why it's hard

Nobody tells you what "do it yourself" actually means.

EDDM gets sold as the easy, cheap option. Then the box of postcards shows up at your shop and you find out the mailing part was never included. Here's the day you just signed up for.

One EDDM drop, three routes, done the hard way:

• FIRST -  Open the USPS mapping tool and try to work out which carrier routes you want. Squint at percentages and averages that describe a whole zip code, not a street. Pick something. Hope.
  

• THEN - Order the cards. Wait. A pallet of postcards arrives at your shop and now they're your problem.
  

• THEN - Count them into bundles of 50 or 100 with rubber bands. Not roughly — exactly, the way USPS requires, or it gets rejected at the counter.
  

• THEN - Fill out a facing slip and postal paperwork for every single route. Get a form wrong and you're driving back.

• THEN - Load the truck. Drive to the destination post office for route one. Stand in line. Do it again for route two, in a different town. Then route three.
  

• FINALLY - Find out three weeks later that the routes you guessed at were half apartments, and start over next month.

That's a full day of an owner's time, on top of the printing bill. The targeting was still a coin flip.

the bigger problem

The logistics are annoying. The guessing is what costs you money.

Every EDDM tool ever built starts the same way: pick a zip code. So that's what people do. They pick the zip they live in, or the one that sounds nice, and mail the whole thing.

But a zip code is a postal filing system. It isn't a description of who lives there. One zip can hold a street of $800,000 homes on half-acre lots and a block of apartment buildings two miles away, and the average you're shown papers over both. You mail 5,000 pieces, half of them land somewhere they were never going to work, and you conclude that direct mail doesn't work.

It did work. You just aimed it at the wrong streets, and nothing in the process was ever going to tell you.

The card itself

EDDM cards are big on purpose.

USPS sets minimum dimensions for EDDM, which is quietly good news! The smallest EDDM card is still bigger than the 4x6 postcards most companies mail. Yours will be the biggest thing in the mailbox that day.

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