16 Every Door Direct Mail Tips and Tricks

by Chelsea Camper | Last Updated August 16, 2021

Every Door Direct Mail™ (EDDM) is still new to the direct mail market so there’s still time to be one of the first on board!

Here are 16 tips and tricks to help you get started with EDDM. Enjoy!

Planning

Schedule your mailing to align with a sale or promotion. Try to give people a reason to come to your store or try your service; make them feel special, give them a deal that’s just too good to pass up.
Print your own EDDM mailers. By printing your own you have more flexibility in what your message says. Here’s an example: Your boss wants 2,000 mailers to go out about your green widgets. But then he changes his mind and instead he wants 1,000 mailers to go out about green widgets and 1,000 mailers go out about teal widgets. If you sent that job to an outside printer you’d have to call them, ask them to stop the presses (probably pay a fee for that), then get them the new design ask quick as you can. Had you printed your own, you wouldn’t have to call the printer in a hurry to stop printing or pay that little fee. You could have walked over to your printer, hit Cancel Job (assuming you already printed 1,000), got a new design, and finished printing your mailers.
Use a laser printer or a simplified design with an inkjet printer. Unless you have a super awesome inkjet printer that can print high quality photos on a tight budget (let me know if you find one!), we’d suggest using a laser printer since they usually run cheaper than inkjet.
Pick routes by entering your store’s location and using the map to decide which routes youd like to send to. There is an option to search by Location to distribute your EDDMs. After entering the address of your store and selecting the radius in which youd like to advertise, use the Map view to visually select the routes you’d like to advertise to. You can see what the map view will look like by downloading the EDDM WebTool User Guide (PDF) and going to page 8 (it’s actually page 10 of the PDF, but listed as page 8). Seeing exactly where the routes are in relation to your store is a great help.
Be selective in the routes you pick. Remember that if you send out 2,000 mail pieces and 10% take you up on the offer you made them in the EDDM, that’s 200 people at least! More if the offer is for multiple people (20% off a dinner for four). Will you be able to handle the extra business?

Designing

Use Microsoft Publisher or InDesign (if available). It can be frustrating to try to create a mail piece in Microsoft Word. Word is built to write letters and papers; not so much to design mail pieces, however it can be done. By using the Text Wrap options and creating text boxes you can make an effective mail piece in Microsoft Word. It’s just a bit easier on the nerves to use a program that was built to handle image-based design.
Don’t try to say everything at once. By putting everything about every part of your business on one mailer you’ll make it busy and spam-like. Give people just enough information to intrigue them to take that next step; whether that next step is calling you or visiting your website, is up to you.
Repeat each piece of relevant contact information at least twice (front and back). If you’re a small bakery with a nice web site but not enough people to man the phone 24/7, the two pieces of content you should focus on would be your physical address and your web site. It’s good to add your phone in as well, but if that’s not the primary way you want to be contacted, add your e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, or another way that you’d rather be contacted and repeat that piece of contact information.
Put the route number on the mailers. This was an idea that one of our customers gave us after his first use with our Every Door Direct Mailers. By doing this he could see which route people came from when they came in to redeem their coupons for discounted martial arts training. If he got enough people from one route that he thought he wouldn’t get any more with a second mailing, then he would know not to send to that route next month. It would work just as well in reverse for a family store to know which routes are the most active when they come in to renew monthly coupons and could continue to send mailers to those routes.

Printing

Use a printer that auto duplexes if available; most mailers are two sided. If you don’t have a printer that auto duplexes, that’s alright. It’s just going to take you a bit longer to manually duplex your pieces.
Set printer to print 50 (or 100) at a time. You need to sort your mailers into bundles of 50 or 100 for the post office to deliver them. Instead of sitting there counting out 50 (or worse yet, 100) over, and over, and over, and over again, have your printer do the work. Send your job in sets of 50 or 100 and separate the sets with bright colored paper or cardboard.
Print a small overrun. “Overrun” just means “extra.” Print 5-10 extra pieces just in case some the original set get damaged during packaging and/or transit to the post office.

Packaging

Use soft elastic loops to bundle sets of 50. Most people would first go to rubber bands to bundle their sets of 50 (we did at first too), but the rubber bands can bend the paper in a “u” shape. The elastic loops put just enough pressure to hold the stack together, but not so much that they started to bend.
Print one facing slip for each route. Fill in static information, then copy that facing slip. If you have 2,000 mailers split into 40 bundles and 5 routes, you can save a lot of time on paper work by filling out the basic, static information on one sheet for each of the 5 routes then coping that sheet for as many times as you need to. Most of the information stays the same for each route (route number, total number of bundles, etc.). The only thing that changes within each route is the bundle number. Example: “Bundle 1 of 8,” “Bundle 2 of 8,” etc.
It is okay to have a bundle under 50. If you’ve played around with the EDDM route map you know that you’re not going to get an even number like 2,000. You’re going to get a number like 1,873. It is perfectly okay to have a bundle of 20 for route ABC09 and a bundle of 3 for route DEF09 if route ABC09 is 820 and route DEF09 is 1,003. Just let the post office know when you drop off your mailers.
Even if you get there first thing in the morning, your mailers won’t go out the same day. This is one of the most important things to remember! If you get there on Friday at 8am when the post office first opens, don’t expect them to go out Friday; they just can’t do it.

Have you had any experiences with Every Door Direct Mail?? Have any tips youd like to share?