Every Door Direct Mail Tutorial

Wondering if Every Door Direct Mail service is right for your business? Just ask yourself this question: Is your business looking to get marketing messages to a broad audience in a localized area? 

If the answer is yes, then you’ve come to the right place. Every Door Direct Mail lets you reach every address in a neighbourhood without the need for consumer names or street addresses. The Postal carrier delivers your mailing to each consumer’s mailbox with the day’s mail. So you get the marketing benefits of direct mail without the added cost of printing names and street addresses on your mailpieces.

For 5,000 addresses or less, Every Door Direct Mail is a great choice. Standard Mail flats can be dropped off at the local Post Office of your targeted area, without the need for a postage permit. 

To reach every address, contact your local print professional who can handle everything for you, or you can start at this address: usps.com/eddmtool

Here, you’ll discover the online tool for Every Door Direct Mail. Use this tool to help you complete the process from beginning to end, or just use it to plan your mailing. This tool does nearly everything except design and print your mailpiece.

It identifies the neighborhoods you want to reach, gives you estimated address counts and postage costs, and if you choose not to have a print professional do it all for you, it provides the necessary documentation you can use to submit your mailing to the U.S. Postal Service on your own. 

Simply use our web tool to choose the area where you want your mailing to go. Then select the individual carrier routes. 

What is a carrier route? It’s the delivery area a single Postal carrier is responsible for. There are multiple carrier routes in a single ZIP Code. It’s important to know that Every Door Direct Mail goes to every residential address on a carrier route. You can also choose whether to add in every business address on that route. Which means, every mailbox will receive your mailing. 

So let’s get started. First, you will be asked how you would like to process your mailing. The easiest way is to base your choice on the number of consumers you want to reach. For 5,000 addresses or less, Every Door Direct Mail Retail is a great choice. Standard Mail flats can be dropped off at the local Post Office of your targeted area without the need for a postage permit. For mailings over 5,000 pieces or for additional formats beyond a flat, Every Door Direct Mail Business Mail Entry is required. 

Locate the tabs at the upper left of the screen. You can choose to search for your desired routes by city, by county, by ZIP Code, or even by your business location. We’ll review several examples to show you how this works.

In Step One, the first tab “By City” is the default selection when you first access the tool. You must first choose your state. Then choose your city, then choose up to five ZIP Code locations. Why five? That’s the maximum number this tool supports per day. 

So if your selection includes more than five, you’ll be prompted to narrow down your search and pick the exact ZIP Code locations you want to reach. 

Next, pick the type of carrier routes you want to include for your mailing: city, rural/highway contract, and PO Box addresses. Why is this important? Every business has different marketing goals. For instance, if you sell farming supplies, you may not want to send your mailing to city routes or PO Box addresses.

Now, choose your delivery types. Remember, you can send to both business and residential addresses or just residential consumers alone. Why does this matter? If you sell office supplies, businesses are an obvious part of your customer base, so you’ll want to click on Business. On the other hand, if you remodel older homes, you may only want to click Residential. Once you’re done with this selection, you’ll press the “Submit” button to see a list of matching carrier routes.

Before we move on, let’s look at another way of doing Step One. This time we’ll use the “By Location” tab. With this feature, you can type in the address of your business location and then select a mile radius around your business. For example, if you own a pizza shop and want to reach everyone within three miles, you’d input your address…then slide the radius bar to three miles…choose route and delivery types…and hit “Submit”. 

A box appears if the search criteria finds more than five ZIP Code locations. In this case, you’re prompted to pick up to five or decrease your radius in order to reduce your mailing area. 

We’ll now click “Submit” to continue to Step 2. In this step, you may select or deselect carrier routes to increase or decrease the size of your mailing area and number of mailing addresses. Remember, Every Door Direct Mail Retail is limited to 5,000 pieces. If the routes you select include more than 5,000 addresses, you will be prompted to decrease your selections. 

On the right side of the screen, you can see your approximate postage cost. When using the tool for the Retail product, only the cost for “Local Post Office” will be provided. As you add or remove routes, the postage cost will update. This is a handy feature for staying within your budget.

At the top of this box, you’ll find the number of routes and total number of delivery addresses. These figures also update as you select and deselect routes.

We have also included another helpful feature. When you select the “By Location” tab, you have access to mapping. Once you click this option and hit the “Submit” button, you may again need to decrease the number of Zip Codes to five.

You will now see a radius circle around your business. In this case, we chose the three-mile radius for our pizza shop.

When you click on a carrier route in the list below, it appears on the map, giving you a quick visual representation of where this route is in relation to your business.

You may notice how this carrier route extends outside the radius. When this happens, you need to decide if you want to mail to this route. Remember: Every Door Direct Mail goes to every address on a carrier route, so if you chose the route in this example, you would be mailing to people outside your selected radius.

The “Quick Service Guides” link below gives you more information about flats and irregular parcels – two types of mail formats you can use when sending mail using Every Door Direct Mail. You can also access guidelines about how to prepare your mailing for entry at a Postal facility. Remember, for Retail product drop-off, you must use a flat.

You have now used the tool to plan your mailing area. Your printer can take care of providing your pieces to the Postal Service. If you want to do it yourself, click the “Next” button to proceed to Step 3.

In this step, enter your business name, the name of the Post Office of your mailing, and the type of permit you’re using. No permit is required when you use Every Door Direct Mail Retail. However, you will need your Customer Registration ID. If you need to get an ID, the Retail tool will initiate that process.

Step 4 generates custom Every Door Direct Mail documentation for PS Form 3602. If you’re using Every Door Direct Mail Retail, you will be provided with the “Retail Mailing Statement” including the same information. This includes the ZIP Code numbers, carrier route numbers, the number of mailpieces needed for each route, and your customer information. Just fill out the saturation mail description and number of bundles.

Each bundle should be made up of 50 mailpieces. Each carrier route will require multiple bundles.

For instance, if the number of addresses on a route is 226, then you would make up 4 bundles of 50 and one bundle of 26 for that route.

You will have to manually input the number of bundles on this form once you print it. Remember to save a copy for your records. 

This step also provides the necessary forms you will need to fill out prior to entering your mailing at the local Postal facility. Directions are included on the forms.

And finally, Step 5 generates a custom Every Door Direct Mail Facing Slip. 

You will need to print and complete one of these for each bundle in your mailing – and then include the Facing Slips with your mail bundles when you or your printer bring them to a Postal facility.

That’s it! Whether you have your printer do the forms and the bundling for you, or you do it all yourself, you’re ready to bring customers to your door…with Every Door Direct Mail from the U.S. Postal Service.