How to Do EDDM Mailing and Reach Every Mailbox on Your Route

Every Door Direct Mail is a USPS saturation program. Instead of addressing individual recipients, you select entire carrier routes, and USPS delivers one copy of your piece to every residential stop on those routes. The address block on your mailer carries a generic line such as Local Postal Customer, so the same printed file serves ten thousand households.

There are two tracks. EDDM Retail is the walk-in version: no permit, no annual fee, up to 5,000 pieces per ZIP code per day, paid at the post office that delivers the routes or online through the USPS Business Customer Gateway. EDDM BMEU is the permit version: it removes the daily cap, allows piece sizes that Retail does not, and lets a mail house drop everything at a bulk mail entry unit on your behalf.

The mechanics are the same either way. Print, bundle, document, drop. What changes is volume, paperwork, and who does the driving. If you would rather skip all of it, our EDDM service handles the routes, the bundling, and the postal drop as one job.

Open the USPS EDDM online tool and type the address people associate with your business. The map draws every carrier route around it, and clicking a route reveals what you are actually buying: total residential stops, business stops, an average household income band, and an age distribution. Selected routes stack into a cart with a running piece count and postage total.

Route selection is where campaigns are won or lost. Draw the radius around how far your customers realistically travel, not around how much of the map you can afford. A quick service restaurant lives inside a ten minute drive, a specialty clinic can pull from the whole county. Watch for barriers as well, because a highway, a river, or a rail line often marks the point where a neighborhood stops thinking of you as local.

Two practical habits pay off. First, always exclude business-only stops unless you sell to businesses, since including them raises your count without raising your response. Second, plan to mail the same routes at least three times. Saturation mail compounds, and the third drop on a familiar street almost always outperforms a first drop on a new one.

An EDDM mailer has two jobs on one side. The address side must reserve a clean zone for the EDDM indicia, the ECRWSS endorsement, and the generic customer line, and USPS expects that zone to stay free of artwork, folds, and stray text. Put the indicia in the upper right of the address panel, give it breathing room, and never let a background image run through it.

The message side follows ordinary direct mail rules. One offer, one deadline, one action. Lead with the benefit in type large enough to read at arm's length while someone stands over a recycling bin, keep body copy short, and make the phone number or QR code impossible to miss. If you are working out how the panels should be organized, the anatomy of a postcard breaks down what belongs on each side.

On the production side, build the file at full trim size with 0.125 inch bleed, keep live text at least 0.25 inch inside the trim, and export CMYK at 300 dpi. Our EDDM guidelines for file setup and size requirements covers the specific templates, and the prepress team flags anything that would fail postal review before your job goes on press.

Your budget has two independent halves. Postage is a flat EDDM per-piece rate paid to USPS, identical for every qualifying piece regardless of size or stock, and it is the half you cannot negotiate. Printing is the half you control, and it moves with quantity, dimensions, paper weight, finish, and turnaround.

Quantity does the most work. The setup effort behind a print run is nearly the same at 1,000 pieces as at 10,000, so the per-piece cost falls steeply as volume rises. Going from a small test run to a full neighborhood saturation often cuts the print cost per household by more than half, which is why splitting one campaign into four dribbles is usually the most expensive way to mail.

Size and stock come next, then finish and turnaround. A 6.5 by 9 card on 14pt gloss is the cost floor, a 9 by 12 on heavy stock with soft touch is the ceiling. Our mailing flyers start at $18.94, and if you are weighing us against the usual names, see the MOO postcards alternative and the Vistaprint mailing services alternative for a like for like comparison.

The costly mistakes are boring ones. Designing at letter size and discovering the piece does not qualify as a flat. Burying the indicia zone under a photo. Dropping bundles at the wrong post office. Mixing two routes into one bundle. Every one of these is caught by a five minute check before the job goes to press, and every one of them costs a reprint after.

The strategic mistakes are quieter. Mailing once and calling direct mail dead is the most common, since saturation works on repetition and the second and third drops carry most of the response. Spreading a thin budget across forty routes instead of hitting eight routes four times is the runner-up. And running an offer with no deadline gives a household permission to set the piece down and forget it.

Finally, give the campaign a way to report back. A dedicated phone number, a coupon code, a landing page, or a QR code turns guesswork into a number, and that number is what tells you which routes deserve the next drop. When you want the whole thing handled end to end, the 4OVER4 EDDM service covers routes, print, bundling, and delivery in one order.