Expert: Jon Cates
Company: Blooming Color
Phone: (502) 370-2770
Website: Blooming Color
Published on October 23, 2026
| The question comes up more than you’d think, usually as an apology: I’d love to do a mailer, but I don’t have anybody’s addresses. Fair enough. Every piece in your box is addressed to a specific person, so somebody knew who lives there. That information is for sale, priced per thousand names, more filters like income band. A few hundred dollars before you’ve printed anything. That’s usually where the ideas gets shelved. Here’s what doesn’t get talked about. Since 2011 the Postal Service has run a program for people who don’t want to buy a list: Every Door Direct Mail. Nobody markets it, because there’s no product attached. You buy geography instead of names EDDM sells you carrier routes — the loops your carrier walks every morning, a few hundred delivery points each. A free USPS map shows each one’s household counts, median income, average age. That’s your targeting, and for most local businesses it’s plenty. Follow one side of Bardstown Road and skip the other. You can’t pick houses inside a route. Every address gets a piece. The address panel doesn’t say Bob Henderson. It says Local Postal Customer. The economics are the reason to care. Postage is a flat 26 cents a piece as of July. A Forever stamp is 82 cents. Add printing and most cards land near 40 cents all-in, about $400 per thousand households. The rate doesn’t scale with size. A 6.5 x 9 postcard and a full 8.5 x 11 flyer mail for the same money. Most people default to the small card out of habit. If you’re paying the same, use the real estate. Two things surprise people. It isn’t quick: plan on a week to ten business days. Excellent for a grand opening on the calendar. Useless for a sale that starts Friday. And the mail has to be bundled to spec and dropped at the Post Office serving those routes. Do it yourself, capped at 5,000 pieces per ZIP per day, or your printer inducts it on a permit and you never touch it. We run several of these a month. When it’s the wrong tool, it’s really the wrong tool. EDDM is blunt by design. If you customers are defined by where they live — restaurants, dentists, gyms, salons — saturating the routes around you is exactly right, and filtering a list is paying for precision you don’t need. If your customer is a thin slice of the population, or a title inside a company, EDDM spends your budget on people who were never going to call. That’s what purchased lists are for, and they’re worth every dollar. Figuring out which one you are is most of the work. The mailing part is easy. |
