trusted. A well-designed card feels like an established business. That matters when you are asking to be let into someone's home.
• It's measurable now. QR and offer codes mean a leaflet drop produces numbers as clean as any digital campaign: scans, calls, redemptions, by street.

Not just roofers: who it works for

Door drops suit any business whose customers live within a few miles of it:

• Trades: roofers, landscapers, decorators, window and drive firms
• Takeaways, cafés and restaurants: menus through doors still fill Friday nights
• Gyms and fitness studios: especially January, September and pre-summer
• Salons, barbers and beauty: new-client offers to the surrounding estates
• Estate and letting agents: farming the exact streets you want instructions from
• Healthcare and care services: dentists, opticians, physios, home care
• Events, venues and shows: a whole town told about one date, fast
• New openings: announce a shop or office to everyone within walking distance

Why have LMS Media run it, not a distribution company?

There are firms that will push anything through a letterbox, and some of them are good at it. What they don't do is everything around the drop. We do the whole job from one studio:

1. Target. We pick the postcodes, estates and streets that match your customers.
2. Design. A leaflet that looks improvised gets binned. Ours are designed to look established and written to sell, by the same people who write your website.
3. Print. Proper card, proper finish, prices that make sense at 1,000 and at 20,000.
4. Drop. Reliable delivery to the doors we agreed, solus or shared.
5. Track. Every leaflet carries a QR or offer code unique to that round, so you see exactly what each drop brought in.

The drop is only the delivery. The reason the phone rings is what the leaflet says and how it looks. That's the part we do best.

What it costs

Bigger print runs bring the per-leaflet cost down. Full detail in our leaflets cost breakdown. And because we handle your website and social too, the leaflet can point people somewhere that is ready for them: a page that loads fast and closes the enquiry, not a homepage from 2019.

Common questions

How much does a leaflet drop cost? Door drops start from £45 per 1,000 homes, design is £89 flat and print starts from £60 per 1,000.

Solus or shared? Solus means your leaflet goes through the door alone; shared means it travels with two or three others, which cuts the cost. Strong offer or a launch: solus. Steady presence on a budget: shared.

How do I know it worked? Every drop gets its own QR or offer code. You watch the scans, calls and redemptions come in by street, and on average 2.5% of door drops drive a website visit, so the signal shows up quickly.

How many should I print? Most local campaigns start at 5,000: enough to cover two or three estates properly and give clean tracking data.

Do leaflet drops actually work? Yes: £2.90 back for every £1 spent, 84% opened or kept, 13.9% prompting a call, visit or redemption, and that figure has climbed for six years straight. Search "leaflet drops near me" and most of what turns up is delivery only. We design, print, target and track the drop, so the numbers above are what you actually get.

Print is not dead. Locally, it is the channel your competitors have forgotten, and the one sitting on your customers' kitchen tables for the next four weeks.