Direct Mail Made Easy: USPS EDDM

Direct Mail Made Easy: USPS EDDM

In our last Blog, we discussed the viability of direct mail as a marketing tool and presented the elements that make up a successful direct mail campaign.

In this issue, we are introducing a simple first-step campaign for businesses that are new to direct mail or have a smaller budget. The program is called Every Door Direct Mail (EDDM) and it does just what its name implies- the letter carrier delivers your direct mail piece to every single active address in a neighborhood along with the rest of the day's mail.

Here's what make EDDM different from regular direct mail marketing:

• you don't have to put an address on the mail piece, and
• the postage rate is the lowest one offered by the USPS- currently about 17 cents per piece mailed.

So, in addition to saving between 40% and 70% on postage, there is no need to spend money on purchasing a mail list, checking the names and addresses for deliver-ability, or affixing labels.

History of EDDM

Every Door Direct Mail was developed by the USPS as a way to help local businesses build sales using direct mail marketing. Announced in December 2010, the USPS tested EDDM for two years (2011 and 2012) before making it a permanent product offering in January 2013. During the test period, the USPS heavily promoted the use of EDDM to businesses and to professional mailers and launched a number of online tools that explain and help mailers implement EDDM. As it gains experience with EDDM, the USPS keeps making changes in the program to improve it.

In mailing terms, EDDM is a saturation mailing--meaning it targets every active residential/business address in a carrier route--using a simplified address--Postal Customer or Residential Customer and sometime the city, state and Zip Code. Before EDDM, the USPS had restrictions on using the simplified address format on city routes, making it unavailable for almost all mailers. For EDDM mailings, USPS regulations were changed to allow simplified format for city routes.

EDDM also requires that a mail piece meet the physical standards for a flat--basically, an over-sized mail piece. The reason for this is that letter sized mail, including the 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 size that is so popular for post cards and self-mailers, is provided to letter carriers in fully-sorted, line-of-travel order.

Flat mail is not co-mingled with letter mail during sortation (think of when your letter carrier hands you letter-sized mail, then separately hands you magazines, large catalogs, and envelopes and other over-sized mail). So, because EDDM is flat mail, it bypasses line-of-travel sortation and thus requires no other instructions to the letter carrier than to add one piece to the day's mail being delivered to each active address.

The requirement that EDDM be flat mail does not mean that there is only one size that meets the requirement. On the contrary, it opens up a lot of very interesting size possibilities for the direct mail piece that will:

• make it stand out from the rest of the mail;
• provide more room for the advertising message;
• still be cost-effective to print

For more information or to get started with an EDDM project, call us at 254-773-7391 or visit us at www.papergraphicsltd.com.