Every Door Direct Mail lets you send a piece to every address on a chosen postal carrier route without owning or renting a mailing list. For a business with a physical location and a defined trade area, it is one of the few channels where you control exactly who is reached.
Why it works in Manhattan
A restaurant on Ninth Avenue draws from a walkable radius. Digital advertising will happily charge you to reach people in another borough who will never visit. EDDM lets you select the specific routes around your location and hit every address on them.
Manhattan has a particular advantage: density. A single carrier route can cover a large number of households in a small number of buildings, so the cost per household reached is efficient.
The size rules
This is where first attempts usually fail, because the piece must qualify as a flat rather than a letter.
- It must exceed one of: 6.125 inches in height, 11.5 inches in length, or 0.25 inches thick.
- Maximum size is 12 x 15 inches.
- Thickness must fall between 0.007 and 0.25 inches.
- Common compliant sizes: 6.5 x 9, 6.25 x 11, 8.5 x 11 and 9 x 12.
EDDM Retail postage is the same per piece regardless of size within the qualifying range. A 6.5 x 9 postcard and a 9 x 12 mailer cost identical postage. Since postage usually exceeds printing cost, going bigger is often better value rather than an extravagance.
What it costs
As of 2026, EDDM Retail postage runs $0.260 per piece. Printing adds roughly $0.10 to $0.22 per piece depending on quantity, stock and finishing. Budget somewhere around $0.36 to $0.48 per household all in.
Choosing routes in a dense city
USPS publishes a mapping tool showing carrier routes with address counts and demographic averages. In Manhattan, pick by trade area rather than radius: a route on the far side of a park, a highway or a major avenue may be geographically close but functionally distant, because nobody crosses it for lunch.
Indicia and bundling
Your mailer needs the correct EDDM Retail indicia and required clear space for the address block. Pieces are bundled in counts of 50 to 100 with facing slips and dropped at the post office serving the selected routes. We print the indicia correctly and can handle bundling and the drop so it runs as one job.
Making it work
- One offer per piece. A postcard saying five things says nothing.
- Make the offer specific and time-bound.
- Print your address large. Proximity is the whole reason this channel works.
- Include something trackable: a code to mention, or a dedicated number.
- Mail the same route more than once. A single drop is a test, not a campaign.
See sizes and stocks in marketing materials. Source: USPS EDDM requirements and 2026 retail rates.
Need this printed? We are at 40 Wall Street, and we deliver free anywhere in Manhattan.