There is plenty of good advice in the door drop world about standing out on the doormat.
One of the most popular is die-cuts, pop-outs and unusual formats.
It is sound advice. It is just not for most brands using door drop.
Where it works and where it doesn’t
Rough rule of thumb. If you are a big FMCG or ecommerce brand with an average order value around thirty to eighty pounds, format flair is fair game.
If you are in a low-interest category, later-life property, mobility, care, insurance, anything with a long consideration window and emotional weight, that advice does not track in the same way.
Here is why.
For your brand, the first action someone takes is not a purchase. It is request a brochure. Book a callback. Get a free quote. Watch this video. Call and speak to an adviser.
They have to trust you enough to take that first step before they have spent a penny.
And a die-cut built purely for attention can easily give the wrong first impression. Anyone who has watched someone try too hard to be noticed in a meeting or a pitch knows how that reads. It is off-putting. In a category where the reader is already weighing something up, off-putting is expensive.
For these brands, format is usually not the problem. Familiar, easy to hold, easy to read and easy to digest is plenty. Something the reader has picked up a hundred times and knows what to do with.
Format can earn attention. The argument earns action.
Check how it actually folds
Here is a small thing that costs more than it should.
I got a door drop from Hillarys that was clear, organised and persuasive. Genuinely solid direct response creative.
But only if you could be bothered to work out how to open it.
It had been designed to unfold a specific way. Nobody checked how it would actually be folded in production. So the experience for the reader was nothing like the one intended, and the layout ended up confusing.
That is real-world context getting lost between the marketing team, the creative team and the production team. And it turns work that should perform into work that doesn’t.
No one cares how you wanted it to be opened. They did not want to read it in the first place. Your first job is to make it effortless.
The pretty ad problem
I trained as a graphic designer. Like most students, I was obsessed with how things looked.
Then I got my first job in advertising, as a Mac operator at a direct response agency in Dartford. And I learned something brutal fairly quickly.
The prettier the ad, the worse it performed.
I would spend hours making an ad look as good as possible, only for the ugly ones to beat mine in A/B tests.
It took me a while to work out why, and the answer was simple. I was designing for me, not for the person reading it.
They did not care that I had balanced the typographic hierarchy. They did not care that I had kerned the subhead. They cared about themselves. And if the ad did not communicate why it mattered to them clearly, quickly and persuasively, it did not work.
So what actually matters
Get the argument right first, in a format that has been proven.
If the argument recognises the reader’s problem, speaks their language and gives them a clear reason to take the next step, the shape of the leaflet is irrelevant.
If it doesn’t, no fancy format is going to save it.
Getting noticed for the sake of it is pointless. Getting noticed because of the value you offer the right reader isn’t.
Or as Ed McCabe put it, every time we get creative we lose money.
Send me your creative