Every Door Direct Mail is a USPS program that lets you send a mailer to every address on a chosen postal carrier route without owning a mailing list, renting one, or knowing a single name. For a business with a physical location and a defined trade area, it is one of the few advertising channels where you control exactly who gets reached.
Why it suits a Queens business
If you run a restaurant on Hillside Avenue, your customers are overwhelmingly the people who live within roughly a mile. Digital advertising will happily charge you to reach people in Manhattan who will never visit. EDDM lets you pick the specific carrier routes around your shop and hit every household on them.
The size rules
This is where most first-time EDDM projects go wrong, because the piece has to qualify as a flat rather than a letter.
- It must exceed one of these: 6.125 inches in height, 11.5 inches in length, or 0.25 inches thick.
- Maximum size is 12 x 15 inches.
- Thickness must fall between 0.007 and 0.25 inches.
- Popular compliant sizes are 6.5 x 9, 6.25 x 11, 8.5 x 11 and 9 x 12.
Here is the part that catches people out: EDDM Retail postage is the same price per piece regardless of size. A 6.5 x 9 postcard and a 9 x 12 mailer cost identical postage. Since the postage usually exceeds the printing cost, going bigger is often the better value, not the extravagance it appears to be.
What it costs
As of 2026, EDDM Retail postage runs $0.260 per piece. Printing a standard postcard adds roughly $0.10 to $0.22 per piece depending on quantity, stock and finishing. All in, budget somewhere around $0.36 to $0.48 per household.
For a carrier route of 500 homes, that is roughly $180 to $240 to reach every single door. Compare that to what 500 targeted digital impressions cost in New York City, and remember that a postcard on a kitchen counter has a longer life than an ad impression.
Choosing your routes
USPS publishes a mapping tool where you enter your address and see the carrier routes around you, with the number of residential and business addresses on each, plus demographic averages. You select the routes you want and the tool totals your piece count.
Pick routes by trade area, not by radius. A route on the far side of a highway or a rail cut may be geographically close but functionally distant, because nobody crosses it to buy lunch.
Indicia and bundling
Your mailer needs the correct EDDM Retail indicia printed in the address area, along with the required blank space for the address block. Pieces are bundled in counts of 50 to 100 with facing slips per bundle, and dropped at the post office that serves the routes you selected.
We print the indicia correctly as part of the job and can handle bundling and the drop, so it goes out as one job rather than you managing three moving parts.
Making the piece work
- Put one offer on it. A postcard trying to say five things says nothing.
- Make the offer specific and time-bound. A deadline creates a reason to act now.
- Print your address large. Proximity is the entire reason this channel works.
- Include something trackable, such as a code to mention or a dedicated phone number, so you can measure the response.
- Mail the same route more than once. A single drop is a test, not a campaign.
See sizes and stocks on our marketing materials page.
Source: USPS EDDM requirements and 2026 retail postage rates.
Need this printed? We are on Hillside Avenue in Jamaica, Queens.