In April 2020, parent company Loblaw announced that it was permanently discontinuing printed flyers at No Frills and the Real Canadian Superstore. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, other companies similarly paused paper flyer circulation, but have since returned to business as usual. In an interesting development since April, No Frills has now decided to bring back paper flyers at their locations after a drop in visits.
New figures from Geomedia, a company that specializes in tracking visits to physical locations, shows that when No Frills discontinued its paper flyer, they experienced a 2% drop in share of visit compared to one year ago. Geomedia also saw a decrease in customer visits among the other retailers that had ceased distribution.
Amid the competitive retail industry in Canada, the article goes on to mention that the top-of-mind awareness that flyers provide is very important to organizational success. “We’re able to attribute the flyers to sales, so I can only imagine that their audience was craving the printed flyer that they relied on every week,” says Debbie Drutz, President of Novus Canada.
Adding to these findings, a survey conducted by Postmedia in June 2020 showed that 85% of respondents read printed flyers at least some of the time, and 52% indicated that they always read print flyers. Digital flyers did not show to have the same reach with just 9% of survey respondents only looking at digital flyers and 27% indicating that they never looked at flyers online.
In a study conducted by Totum Research on behalf of News Media Canada, the results also showed the importance of print flyers in today’s industry. Of the respondents that read flyers, 89% used printed flyers and 54% of respondents indicated that their printed flyer usage was about the same compared to a year ago. In addition, 15% of flyer users only looked at printed flyers, a higher percentage than the respondents that only read in digital (11%). The most popular ways of obtaining flyers include it being delivered to the respondent’s door (29%), in a newspaper (19%), and in the mail (17%).
To find out more about No Frills bringing back flyers, click here. To read more about the Postmedia survey, click here.
