Why British Post Is Now Running Campaigns Through Marketize
We want to be straightforward with you in this piece, because we think the situation calls for it. We’ve been in the leaflet distribution business long enough to know what can go wrong – not just in the abstract, but from experience. We’ve had distributors let us down. Not constantly, and not the majority, but enough times that it had a real impact on clients who trusted us with their campaigns. We dealt with those situations the way we believe a reputable company should – we made it right, we refunded where appropriate, we reran campaigns at our cost. But that doesn’t change the fact that those clients had to come back to us with a problem in the first place. That’s not good enough, regardless of how it gets resolved on the back end.
So this post isn’t about telling you that we’ve always been flawless. It’s about telling you what we’re doing about the part of this industry that has historically made flawlessness difficult to guarantee – even for companies that genuinely care about doing the job properly.
The problem isn’t unique to us
Anyone who has spent time in door to door leaflet distribution – as a client, an agency, or a distributor – knows the structural issue at the heart of it. Once a distributor walks out the door with your leaflets, you’re largely relying on trust. Traditional GPS solutions exist but most of them are either easy to manipulate, dependent on a live data connection that drops constantly in the field, or simply not used at all. The industry has run on reputation and relationships for decades, and that works reasonably well most of the time. But when it doesn’t, there’s no mechanism to establish what actually happened. Just two parties with conflicting accounts and no evidence either way.
That’s the situation we’ve found ourselves in more than once. A distributor completes part of a route and claims the full job. A client complains their offers aren’t generating responses from a specific area. We investigate as best we can – but manually handling offline GPS data takes considerable time and opens the process up to further delays and human error. How to prevent dishonest leaflet distributors covers exactly why these situations are so difficult to resolve without systematic verification and what technology makes each tactic detectable.
We make the client whole regardless – because that’s our commitment – but we’re absorbing the cost of a problem we couldn’t definitively prove or disprove. It’s not sustainable, and more importantly, it’s not fair to the clients who came to us expecting something reliable.
What drew us to Marketize
We came across Marketize while looking at what the industry was doing around GPS accountability – something we’d been thinking about investing in ourselves on a smaller scale. What struck us about the platform wasn’t the GPS tracking per se, it was the approach to the specific problems that made basic GPS insufficient in the past.
The app records route data locally on the distributor’s device, meaning it captures the full route even in areas with poor mobile signal. It syncs when connection is restored. That’s a meaningful difference from systems that lose coverage in dense urban streets or rural patches and leave blank sections in the route record – which, as anyone in the industry knows, is precisely where disputes tend to concentrate. For a detailed breakdown of what this data actually captures – coordinates, timestamps, offline storage, route patterns – what is GPS tracked leaflet delivery covers every element of how the system works in practice.
The payment structure is handled through a Stripe-based escrow-like system. Clients pay upfront into a secure hold. Funds release when the campaign is verified as complete. For us, that has two practical benefits: it changes the incentive structure for distributors significantly, and it removes the ambiguity from our own client relationships. If a campaign is verified as done, payment releases. If it isn’t, it doesn’t. How to avoid leaflet theft and false delivery claims covers precisely why the grey-area disputes this system eliminates have been so difficult to resolve cleanly under the old model – and how escrow-style payment protection works alongside GPS and photo verification to protect both parties.
On top of that – letterbox counting tools, demographic mapping, a CRM that we can use across our whole client base, QR code response tracking, geo-tagged photo evidence during delivery. Things we’d have had to stitch together from multiple different subscriptions and tools before.
Why we’re recommending it to our clients
We’re not joining Marketize because we think it makes us look good but because we think it addresses a genuine weakness in how this industry operates – one that has caught us out before and that we’d rather not be caught out by again.
What it means practically for our clients is this: campaigns run through Marketize give you access to a live GPS map of your delivery as it happens, a completion report with verified route data and timestamps, and GPS proof of delivery in the form of photo evidence from the route where distributors have opted to capture it. If something goes wrong – a section missed, access issues on a particular street – it shows up in the data. There’s no argument about it. We can see it, you can see it, and we deal with it immediately rather than retrospectively. Removing one of the most subverting variables in your marketing campaign efforts – the question whether your leaflets were delivered properly, leaving you to focus on honing and fine-tuning your campaign rather than waste sleepless nights and stressful days on investigating and trying to obtain redress.
We’ve always made things right when they’ve gone wrong. Marketize gives us a better chance of things not going wrong in the first place – which is what our clients deserved all along.
A word on what this doesn’t change
We’re still British Post: The team, the coverage areas, the way we communicate with clients – none of that changes. What changes is the infrastructure running underneath each campaign and the level of real time delivery tracking transparency available to you as a client when your leaflets are out in the field.
If you’ve worked with us before and want to understand how your next campaign will work through the platform, get in touch. We’ll walk you through how it works from the client side – the live map, the GPS trail, the photo pins, and the verification report.
If you’re a new client weighing up your options – we’d say this: the accountability layer that Marketize provides is now part of our standard offering rather than just an add-on. It’s the baseline we should have had available years ago.
British Post provides leaflet distribution services across the UK. To discuss your next campaign or learn more about how we work through Marketize, visit BritishPost, our listing on Marketize, or get in touch directly.
