A door drop is a cold call in print.
You are uninvited. They did not ask for you. They do not know you. They are not looking for what you sell. And you have got a few seconds to make a case before it goes in the recycling.
That is the honest starting position. Most creative is built as though it isn’t.
I watched a video recently of a bloke who makes sixty to eighty cold calls a day. Before he picks up the phone, he gives himself a pep talk. These people don’t know who I am. They don’t care what I have to say. They owe me nothing. All they care about is themselves and their own problems.
That is not a sales trick. That is an accurate description of every piece of direct response you have ever sent.
The difference is he knows it.
The people making it care. The person reading it doesn’t.
Creative gets shaped by briefs, brand guidelines, feedback and sign-off. That is how it gets made, and there is nothing wrong with that.
But everyone in that process is paid to care about it.
The person picking it up off the doormat is not. They did not ask for it. They probably do not want to read it. They might wish you had not sent it at all.
That is the person the argument has to be built for.
And when you forget it, the creative starts explaining the product in ways stakeholders like. What it does. How it works. Why it is different. How long the business has been going. What the customer needs to do next.
It reads as sensible. It is response suicide.
You care more than they do
This is the easiest mistake to make. You spend every day thinking about what you sell. You know why it is good. You know how it works. You have seen how much it helps people.
So you write as though the reader knows all that too.
They don’t. And more to the point, they are not that interested yet.
Now think about how small a slice of your drop volume is made up of people already looking for your solution and ready to do something about it. Then think about how much bigger that slice could be if the creative was built for the people who have the problem you solve and are open to options.
You show them something they recognise about their own life. You show them you understand why the problem keeps happening. You show them what could be better. You make the next step easy and low risk.
That is a different job to explaining your product.
It has been true for a very long time
Victor Schwab wrote a poem in 1942 called Tell Me Quick and Tell Me True. It is the best summary of this I have read, and it is over eighty years old.
I see you’ve spent quite a big wad of dough,
to tell me the things you think I should know.
How your plant is so big, so fine, and so strong,
And your founder had whiskers so handsomely long.
So he started the business in old ‘92!
How tremendously interesting that is… to you.
It carries on for another twenty lines, and every one of them is a reader asking the same question. What does the damn thing do for me?
Eighty years on, most door drops still lead with the whiskers.
Where this leaves you
Nobody is sitting at home waiting to hear about your product. They are thinking about their own life. The heating bill that went up again. The stairs that are getting harder. The conversation with the kids they keep putting off.
That is where you start.
Not with the brand. Not with the product. Not with the offer.
With the problem they already have.
I put a free workshop together that shows what this looks like in practice. I take a real door drop, show you exactly where it starts losing people, and what I would change.
Watch the workshop