Retailers using printed circulars to promote sales and new product releases are altering their approaches – rather than sending higher volumes of flyers to consumers, they are instead trying to send more information in one complete package.

Recent data from Market Track, a company that measures the return on investment achieved by retail marketing efforts, found that overall circular counts per market declined in January 2011 from five to four. On the other hand, the number of pages per flyer jumped 7.6 percent during the same time frame.

For example, Lowes sent out massive 20-page inserts in the first week of January, whereas the company released two smaller flyers during the same period last year.

"JCPenny distributed only two flyers this January compared to five flyers last year, resulting in a 48 percent decrease in pages," RetailingToday notes, citing the research. "Walmart and Safeway worked on their promotions in a different way this month, they dropped fewer flyers per market but increased the number of pages per insert by 42 percent and 5 percent respectively compared with last year."

Retail merchants looking to bolster sales should experiment with a variety of means, ranging from time-proven methods such as circulars to new mediums such as mobile devices.

This entry was posted by Retail Pro on Friday, February 10th, 2012 at 2:42 am .