Door Hanger

A door hanger is a piece of printed marketing collateral — typically card stock between 14pt and 16pt — with a die-cut hole or U-shaped cut at the top so it can be hung from the inside doorknob of a residential front door. The format dates to the 1960s "Do Not Disturb" hotel tag and was adopted by political campaigners and home-service contractors as a way to leave a physical message without ringing the bell.

Door hangers differ from flyers, postcards, and Every Door Direct Mail (EDDM) in three structural ways. First, they are hung individually on the doorknob rather than dropped in a mailbox or stacked on a porch — so they don't compete for attention with any other piece of mail or signage. Second, they sit at eye level the next time the homeowner uses their front door, which means the dwell time is measured in days rather than seconds. Third, Canada Post and the USPS prohibit non-mail items from being placed inside mailboxes, so a hanger requires a human carrier and is delivered as part of a walking or driving route — never via the postal stream.

The most common formats are quarter-page (3.5" × 8.5"), half-page (4.25" × 11"), and full-page (5.5" × 11"). Half-page is the working standard for Calgary home-service contractors because it carries a full before/after photo and a same-day phone number without being so large the homeowner discards it on sight. Card weight matters: anything below 14pt curls within a day in dry Calgary winters, and anything above 16pt drives the unit cost above the break-even point on a $325-per-zone job.

In Calgary, a single StreetDrop zone covers approximately 4,000 doors and is walked over one to two days by a GPS-tracked carrier. The hanger arrives at a moment the homeowner is not actively searching — staring at a chaotic garage, watching shingles flap in a windstorm, noticing that the lawn needs aeration — and converts that latent need into a phone call. That timing is the whole reason the format outperforms search advertising on cost per lead for impulse-driven home services like junk removal and seasonal lawn care.

Door hangers are most often confused with direct mail. They are not direct mail: they bypass the postal system entirely and are governed by municipal solicitation bylaws rather than federal postal regulations. They are also distinct from canvassing, which involves a human knocking and pitching in person — a door hanger achieves a similar physical proximity without the awkward interruption.