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Next time someone is talking up a digital marketing campaign, make sure you run the print numbers first. You may be missing out on an extremely cost-effective marketing channel!

There wasn’t much on the front of the flyer. It simply said: “Get Your Heartbeat Above 150 – Legally”. Intrigued by the memorable message, Nick turned to the other side of the flyer where he found details of how to join a Gym.

This was a very cleverly thought out marketing campaign

The flyers were being distributed outside a busy station where there was plenty of footfall. There was a branch of the Gym nearby. And, being January, there would be plenty of passers-by with New Year resolutions who would be interested in joining a gym.

With a clever and witty headline, this was a flyer with a message that was likely to be read by many potential clients. At the same time, the costs would not be high.

It was not a high-budget prospect

At this point, we would like to emphasise that NM Print played no part in the creation of this campaign. We don’t produce any print for the Gym (although, if any Gym is reading this, we would love to talk to you!) All the figures in the rest of this article are estimated from our in-depth knowledge of print and pay per click.

That said, it was easy for us to estimate the rough cost of the campaign. Let’s assume that the campaign ran for three days. For NM Print to produce 15,000 of these flyers would be just £387. To this, we should add costs of £250 for the design. And also £260 for two people to hand out the flyers for three hours a day (they only need to be present at lunchtimes). So that’s a total campaign cost of around £837.

What sort of results should the Gym expect?

A conservative ROI on this sort of campaign would be 2%. In other words, the Gym should expect to gain 300 customers, each spending £500/year. That’s a total revenue of £150,000, with an acquisition cost for each customer of just £2.79.

How does the flyer campaign compare to pay per click?

The cost for a click in this space is estimated at 64p/click. In other words, to gain 15,000 clicks would have cost £9,600. To be fair, we should assume a different conversion rate from PPC. If we were extremely generous we might make an assumption that PPC would have a 6% conversion rate, three times better than the flyers. So to get the same results would cost £3,200. That’s nearly four times more than the flyer campaign.

People who ignore print are ignoring an extremely cost-effective marketing channel

We should also remember that it is really easy to use. Using a service such as NM Print means that you can place a print order in just a couple of minutes. NM Print even offers design templates for those customers who do not use a designer.

So next time someone is talking up a digital marketing campaign, make sure you run the print numbers as well. And next time someone hands you a flyer be careful: you could end up spending money on a new gym membership!