field notes · from the uncle stamp desk · july 2026

EDDM vs radius mail: an honest comparison

every door direct mail is the cheapest way to reach a neighborhood, and sometimes that's exactly right. here's when it is, when it isn't, and the math for both.

every door direct mail (EDDM) is the usps program that lets you blanket entire carrier routes without buying a mailing list. it's the cheapest postage in the game, and for some jobs it's the right tool. for most home service marketing, it isn't. here's the honest breakdown.

what EDDM actually is

you pick carrier routes on a usps map, print oversized cards, and every single address on those routes gets one: every home, every apartment, sometimes the businesses too. postage runs around $0.20 per piece, roughly half of what addressed mail costs to send. no list, no names, just saturation.

the card can't say a name because there isn't one. it says "postal customer." and the targeting stops at the carrier route, a unit of a few hundred households drawn for mail delivery efficiency, not for your business.

what radius mail actually is

addressed mail to specific homes chosen because of something you know: they're within 100 homes of a job you just finished, they closed on a house last month, they're in a subdivision built the same year as one you keep working in, or they used to be your customer. postage plus print costs more per card, but every card has a reason to exist.

the math, side by side

say you have $900 to spend on a neighborhood.

EDDM: about 3,000 cards at ~$0.30 all-in (postage, print, and your time at the post office or an EDDM service's fees). if 0.3% call, that's 9 calls. saturation lists pull lower response because most recipients have no connection to the trigger, but you reach everyone.

radius: about 1,000 cards at ~$0.89 all-in, targeted to the streets around your last month of completed jobs. if 1% call, that's 10 calls. same call volume, but the 1,000 homes were chosen because they just watched your truck work next door, so the calls skew toward your service area and your route density improves with every job booked.

the numbers above are illustrative, not promises. the structural difference is real though: EDDM buys reach, radius buys relevance, and in a route-based business relevance compounds.

when EDDM genuinely wins

• grand openings. new location, zero customers, need the whole town to know once. saturation is the point.
• restaurants and retail, where everyone within two miles is a legitimate prospect and there's no route economics.
• dense single-trade opportunity, like a hail path that covers entire carrier routes edge to edge. if you'd mail every address anyway, pay the cheaper postage.
• political and civic mail. every mailbox is the electorate.

when radius mail wins

• you have jobs already. the homes around completed work are the best prospects in the trade, and EDDM can't isolate them.
• you want the mail automated. EDDM is inherently a manual campaign. addressed mail can fire from your CRM every time a job closes. that's the automation we run.
• you want real tracking. with addressed mail, you can match new customer addresses against the mailed list and know exactly which cards produced jobs. EDDM gives you a coupon code and a guess.
• route density matters. pest, lawn, HVAC maintenance: recurring-service businesses make money on tight routes, and radius targeting is route targeting.

the hybrid most owners land on

use EDDM once or twice for the big saturation moments, a launch, a new service area. run addressed radius mail as the permanent layer, triggered by your jobs, tracked to the customer. cheap reach for the announcements, compounding relevance for the machine.

questions owners ask