The pitch always leads with the same number. Three cents a household. At that price it sounds like it barely matters whether it works.
Then the invoice arrives and it is not three cents, it is several hundred dollars, because three cents times the minimum buy is the actual number. Direct mail is not expensive or cheap in the abstract. It is three different products at three very different prices, and most of the disappointment comes from buying one while imagining another.
Three products, not one
The shared coupon envelope is what most people picture. Valpak's Blue Envelope and Money Mailer both work this way: your offer is one insert among dozens, mailed to a broad set of households. Valpak's own materials quote pricing starting at three to five cents per household, sold in increments of ten thousand homes. So the minimum realistic buy lands somewhere around $300 to $500 per drop, and local markets typically mail somewhere between twelve and twenty four times a year.
Every Door Direct Mail is the opposite arrangement. You print your own piece, pick USPS carrier routes, and every address on those routes gets it. There is no list to buy. Postage is the cheapest the Postal Service offers, currently $0.260 per piece at the retail rate and $0.259 through a bulk permit, effective July 2026. Add printing at roughly six to eleven cents for a full-color postcard at volume and your all-in cost lands around thirty one to thirty six cents per door.
Targeted addressed mail is the third option, where you buy or supply a list and mail to specific households. Most addressed postcard campaigns settle around fifty five to ninety cents per piece all in.
Why the gap is ten times
Look at those numbers side by side. Three to five cents in a shared envelope. Thirty one to thirty six cents for your own EDDM piece. That is roughly a tenfold difference, and understanding what it buys is the whole decision.
In the shared envelope you are renting a small space inside something a household opens once. Your offer competes for attention with a pizza coupon, a gutter company, and a chiropractor. You do not control the format, the timing beyond the drop schedule, or what sits next to you.
With EDDM the entire piece is yours. Size, message, offer, timing, and the fact that it arrives alone rather than in a stack. You are paying ten times more for exclusivity and control.
Neither is the right answer universally. A simple, price-driven offer with broad appeal can work well in a shared envelope. A service that needs explaining, or a business trying to look like the premium option, generally cannot buy credibility three cents at a time.
Run the breakeven backwards
This is the calculation almost nobody does before signing, and it takes two minutes.
Say you mail 5,000 EDDM pieces at thirty five cents. That is $1,750. Your average job is $400 and your net margin is 20%, so each job puts $80 in your pocket.
To break even you need roughly 22 jobs. From 5,000 pieces, that is a conversion rate of about 0.44% from doors to booked work.
Now you have a real question instead of a vague one. Is it plausible that four or five households in every thousand will hire you off a postcard? For an urgent service in a dense area with a strong offer, maybe. For a considered purchase people research for weeks, probably not.
Do that arithmetic with whatever quote you are given. If the required conversion rate makes you wince, that is your answer, and it cost you nothing to find out.
Treat response rates carefully
You will be shown response benchmarks. Commonly cited figures put saturation mail like EDDM around one to two and a half percent, prospect lists at one to two percent, and house lists to existing customers meaningfully higher at roughly three to four percent.
Two cautions. Nearly all of this data is published by companies that sell direct mail, which does not make it wrong but does mean it is not disinterested. And more importantly, a response is not a booked job. Depending on how a given study counts, a response might be a phone call, a website visit, or a redeemed coupon. The number that matters to you is jobs, and it is always smaller.
The house list figure is the interesting one. Mailing people who have already paid you consistently outperforms mailing strangers, by a wide margin, and it is the cheapest list you will ever own. Most local service businesses have never mailed their own customers once.
The two things that actually decide it
Frequency. A single drop is not a test, it is a coin flip. The households that needed you that week will call and the rest will not remember you existed. Valpak markets mail a dozen or more times a year for a reason. If you cannot commit to at least three drops to the same area, the money is better spent elsewhere.
Tracking. Put a dedicated phone number or a unique code on the piece. Without one you will be reduced to guessing, and the guess will be shaped by whether the month happened to be good. This is the single most common way businesses conclude mail "did not work" when they simply never measured it.
The honest read
Direct mail is a real channel with real economics, and the current postage rates make EDDM genuinely cheap for a business with a defined geographic catchment.
It works best for services people buy on impulse or urgency, in dense areas, with a specific and strong offer. First visit free or fifty dollars off a named service will outpull twenty percent off by a wide margin.
It works worst as a rescue plan. The businesses that get hurt by direct mail are usually the ones that bought it in a slow month, mailed once, could not track it, and concluded the channel was broken. The channel was fine. The plan was one drop and a hope.