The companies choosing door drop in 2022

We’re just at the midway point of 2022 and as we’ve seen recently with the launch of the DMA Door Drop Annual Report, door to door volumes are on the rise.

So who are the clients driving this rise?

As ever, door drop is a channel that serves a variety of business sectors, though many of those dominant areas have changed over the years.

If we have a look at JICMAIL data for all door drop items received in the first quarter of 2022, we can get an indication of which sectors may have been most active:

The table shows the strength of door drop across a range of businesses; from national food takeaway brands, to local tradespeople, to the big UK supermarkets and to local estate agencies.

This reinforces the challenges that the DMA has in collecting volumes each year; the larger volume clients that will typically use bigger door drop companies to place distribution via Royal Mail Door to Door and Teams can be more easily recorded, but the local, smaller volume business that is often handled directly with team businesses or indeed delivered by a company’s own staff, is much harder to track.

It is perhaps a little surprising to see low numbers in the telecoms and utilities sectors, though this may be a result of some turbulence in those areas and this is only the first quarter of the year, so those numbers may well change as the year progresses.

And what about clients?

The highest number of items received by the JICMAIL panel from individual brands are as follows:

• Domino’s
• Farm Foods
• Specsavers
• Waitrose
• Oddbox
• Pizza Hut

This is only the items received by panelists and doesn’t represent any official volume counter for the channel, but it’s an indicator of companies who may be active with door drop across the UK. 

How about TLC clients?

Pleasingly, 2022 saw the return of the last handful of clients that had paused activity because of Covid, and so we are enjoying busy periods across a range of sectors.

Our client split isn’t quite reflective of the table above, although a number of the strongest categories featured will include our biggest clients.

But on top of those, we are doing a lot of work in what might be regarded as under performing categories for the channel; good news for the clients, who are stealing a march on their competitors, and hopefully good news for the channel as we continue to bring new users to door drop.

Some areas of interest for us include:

• FMCG – a number of brands are either testing door drop for the first time or returning to the market, and in six months we have put together a number of high profile coupon distributions, many of which form part of a larger, integrated campaign. Typically delivered by Royal Mail Door to Door and involving free newspaper and solus/team distribution on a couple of occasions.
• Health and Fitness – both locally and nationally, we’re helping businesses hit hard from Covid lockdowns and low consumer confidence, to entice people back to gyms, swimming pools and leisure facilities.
• Travel – it’s wonderful to report that we have several national travel brands running activity again, which has been a more gradual process than some other sectors that were heavily active within 3-4 months of Covid hitting in March 2020.

These are in addition to the significant volumes we are booking in the home food delivery, charity and retail space.

There are challenges ahead for some sectors because of the cost of living crisis, but for others that may open up an opportunity.

Thanks to JICMAIL we can have better, more regular insight into what is happening in the market and this is something we will continue to monitor.

If you’re interested to dig deeper into any of the sector specific numbers, case studies or JICMAIL data then please get in touch and we’ll happily assist you.

Neal Dodd, Managing Director