For me, one of the problems with smaller drops is that it's pretty tough to work out if and why they have been successful.
You'll hear people on here saying that they are dropping, say, 1000 leaflets. Now, if you response rate is around 0.3-0.4%, then you're expecting three or four responses. If you get zero responses, it might mean that your leaflet's failed or that you've had a typical random result.
Bung out 10,000 and you're going to end up in the range of 30-40 much more consistently, so you can begin to assess success.
For my second 43K drop in November, I'm planning on mixing two completely different leaflets so I can see which is more effective. Without research work like that, I can't get better. They'll both be as good as I can manage, but I expect that one will do better than the other; then I'll create a third one to compare with the better result, and so on.
Another benefit of that is that my second drop with a different type of leaflet may well pick up a customer who didn't respond to the first one.
Lee Pryor manages drops of 100K, which certainly gives you a good basis for assessing how good your results are. My total catchment is the 56,000 owner occupied houses in Southampton, so that's my logical limit. Again, though, one problem with the leaflet approach is that any distributor is goingto hit a bundle of properties out of my target type.
All good fun...now I just need somewhere to store 50,000 leaflets for a fortnight.
Vin