Leafleting has a bad reputation with installers, and mostly it has earned it. A generic A5 with a stock photo of a white uPVC window and "20% OFF THIS MONTH" is indistinguishable from the takeaway menu it lands on top of. It gets a glance and a bin.
But the mechanics of door-drops are still sound — cheap, local, and completely unaffected by the ad auction everyone else is bidding in. The problem is almost never the channel. It is the creative.
Leaflet where you are already working
The single highest-leverage decision is the street. If you are fitting a job on a road of similar houses, every other house on it shares the same problem: the same era of frames, the same draughts, the same tired timber. You have a van outside, scaffolding up, and neighbours already curious.
- Work the street you are on, not a random postcode. Same house type means the same problem and the same solution.
- Drop while you are still on site — your van outside is the proof the leaflet is making.
- Fifty doors on one road beats five thousand across a town. Density is what makes a door-drop feel local rather than junk.
Show the house, not the offer
A homeowner cannot picture what new windows would look like on their home. That is the entire barrier. Discounts do not solve it — they just compete on price with everyone else in the recycling bin.
What does work is showing a house they recognise. Photograph a property on the street, render the new windows and doors onto that photo, and print it. The person opening the leaflet sees their own road, and often a house identical to theirs, already changed. That is a fundamentally different piece of paper.
A discount asks the homeowner to make a decision. A picture of their own street makes it for them.
What to put on each side
Two sides of A5 is enough. Resist filling it.
- Front: the render, big. The address or street name so it is unmistakably local. One line of copy.
- Back: what you did, roughly what it cost, and how to reach you. Your accreditations as text — FENSA, CERTASS, TrustMark — and nothing else.
- A QR code to the full interactive before-and-after. This is the bit that converts: the homeowner scans, drags a slider, and spends a minute looking at the change instead of three seconds looking at paper.
Follow the rules on unaddressed mail
Unaddressed door-drops do not need consent under UK GDPR, because you are not processing personal data — you are putting paper through a letterbox. Two things still apply: respect "no junk mail" notices, and if you photograph a property, be considerate about identifying features. Photographing a house from the public highway is generally lawful, but a neighbour who recognises their home on a leaflet they did not agree to may not see it that way. Asking the customer whose job you just finished for permission to use their house is both easier and better creative — you get a real before-and-after.
One more, and it is the one installers miss: if a homeowner responds and you sign them up at their kitchen table, that is an off-premises contract. They get statutory cancellation rights, and you have information you are legally required to give them. Worth reading up on before the leaflets go out, not after.
Measuring it
Door-drops are famously hard to attribute. A QR code fixes that — every scan is a measurable response, so you can compare one street against another and stop guessing. Expect response rates in the low single digits at best; the maths works because the drop costs pennies and a window job does not.
Unformed’s Campaign feature builds this leaflet for you: photograph a house, render the new windows on it, and print a two-sided A5 with the QR code already pointing at the interactive before-and-after. If the homeowner bites, the campaign converts straight into a real project with the survey, quote and contract attached. See how the quoting side works.