Direct to Door Mailing Explained, From EDDM Routes to Door Hangers
Three channels put print on a doorstep, and they are priced, targeted and regulated differently. Here is how each one works, what disqualifies a piece, and which one fits your buyer.
Direct to door mailing is any printed piece delivered to a home without you knowing the resident by name, and there are three ways to do it. USPS Every Door Direct Mail buys a whole carrier route with no addresses, addressed direct mail buys a list of specific households, and door hangers skip the postal system and pay somebody to walk the street. EDDM is the cheapest per household and the least selective, addressed mail costs more and hits narrower, and hand delivery has no postage at all but legally cannot touch a mailbox.
Quick answer
Buy a route, buy a list, or pay somebody to walk
The three channels differ in who receives the piece and who carries it. EDDM covers every address on a postal carrier route, so there is no list to rent and no name on the card, and the piece must qualify as a flat by beating 6 1/8 inches high, 11 1/2 inches long or 1/4 inch thick. Addressed direct mail costs more per piece but lets you filter households and suppress your own customers. Hand-delivered door hangers pay no postage, move fastest on a short street list, and by law stay off the mailbox entirely.
The Three Ways a Printed Piece Reaches a Front Door
People use "direct to door" to mean whichever channel they last used, which is how campaigns end up costed against the wrong benchmark. The three routes to a door are genuinely different products with different failure modes.
| Channel | How you choose who gets it | What you pay | The catch |
|---|---|---|---|
| EDDM Retail | Pick whole carrier routes on the USPS map. No names, no addresses. | Printing plus a flat per-piece postage rate. No permit fee, no list cost. | 5,000 pieces per ZIP per day, and you must physically drop the bundles at the delivering Post Office. |
| EDDM through a permit | The same routes, submitted through a business mail entry unit. | Printing, postage, and an annual permit or a mail house that owns one. | More paperwork up front, no daily cap, and you can hand the whole job to someone else. |
| Addressed direct mail | A list, filtered by household or business attributes, with names on the pieces. | Printing, higher postage, plus the list rental or purchase. | List quality decides the result. A stale list burns postage on people who moved. |
| Hand-delivered door hangers | Streets you or a distributor choose, house by house. | Printing only, then labour. Door hangers start at $290.41. | No postal system means no postal reach. Coverage is only as honest as the person walking. |
Read the last column before the third one. Cost per thousand tells you almost nothing on its own, because the cheapest channel is the one whose catch you can absorb. A restaurant with four streets worth of customers should not be renting a list. A commercial roofer selling to houses over thirty years old should not be buying whole routes. Our explainer on what EDDM is covers the program in detail, and EDDM Retail versus BMEU covers the moment you outgrow the retail counter.
How an EDDM Drop Actually Runs, Start to Finish
The sequence is short, and every step has one thing in it that catches first-timers.
One, select routes on the USPS EDDM tool. You draw a radius or search a ZIP, and the tool returns carrier routes with their residential and business counts. Write down the route numbers and the total, because that number is your print quantity and there is no rounding down later.
Two, size the piece so it qualifies. This is where most jobs die. The piece must be a flat, and a standard postcard is not one. See the next section, and start from an EDDM size rather than trying to rescue a design you already like.
Three, print with the address panel reserved. The mailing side carries the postal indicia in the top right and the endorsement line that tells the carrier this is a saturation mailing. Leave that area clear from the first sketch, not after the artwork is approved.
Four, bundle and paperwork. Pieces go out in bundles of 50 or 100 with facing slips on top, one bundle set per route, plus the USPS form that accompanies the drop. Count carefully. A bundle that is short gets rejected at the window and you drive home with it.
Five, drop at the delivering Post Office. Not any Post Office, the one that serves those routes. Pay at the counter and keep the stamped paperwork.
If steps four and five sound like a morning you would rather not spend, that is exactly what direct mail postcards exist for at $89.68 and up. We print, prepare and submit the mailing, and you never see a facing slip. The same applies when you are mailing to names instead of routes, which our guide on building or renting a mailing list gets into.
Sizing and Setting Up the Piece So It Qualifies
EDDM Retail moves flats, not letters. A mailpiece counts as a flat once it exceeds any one of three dimensions, and only one has to be beaten.
- More than 6 1/8 inches high, or
- more than 11 1/2 inches long, or
- more than 1/4 inch thick.
The upper end is capped at 15 inches long, 12 inches high, 3/4 inch thick and 16 ounces. That leaves a workable band, and the sizes that live comfortably inside it are 6.5 by 9, 6.5 by 12, 8.5 by 11 and 9 by 12. The trap sits right at the edge: a 6 by 9 postcard fails, because 6 inches is under 6 1/8 and 9 inches is under 11 1/2. Trimming the same artwork to 6.5 by 9 makes it mailable. That eighth of an inch has sent more reprints back to press than any design mistake.
Our oversized postcards start at $51.62 and cover those sizes directly. Plain standard postcards at $16.48 are the cheaper piece, but they are a letter-rate product for addressed mail, not an EDDM piece, and mixing the two up is the single most expensive assumption in this whole channel.
On the mailing side, reserve the top right for the postal indicia and leave the endorsement line legible. Do not run a dark photograph under the address area, do not creep artwork into the clear zone, and do not letter-space the endorsement to make it fit the layout. The full clear-zone measurements sit in our EDDM file setup guide, and you can start from a correctly built layout in the blank template library instead of measuring it yourself.
Where Each Channel Earns Its Money
EDDM wins when your buyer is defined by geography and nothing else. Neighborhood restaurants, dentists, gyms, lawn care, house cleaning, storage: the person two streets away is worth the same as the person next door, so paying to separate them is money spent on nothing. Buying the route also removes the biggest hidden cost of addressed mail, which is a list that has quietly aged.
Addressed mail wins the moment an attribute matters. Home age, lot size, business type, tenure, purchase history, or your own customer file for a win-back. Mailing 900 correct households beats mailing 4,000 households where 3,100 will never buy, even though the per-piece cost is higher. Mailing flyers start at $89.68 and are the lighter, cheaper piece when the offer needs room but not weight.
Hand delivery wins on two specific jobs. The first is speed on a tight street count, because a walker covers a block this afternoon rather than next week. The second is anything where the piece needs to be physically in the way, which is what a doorknob hanger does and a mailbox never can. That advantage comes with a hard rule: federal law reserves the mailbox, its post and its flag for mail that paid postage, so a hand-delivered piece goes on the knob or under the door. We cover the detail in whether flyers can go in mailboxes and the wider door hanger legal guide, including the local ordinances and HOA rules that override common sense in some towns.
Most campaigns that work well use two of the three. A route-level EDDM drop builds recognition across a neighborhood, an addressed follow-up goes to the people who responded, and door hangers cover the streets nearest the shop where a walker is cheaper than postage. If you want the print and the postal side handled together, the direct mail services range covers it, and the postcards range lists every size and stock we run.
Wally explains direct to door mailing
A route, a list, or a pair of shoes
Wally points at a street and says take all of it, and that is EDDM: every address on the carrier route, no names, cheapest per house, and the card has to be big enough to count as a flat. Then he points at nine houses out of forty and says only those, and that is a rented list: more per piece, far less waste, and you can leave your existing customers out. Then he takes off the postal hat, walks the block himself and hangs a card on each knob, because that costs no postage at all. One rule he never breaks: the mailbox belongs to the carrier, so anything he delivers by hand goes on the door.
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Common Questions
Your direct to door mailing questions, answered
What does direct to door mailing cost per household?
Budget it in two parts, because they move independently. Printing is the part we quote: oversized postcards in EDDM sizes start at $51.62 and direct mail postcards, printed and submitted for you, start at $89.68. Delivery is the second part. EDDM Retail carries a single flat postage rate per piece that USPS publishes and revises, and it sits well below a First-Class stamp, so check the current figure on usps.com before you build a budget around it. There is no list rental cost with EDDM because there is no list. Door hangers invert the maths entirely: no postage at all, but you pay for the hours somebody spends walking.
Do I need a mailing permit for EDDM?
Not for EDDM Retail. You take the bundles to the Post Office that delivers the routes you selected, hand over the paperwork, and pay postage at the counter with no permit and no annual fee. The limit is 5,000 pieces per ZIP Code per day, which is generous for a single neighborhood campaign and restrictive for a city-wide one. Past that ceiling you need a permit account and you submit through a business mail entry unit, which our guide on EDDM Retail versus BMEU walks through.
Can I put a flyer in someone's mailbox?
No. Federal law reserves the mailbox for material that carried postage, and that includes the flag, the post and the newspaper tube attached to it. This is not a technicality that gets ignored quietly, it is the reason distribution companies train walkers to hang or wedge rather than post. If you want the piece in the mailbox, it has to be mailed. If you want to avoid postage, it has to go on the door.
What postcard size qualifies for EDDM?
The piece has to be a flat, not a letter, so it must exceed at least one of three thresholds: 6 1/8 inches high, 11 1/2 inches long, or 1/4 inch thick. That is why 6.5 by 9, 6.5 by 12, 8.5 by 11 and 9 by 12 all work, and why a 4 by 6 or a plain 6 by 9 does not. The upper limits are 15 inches long, 12 inches high, 3/4 inch thick and 16 ounces. When a design is close to the line, the eighth of an inch is real and the Post Office will measure it.
Is EDDM better than mailing to a rented list?
It depends entirely on how your buyer is defined. If your customer is simply anyone living near you, a dentist, a pizzeria, a lawn service, then buying the whole route is cheaper per response than paying for names you were going to mail anyway. If your customer is defined by an attribute, such as household income, roof age, or a business classification, a rented list lets you mail 900 of the right people instead of 4,000 of everyone, and it lets you suppress your existing customers. Neither is a default. Pick the one that matches how narrow your buyer is.
How long does an EDDM drop take to land?
Print time plus delivery time, and the second half is the part people underestimate. EDDM travels as standard marketing mail, so once the bundles are accepted the carriers work them into their normal route load over the following days rather than delivering them all on one morning. Plan for the drop to spread across roughly a week and time your offer accordingly. If a piece has to arrive by a fixed date, an event, a sale, a grand opening, work backwards from that date with room to spare rather than mailing tight.
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