When planning a direct mail campaign, who should receive your mailpiece?.
Should you reach virtually every household in selected Denver neighborhoods with Every Door Direct Mail (EDDM)? Or should you build a targeted mailing list based on characteristics such as location, homeowner status, age, income, business type, customer history, or other relevant criteria?
The answer depends on your offer, your audience, and how geographically concentrated your potential customers are.
The simple answer:
- Choose EDDM when geography is your most important targeting criteria and nearly everyone within an area could be a potential customer.
- Choose a targeted mailing list when specific characteristics determine who is, and is not a good prospect.
- Consider a hybrid strategy when you want to use data to identify your best neighborhoods and then saturate those areas with EDDM.
At JET Print and Mail, we help Denver and Colorado businesses evaluate all three approaches so they can spend their direct mail budget reaching the people most likely to respond.
What Is EDDM?
Every Door Direct Mail, or EDDM, is a USPS program that allows marketers to select postal carrier routes and deliver a mailpiece throughout those routes without purchasing an individual mailing list.
Using the USPS EDDM mapping tool, marketers can select carrier routes and review information such as residential delivery counts and broad demographic characteristics, including age, household size, and income.
Instead of addressing your mail to:
Jane Smith
123 Main Street
Denver, CO 80211
an EDDM piece can use a simplified address such as:
LOCAL POSTAL CUSTOMER
123 Main Street
Denver, CO 80211
Your targeting happens primarily at the carrier-route or neighborhood level, rather than at the individual household level.
That makes EDDM particularly effective when your ideal customer is essentially:
Anyone who lives near my business or within my service area.
What Is a Targeted Mailing List?
A targeted mailing list takes the opposite approach.
Instead of asking:
“Which neighborhoods should we mail?”
you start by asking:
“What characteristics define our best prospects?”
Depending on the campaign and available data, a targeted list could be built around criteria such as:
- Homeowners
- New movers
- Household income ranges
- Age ranges
- Specific ZIP Codes or geographic areas
- Existing customers
- Former customers
- Donors
- Members
- Business owners
- Industry or SIC/NAICS classification
- Company size
- Job titles
- Customer purchase history
- CRM or first-party customer data
The mailing is then addressed to the selected individuals, households, or businesses.
For marketers with a narrowly defined ideal customer, this can dramatically reduce the number of pieces that need to be printed and mailed.
EDDM vs. Targeted Mailing Lists: What’s the Difference?
Neither approach is automatically better.
The goal is to choose the targeting method that matches how your business actually acquires customers.
When Should You Use EDDM?
1. Simple Rule of Thumb, If Almost Everyone in the Neighborhood Could Be a Customer.. Use EDDM
EDDM works particularly well for businesses with products or services that apply to a large percentage of households.
For example, a Denver-area HVAC company may be interested in virtually every homeowner within its service territory.
The company may care much more about where someone lives than about precisely who lives there.
Other examples can include:
- Restaurants
- Pizza delivery
- Roofing companies
- Landscapers
- Pest control
- House cleaning
- Painting contractors
- Local gyms
- Salons and spas
- Real estate agents
- Automotive repair shops
- Neighborhood retail stores
- Local events
For these businesses, paying to identify individual households may provide little additional value.
2. Your Business Has a Defined Service Radius
Imagine you operate a restaurant in Denver’s Washington Park neighborhood.
Customers who live two miles away may be significantly more valuable than someone who matches your perfect demographic profile but lives 25 miles away.
EDDM lets you build campaigns around physical proximity.
The same logic can apply to home-service companies assigning territories, businesses opening new locations, or organizations promoting neighborhood events.
3. You Want High Visibility Within a Specific Area
Sometimes the goal isn’t simply generating an immediate response.
It is creating market penetration.
If you repeatedly mail selected carrier routes surrounding your location, your brand can become increasingly familiar within those neighborhoods.
This can be particularly useful for businesses where customers may not need the service today but eventually will.
Think roofing, HVAC, real estate, plumbing, landscaping, or automotive repair.
4. You Don’t Need Individual Personalization
If everyone is receiving essentially the same offer, EDDM may make sense.
For example:
“$25 Off Your First Service — Now Serving Your Neighborhood.”
There may be little reason to identify every household individually.
When Should You Use a Targeted Mailing List?
Targeted lists become more valuable as the number of people who qualify for your offer gets smaller.
1. Only Certain Households Are Good Prospects
Suppose you provide a service aimed primarily at homeowners.
In a Denver neighborhood with a large percentage of renters, mailing every residential address could create unnecessary waste.
A targeted list could allow your campaign to focus specifically on households that meet your selected criteria.
The question becomes:
Why pay to print and mail 10,000 pieces when your actual audience might only contain 3,000 qualified prospects?
2. Customer Value Is High
Targeting becomes increasingly important as the value of acquiring a customer rises.
A $10 restaurant coupon can support a broad geographic campaign.
A high-value home renovation, financial service, B2B contract, or other major purchase often justifies more precise prospect selection.
The cost per mailed piece isn’t the only metric that matters.
Cost per qualified prospect matters more.
3. You Have Strong First-Party Data
One of the most powerful mailing lists may already exist inside your company.
Your CRM might contain:
- Existing customers
- Prospects
- Lapsed customers
- Previous donors
- Members
- Leads that never converted
- Customers approaching a renewal date
- Customers who purchased one service but not another
Instead of acquiring an entirely new audience, direct mail can help activate data your organization already owns.
And because you know something about each recipient, the creative and offer can be much more relevant.
4. You Want Personalized Direct Mail
Targeted lists also make variable data printing possible.
Instead of every recipient receiving identical messaging, different audiences can receive different:
- Headlines
- Offers
- Images
- Calls to action
- QR codes
- Landing pages
- Sales representative information
- Location information
A Denver roofing company, for example, might send one version to recent storm-affected neighborhoods and another to homeowners in areas with older housing stock.
The data doesn’t simply determine who receives the mail.
It can determine what they see when they receive it.
What Is the Biggest Mistake Marketers Make When Choosing EDDM?
The biggest mistake is choosing EDDM simply because the postage looks inexpensive.
USPS currently positions EDDM as a way to reach selected carrier routes without purchasing a mailing list, and EDDM Retail allows qualifying mailers to send from 200 to 5,000 pieces per day per ZIP Code without a special mailing permit. Larger EDDM campaigns can use BMEU entry.
But lower postage per piece doesn’t automatically mean lower customer-acquisition cost.
Consider two hypothetical campaigns.
Campaign A: EDDM
You mail:
10,000 households
But only:
3,000 households fit your ideal customer profile.
Campaign B: Targeted List
You mail:
3,000 qualified households
Campaign B could potentially have higher data or processing costs per piece while still producing a lower total campaign cost and less wasted print and postage.
That’s why JET approaches direct mail planning from the audience outward—not simply from the postage rate inward.
When EDDM Can Actually Be More Targeted Than You Think
There is an important middle ground.
EDDM isn’t necessarily “spray and pray.”
USPS allows marketers to evaluate and select carrier routes using geographic and broad demographic information.
Instead of mailing every carrier route across a Denver ZIP Code, you might identify the routes that best align with your customers.
For example, a home-services company could analyze where its best existing customers live and identify similar nearby carrier routes.
Now EDDM becomes a form of neighborhood-level targeting.
That can be extremely effective when your customers tend to cluster geographically.
The Third Option: Combine Data Targeting With EDDM
Sometimes the best answer isn’t EDDM or a mailing list.
It’s both.
A marketer can use customer or demographic data to determine which neighborhoods have the highest concentration of ideal prospects, then use EDDM to saturate those routes.
For example:
- Analyze your current customer base.
- Identify Denver ZIP Codes and carrier routes producing the most customers.
- Look for nearby neighborhoods with similar characteristics.
- Select the strongest carrier routes.
- Use EDDM to reach every household within those routes.
- Track responses by route or offer.
- Shift future mail volume toward the best-performing areas.
Now the data isn’t being used to decide which individual gets a postcard.
It is being used to decide where your next thousand postcards should go.
For many local businesses, this hybrid approach offers a strong balance between reach, targeting, and campaign efficiency.
Don’t Forget Mailpiece Format
Targeting isn’t the only consideration.
EDDM Retail mailpieces must meet USPS flat-size requirements, meaning not every traditional postcard size qualifies. Current USPS standards also place requirements on dimensions, thickness, weight, preparation, and bundling.
A traditional targeted mailing provides more flexibility to use formats such as:
- Standard postcards
- Oversized postcards
- Letters
- Envelopes
- Self-mailers
- Other qualifying direct-mail formats
Your desired creative concept can therefore influence which mailing strategy makes the most sense.
Need help with Design? Download our postcard templates here
How JET Print and Mail Helps Denver Businesses Choose
At JET Print and Mail, we don’t believe every direct mail campaign should use EDDM, and we don’t believe every campaign needs an expensive, highly segmented mailing list.
The right approach depends on the campaign.
Our team can help Colorado marketers evaluate:
Audience → Geography → Data → Mailpiece → Postage → Tracking
That can include:
- EDDM route planning
- Targeted mailing lists
- Customer data preparation
- List cleansing and address hygiene
- Suppression and optimization
- Variable data printing
- Postage strategy
- Direct mail production
- Mailing and fulfillment
- Campaign tracking
The objective isn’t simply to mail more pieces.
It’s to deploy your budget where it has the greatest opportunity to produce results.
Ready to Decide Between EDDM and a Targeted List?
If you’re planning a direct mail campaign in Denver or throughout Colorado, talk with JET Print and Mail before purchasing a list or selecting carrier routes.
We can evaluate your audience, geographic footprint, campaign goals, mailpiece, and postage options and help determine whether EDDM, a targeted mailing list, or a combination of both makes the most sense.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is EDDM cheaper than using a mailing list?
EDDM can offer attractive postage and eliminates the need to purchase an individual address list. However, the lowest cost per piece does not necessarily produce the lowest campaign cost. If only a small percentage of households within a carrier route are qualified prospects, a targeted list may allow you to print and mail fewer pieces.
Use our Direct Mail ROI worksheet to determine which is best for your campaign
Does EDDM allow demographic targeting?
Yes, but primarily at the carrier-route level. The USPS EDDM tool provides geographic and broad demographic information that can help marketers choose routes. It does not provide the same household-level targeting available through many targeted mailing lists.
Can I target only homeowners with EDDM?
Not household by household. EDDM generally reaches the eligible addresses within the carrier routes you select. If you specifically need to isolate homeowners or another defined household segment, a targeted mailing list may be more appropriate.
Is EDDM good for Denver home-service companies?
It can be. HVAC, roofing, landscaping, pest control, plumbing, painting, and similar businesses often serve geographically defined territories and have services relevant to a large percentage of households. EDDM can be especially useful when the goal is neighborhood saturation.
Can JET Print and Mail provide targeted mailing lists?
JET Print and Mail can help businesses develop and prepare targeted audiences for direct mail campaigns, including strategies using prospect data and existing customer information. The appropriate data strategy depends on the campaign and desired audience.
Can I combine EDDM with customer data?
Yes. One effective strategy is to use your existing customer data to identify geographic concentrations of strong customers and then select EDDM carrier routes around similar neighborhoods.
Does EDDM require a mailing permit?
EDDM Retail does not require a special mailing permit. USPS currently allows EDDM Retail mailings of at least 200 pieces and up to 5,000 pieces per day per ZIP Code. Larger-volume EDDM mailings can be entered through a Business Mail Entry Unit using the appropriate USPS processes.
Sources
United States Postal Service — Every Door Direct Mail:
USPS Every Door Direct Mail overview
USPS Postal Explorer — EDDM Retail Standards:
USPS Domestic Mail Manual: EDDM Retail
