How third-party inserts can maximise your media mix and reach new audiences

At Edit, we specialise in planning and buying media across all channels. One of the channels we are an expert in which we have specialised in for over 10 years, is third-party inserts (leaflets placed into parcels delivered into the home). TPI’s often sit a little under the radar, especially for larger brands who place large volumes of standard inserts into magazine and press titles, and think they already have the insert channel covered.

TPI’s sit separate to standard inserts as they are delivered into the home with other non-competing brands and allow us to target a new group of individuals with the perceived endorsement of that brand in a partnership that allows the client to effectively ‘piggy-back’ onto the brand trust and loyalty of the parcel they are inserted into. Once a consumer has bought something from the likes of ASOS, Graze or Beer 52 as an example, they are in a pleasant state of mind after receiving the parcel they’d been expecting – it’s a great time for them to see an insert in this positive mindset.

Not to say that press and magazines are not important too, but TPI’s can complement these inserts with a more targeted approach tapping into a specific audience rather than the much broader audiences we see with press titles and a lot of the large-scale magazine titles. Brands often underestimate the power of offline marketing, but with the right creative in the hands of the right consumers at the right time the cut-through can be significant amongst the noise of other media. Based on previous client performance across a broad range of sectors, we have found that TPI’s tend to out-perform standard inserts fairly significantly – the response rates are 60% higher on average and the quality of the responses are better than standard inserts with consumer spend being around 40% higher and lifetime value averaging 30% higher. Most titles will accept heavier creatives too, allowing you to explore different specifications with higher impact for testing & optimising to further enhance performance.

There are lots titles available across many different audiences ranging from Boohoo, Missguided and Pretty Little thing for a young female audience, to Cotton Traders, Scotts of Stow and Damart for an age 50+ lower affluence audience. At Edit, we have a fantastic relationship with all TPI partners in the market giving us access to a broad range of titles with high volumes, preferential rates, and quick planning.

Our challenge

One of our telecoms clients had already trialled and tested all key above the line channels and wanted to explore new opportunities to further increase reach and discover new audiences to target with their TV, broadband and telephone offers. They approached Edit with the challenge of finding a new cost-effective approach to add to their marketing mix with an aim to recruit new customers by finding new audiences and also focus on some of their more niche audiences with cut through creative running alongside other channels to promote their most recent offer. The client had previously run press insert campaigns, but this channel didn’t perform particularly well, and they felt they had exhausted this audience which was limited due to the nature of newspaper audiences being similar across the market and not being able to narrow down to specific audience genres/interests etc.

Our strategy

We recommended proceeding with third party inserts as a new test. Using our extensive knowledge of the third party insert market place and our experience with other clients, this meant we had visibility of all relevant titles against various different audiences within the TPI market and could introduce a wide range of titles and carriers relevant to the audiences we’d been tasked to target.

The results

We achieved a massive 500% better response rate in comparison to standard press inserts and a 50% lower CPA.

This has resulted in regular TPI bookings from the client as we continue to explore and optimise this channel against multiple audiences and different offers. Volumes for each campaign average around 3-4 million opening a large pool of potential new customers.

If you’d like to find out more about how TPI’s can help maximise your media mix and reach new audiences, get in touch: jodie.hanrahan@edit.co.uk