Every Door Direct Mail (EDDM) is a U.S. Postal Service program that lets you deliver a printed mailer to every address along the carrier routes you choose — no mailing list, no names, no addresses required. You select neighborhoods on a map by ZIP code and carrier route, print enough pieces to cover them, and the letter carrier drops one at every door. It’s the simplest, lowest-cost way to blanket a local area with a printed message.
That simplicity is why EDDM is popular with restaurants, retailers, real estate agents, home-services businesses, and anyone whose customers are “everyone nearby.” But how you run an EDDM campaign has a real effect on what it costs and how fast it lands. This guide covers both.
How EDDM works
Instead of mailing to a list of specific people, EDDM mails to a geography. You choose USPS carrier routes — the daily loops letter carriers follow — and every deliverable address on that route gets your piece. Because you’re covering whole routes, your print quantity is determined by the routes you select, not by a purchased list.
EDDM pieces have to be printed in the larger “flat” format rather than a standard letter size, which also makes them stand out in the mailbox.
Weight is where the two paths split. EDDM Retail caps your piece at 3.3 oz. Going through a Mail Service Provider lets it run up to 4 oz at the simple per-piece rate — enough for a heavier stock, a bigger format, or a multi-page piece. Heavier than 4 oz is still possible, but at that point USPS charges a per-pound price in addition to the per-piece price, so it stops being a flat per-piece decision. We design and print your mailer to meet USPS EDDM specifications so it qualifies for the discounted saturation rate.
Two ways to run EDDM
There are two paths, and the difference matters once you get past a single neighborhood.
EDDM Retail — the do-it-yourself path
EDDM Retail is designed for small, simple mailings. There’s no mailing permit and no barcoding, with a minimum of 200 pieces and a 3.3 oz ceiling on each piece. But the work lands on you: you bundle the mail by carrier route, prepare the facing slips and forms, and then physically carry it into the Post Office and stand in line at the retail counter. Bundles of flats are heavy.
The other catches: you’re capped at 5,000 pieces per ZIP Code per day, and the mail is entered locally — so none of the entry and preparation discounts below are available to you. It’s fine for a single-neighborhood flyer.
EDDM through a Mail Service Provider — the way to scale and save
When you run EDDM through a Mail Service Provider (MSP) like Community Impact Printing, there’s no daily per-ZIP cap — you can saturate many ZIP codes at any volume. The mail can go out under our permit and account, or under your own permit if you already hold one; either way you get the benefits below.
Crucially, we are a USPS Seamless Acceptance facility. That means mail leaving our building is already verified and in the mailstream — it never has to stop at a Business Mail Entry Unit (BMEU) to be accepted. It goes direct to the delivery point closest to your recipients — delivered to the dock in back, already paid for and already accepted. On USPS’s current price list, commercial EDDM runs about 31¢ per piece entered at origin and about 26¢ per piece entered at the delivery unit — roughly 5¢ per piece decided by where the mail enters the network. Across a large mailing, that adds up fast.
One practical consequence worth knowing: mail claimed under a permit normally has to be entered at the Post Office where that permit is held. Because we’re Seamless, that constraint doesn’t apply — your mail only goes to your permit office if pieces are actually being delivered there.
Why using a Mail Service Provider lowers your postage
Here’s the key thing to understand: postage is always a passthrough cost. You pay the exact USPS rate, and any reputable provider passes it along without a markup. That part is table stakes — it is not a reason to choose one vendor over another, and you should be suspicious of anyone selling it as one.
The real difference is how well your mail is prepared and entered, because that determines which rate you pay in the first place. The Postal Service reserves its lowest rates for mail that arrives sorted, verified, and close to its destination — mail that leaves them almost nothing left to do. A provider who does that work well hands you a smaller postage bill on identical mail. For EDDM, the two biggest levers are how the mail is sorted and where it enters the system.
Destination entry: cheaper and faster
Postage depends partly on how far the Postal Service has to carry your mail. The more of that transportation you take off their hands, the less they charge. So instead of handing your mail off at one central point, we take it to the delivery point closest to where it’s going.
This does two things at once: it lowers the postage (the destination-entry rate), and because the mail skips the upstream legs of the postal network, it tends to reach mailboxes faster. Lower cost and quicker delivery from the same decision.
Seamless Acceptance: verified on the way out, not at the dock
Getting mail accepted used to mean paper forms and manual verification at a BMEU before it could move. Seamless Acceptance replaces that: our mailings are verified electronically through the documentation we submit and the barcode scans the mail generates as it travels, so it enters the mailstream the moment it leaves us.
For you that means fewer stops, fewer hands on your mail, and less opportunity for a piece to get damaged in transit. It also means the mail moves sooner — nothing is sitting on a dock waiting to be looked at. It’s the kind of postal machinery an occasional mailer can’t practically set up, and that an established MSP runs every day.
Carrier-route bundling: the preparation half
EDDM has no address list, so there’s nothing to sort by address. Instead the mail is bundled by carrier route with USPS facing slips — one labeled bundle per route, counted and prepared so the carrier can pick it up and go. That preparation is a real part of the discount, and it’s also the part that would otherwise be your job.
We bundle and slip every route here, on our floor. You never handle the mail, and you never carry it anywhere.
The part nobody mentions: you never see the Post Office
With EDDM Retail you are hauling boxes of flats into a retail lobby and waiting in line behind everyone buying stamps. Through us, your mail is delivered to the dock at the back of the delivery unit — already paid for, already accepted, already verified. No counter, no line, no paperwork handed across a desk, no trunk full of mail.
A note on the automation and full-service discounts you may have heard about: those are tied to targeted, automation-barcoded mail addressed to specific recipients, so a saturation mailing like EDDM doesn’t use them — it earns its savings through carrier-route preparation and delivery-point entry instead. When your campaign calls for reaching a specific list rather than every door, those automation discounts become an additional lever. We cover them in our guide to how direct mail postage works.
When EDDM is the right tool — and when it isn’t
EDDM is an excellent fit when:
- You want to reach everyone in a defined local area — a neighborhood, a set of ZIP codes, a delivery radius around a store.
- You don’t need to reach specific named individuals or households.
- Your offer is broadly relevant — a grand opening, a menu, a seasonal promotion, a service area.
EDDM is not the right tool when you need to mail to a specific list — past customers, a membership roster, a targeted prospect list, or households matching certain criteria. For that, targeted direct mail with a mailing list is the better choice, and it opens up the full-service and automation discounts EDDM can’t use. If you’re not sure which fits, tell us your goal and we’ll recommend the right approach.
Getting started
We handle EDDM end to end: helping you choose routes, designing and printing a piece that qualifies, and mailing it the most cost-effective way — permit, carrier-route bundling, and Seamless Acceptance entry all handled. Use our permit or your own. Since postage passes through at cost either way, the value we add shows up where it actually can: in how much of that postage gets discounted before the bill reaches you, and in how fast the mail moves.
Tell us the area you want to reach and roughly how many addresses, and we’ll come back with a quote and a recommended plan within one business day.