I am the #1 cheerleader for digital marketing, but sometimes your best marketing weapon is old school direct mail. Trouble is, direct mail can be expensive, especially for a small business. This tool changes that completely!
The USPS has this little known service called Every Door that will deliver your marketing piece to every door on a specific mail route for 18¢ per piece. Let me show you how it works:
Here is a map surrounding a dance studio in Arlington, TX.
In the USPS tool, I have highlighted the mail routes / neighborhoods that I would like to reach with a promotion from this dance studio. Once I do that, I can see a data table for these homes that tells me ages, average number of people per household, household income, the number of homes on the route and the cost for using Every Door to reach them.
When you’re finished choosing your routes, you can schedule a drop. It’s super simple.
Here’s a quick video from the USPS on how it works:
You’ll find lots of information about Every Door at the USPS site and you can play with the route selection tool there as well. The program you want to specifically read about is called EDDM Retail, which simply means that you’re dropping cards off at a post office rather than a mail routing center.
So now you need to have a postcard to send.
Every Door Direct Mail (EDDM) has very specific size requirements, and it can be confusing. They link over to other folks who will print and drop the cards at the postoffice for you, but the total cost runs 53¢ or more per piece.
We like to use the Jumbo Mailers from Overnight Prints which are 6″ x 11″, double sided and you can get 2000 pieces printed for less than $500 before coupons (of which there are plenty out there!).
Your cost for 2000 cards:
Printing 25¢ each
Postage 18¢ each
Total: 43¢ each
You can use whatever printer you want, but you need to use large format postcards for this to work, because regular sized cards don’t meet the minimum size requirements. We’ve printed hundreds of jobs at Overnight Prints and recommend them often when folks are looking for affordable but quality printing.
The best part of EDDM? You can start really small with just a few hundred and try it out to see if it works for your dance studio marketing.