The Ins and Outs of EDDM – Every Door Direct Mail

The biggest mystery that small business owners always look to solve is how to get their name, offerings, and promotions into the minds and hands of potential customers. It’s a constant quandary. There’s so much noise in the marketing world, too. Do you go with digital ads? Emails? Or do you the classic route with billboards, flyers, and commercials?

Customers are just as inundated with marketing noise as you are. Their inbox is filled to the brim with promotions they’ll never open. They scroll by ads without a glance as they look for friend’s latest comings and goings on social media.

Important business is done through the mail. Our physical mailboxes have thinned out over the years, but people still check it. Did you know that 80-90 percent of direct mail gets opened, only 20-30 percent of email gets opened on a good day?

That means, you can get your message in front of 80-90% of your intended recipients when you send your promotions through the mail.

What is EDDM

EDDM stands for Every Door Direct Mail. When you use EDDM, your messaging is sent to desired recipients through location and demographic targeting and you pay only a small fraction of the amount it would normally cost for bulk mail.

EDDM is especially great, because you don’t have to provide a mailing list or anything. You just have to know what neighborhoods, household types, general locations, or demographics you’d like to target.

What sorts of businesses use EDDM?

Any small business can benefit from smartly used EDDM campaigns. For example, say you’re a restaurant. You’d like to reach local people in your area to get them in try your tasty dishes. You could send an EDDM campaign on a folded postcard that includes your take-out menu and a coupon for their first visit.
How about a local salon? You could send an EDDM campaign that promotes a lady’s night open house or simply introduce your services with a limited time offer. Urgent care facilities are hyper-local and depend on the local community to be successful, EDDM is a great solution for this.

Basically, if you’re a business that would like to generate extra foot traffic coming through your door or eyes on your website, EDDM is an amazing option to consider.

What types of campaigns can I run through EDDM?

If you can create a message through a postcard, you can use EDDM to promote it. Some of the most common ways that businesses use EDDM is to tell their customers about:

Weekly, monthly, or annual sales/promotions
Featured products and services
Business grand opening or new location opening
Tell new customers about your business for the first time
Distribute monthly news or insights
Coordinate a new location launch and target just the service area
Increase and keep constant brand awareness

Truly, the sky is the limit. Customers find mailed promotions far more personal than emailed notices, which means there’s a high chance that they’ll read whatever you have to say to them.

What can I send through an EDDM campaign?

EDDM campaigns are for flat mail only. It can’t be enclosed in an envelope or sent on flimsy paper. Whatever you send through EDDM needs to be strong and light enough to be mailed as a stand-alone mailpiece.

EDDM campaigns can be sent on mailpieces with a maximum size of 12″ x 15″ or you can use one of the following standard sizes:

6.5” x 9”
6.25” x 11”
8.5” x 11”
8.5” x 12”
7” x 10” (folded in half)
12” x 4” (folded in half)

Basically, for EDDM, you want a smooth, flat piece of mail that isn’t too heavy (under 3.3 oz). This could include all types of products like:

Small or large postcards
Take-out menus
Business flyers
Postcard magnets
Perforated coupons
Promos with peelable stickers affixed
Folded postcards

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What should I include on my EDDM mailpiece?

Think about it like this—these customers are being introduced to your business, potentially for the first time, through this small piece. What do you want them to know? Boil it down to a simple concept. Remember, a lot of your brand can be conveyed with images.

Now, let’s design this postcard with some have-to-have elements:

What problems can your product or service solve for the customer?

When you start planning your mailer, think about what you can do for the customer. While you may want to sing the praises of your business, most people are interested in how you can help their business. Define a problem that your promotion solves and focus your copy on that. From there, begin planning your design.

Start with an appealing, eye-catching picture and headline

People are visual. No one likes to read giant walls of text. The more you can convey with a simple picture and bold, concise headline, the better. You want to catch their eyes as they flip through the mail, so plan these two elements with care.

Plan your colors carefully

Once you know your header and image, you can use a website like coolors.co to create a color palette. Pick colors that match your logo and image elements. Use these colors for your fonts but keep legibility in mind. You’ll want to be sure that any text you use has great contrast when laid on the image. The simpler your color palette the better—for best results, stick to 3-4 colors max.

Call-to-action

A call-to-action instructs customers on what to do next. Ideally, what do you want them to do with the information you just gave them? Pick up the phone? Pay you a visit? Visit your website? Tell them clearly. Add a limited time or expiration date to increase the chances of them doing this action in a timely manner.

Leave room for the required Retail Indicia

You’ll need to include The Every Door Direct Mail™ (EDDM) Retail indicia in a clear space on the front of your mailer. If you’re not sure what to put here, we can help!

Designing a mailer is a lot of work. Expert design can make a huge difference on how effective your mailing ends up being. If you’re not sure where to begin with the design process, reach out to us. We can handle your EDDM campaign every step of the way. Our expert designers will create the perfect postcard for your message and, after printing and finishing, it’ll be sent on its way to greeting your customers at their mailbox.

3 Easy Steps To Every Door Direct Success

Every Door Direct Mail Retail is incredibly easy to prepare and mail.

The following steps will show you how to take your E.D.D.M. from concept to delivery.

Before you continue reading, please make sure you have familiarized yourself with E.D.D.M. by reading 5 Reasons Every Door Direct Mail Will Work for You and then come back to see how it’s done in 3 easy steps.

1. Discover Your Surroundings

The USPS offers a very useful tool on their website where you can enter data about the area of your mailing and it returns detailed information about that area:

Number of residences in a route
Number of businesses in a route
Number of total routes
Approximate cost of Postage
Local Post Office for each route

There are various ways to select the areas where your Every Door Direct Mail will hit:

By City
By County
By Zip Code
By radius around a specific address

You can choose the type of routes served:

City
Rural/Highway Contract
PO Boxes

You can select from two delivery types:

Business and Residential
Residential Only

Once you have made all of your selections and have a final count of the area and routes that will be covered, you can continue by clicking “Next” to generate all of the paperwork required when delivering your EDDM prints to the Post Office. Don’t forget your postage check! But don’t fret, they also take cash and credit cards.

2. Bundle Your Advertising

Every Door Direct Mail Bundle Facing Slip

This is the most labor-intensive step of completing your E.D.D.M. mailing, but it’s simple!

The USPS requires that you bundle your Every Door Direct Mail pieces into stacks of 50-100. The reason for this is that the Mailman takes these bundles and places them in his bag or cart and delivers one to each mailbox on his route. Please be considerate! Don’t make the bundles too heavy.

One of the forms that the system generates for you is the Facing Slip. This form needs to be on the very top of every bundle, so make copies before you fill in all of the information.

I recommend that you fill the Date, Company Name and Post Office of mailing before making copies so that you don’t have to fill it in every time.

These are the required fields you must complete on the Facing Slip:

Route Number
Date
Number of Pieces in Bundle
Total Number of Bundles
Company Name
Post Office of Mailing

3. Delivery to the USPS

Once steps 1 and 2 are completed, the final and easiest step is your delivery to the Post Office. One of the forms generated by the E.D.D.M. system, the “Facility List”, is a summary of the entire mailing.

For your convenience, the form will list the address of each Post Office you must deliver the bundled mailers to, the hours of operation and contact information.

You will also find a table listing the Carrier Routes selected and number of mail pieces for each route and at the very bottom, the total postage cost (number of mailpieces x 14.5 cents)

The number of Post Offices listed will usually only vary if you selected more than one Zip Code.

That’s it! Your Post Office representative will review your paperwork and mail pieces, process the paperwork in the register and accept payment for your Every Door Direct Mail.

Your mail pieces will be delivered within the Standard Mail delivery time.

If you have any questions or would like a quote, please visit our E.D.D.M Page.

Is there anything you have noticed that can make Every Door Direct Mail even easier or more efficient?

5 Reasons Every Door Direct Mail Will Work for You

E.D.D.M.- Every Door Direct Mail

Recently released by the United States Postal System (USPS), the purpose of Every Door Direct Mail is to enable mom and pop shops, small businesses and corporations to send a direct mail piece to every mailbox in a specific area. The area of the mailing can be specified by zip code or radius around an address and further defined by selecting routes within the results. Get Every Door Direct Mail For Your Business Now

Every Door Direct Mail is Not for Every Type of Business

If your main customers are businesses (B2B), E.D.D.M. is really not for you. Every Door Direct Mail requires that you mail to residences. If your product or service caters to a very specific demographic, targeted direct mailwould be more beneficial to your campaign, not E.D.D.M.

Who benefits from Every Door Direct Mail?

If your product or service serves your local community and appeals to both individual consumer households and local businesses too, E.D.D.M. is a great and inexpensive way to make your presence known and can lead to an increase in foot traffic and phone calls if you plan it out well. Every Door Direct Mail works great for local businesses:

Pizzeria
Laundromat
Deli
Diner
Lawyers & Accountants
Tax Service
Taxi & Limo Service

Don’t forget, franchises do most of their marketing at a local level…E.D.D.M. Win!

Why Every Door Direct Mail Will Work For You

1. Marketing at a Local Level

Local deals, local search, local , local, local!A perfect example is the announcement of a new pizzeria in town. Let’s say the owner is not a marketer or just doesn’t have the time to put together a marketing campaign. Yet, naturally he knows that his target market is every home and business in the surrounding area of his pizzeria. Every Door Direct Mail would be the quick and efficient way for the pizzeria owner to let every home in say, a 2 mile (or more) radius know about the grand opening of the new pizzeria. Simple and inexpensive.

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2. No Mailing List or Permit Required

So, you’re a Franchisee and you own 3 stores that each serve their own local communities. Your main marketing objective is to make sure that everyone in the local vicinity of each store knows about the store, letting them know the address, contact information and hours of operation. Since Every Door Direct Mail service does not require an address list, you can send a direct mail piece to every single residence in the town of each store for a measly 14.5 cents each in postage. No requirement for a Postal Permit also saves your out-of-pocket costs in application and yearly fees.

3. Like Sending a Billboard to Every Door

Every Door Direct Mail requires that the size of your mail piece falls within the USPS “Flat” dimensions. A common size is 6.25 x 9 which is a huge amount of real estate to cover with big graphics of your products or services, coupons and anything else that makes sense to include in the direct mail piece. You can go all the way up to 15 inches. You can also mail folded prints as long as they fold down within the size restrictions: Full color custom Calendars give you 12 months of continuous marketing and fall within the “flat” dimensions.

4. Easy Coupon and Specials Distribution

With the low cost of distribution, E.D.D.M. is a great tool to use to give out your coupons, announce specials and event sales. Spruce up your marketing and offer “neighborhood only” coupons. Sure, you can always use a Valpak type of service but with 1700 other coupons in the same envelope, will your coupon even get noticed ? (See #3 above)

5. Setup is a Breeze

Besides being cost effective, Every Door Direct Mail only takes a few simple steps to put together. Have your E.D.D.M. postcards printed, band them into bundles with a facing slip and a rubber band and then deliver them to the Post Office with your payment for postage. That’s it. Too busy? Your preferred printer can do everything for you, all you have to do is bring it to the Post Office with your postage payment.

One of the reasons the United States Postal Service created the Every Door Direct Mail program is to help local business grow (and to try to get back on track with it’s own revenue of course). But when used correctly, it really is a great opportunity to expand your marketing efforts.

Don’t Put All Of Your Eggs In One Basket

E.D.D.M. doesn’t necessarily need to be your only means of advertising; Use it to augment your web, TV and radio marketing campaigns and remember to add QR Codes to connect the offline with the online.

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