For many years, Canadian Tire has delivered a pretty thick flyer to people’s mailboxes every week.
(For people who aren’t familiar with Canadian Tire, it’s a soup-to-nuts — or lightbulbs to auto parts — store that’s one of the most famous brands in Canada.)
Canadian Tire also produces an email version.
Yet despite what must be a huge cost to print and deliver the flyer – which often runs to over 40 pages – they keep doing it. They haven’t (yet) been tempted to drop the paper version for the much cheaper emails.
It must be working for them. They must be getting a pretty decent return on investment.
Why? Probably for several reasons:
- Email is getting clogged with spam – it’s not as easy to deliver marketing messages that way as it used to be.
- The paper flyer is more user-friendly. I bet people spend longer with it.
- The paper flyer is more likely to be kept at home for a few days (indeed, I know people who keep it in the bathroom from week to week). The puts Canadian Tire’s brand right into every home, every week. (Sidebar – Sears, of course, produced a catalog for years. The story goes – I don’t know if it’s true – that it had a hole punched in it so people would hang it in the bathroom.)
- They’ve been doing it for a long time and doing it consistently – a vital component in building a relationship with clients.
Any other reasons? Post them in the comments.