EDDM for contractors: costs, targeting and tracking

EDDM (Every Door Direct Mail) is the USPS service that delivers your mailer to every address on the carrier routes you choose, without a mailing list. For a contractor it's the fastest way to put a piece in front of a whole neighborhood, and the easiest way to waste money on houses that will never call. The difference is which routes you pick and whether you can tell, weeks later, what each drop booked. This guide covers 2026 costs and limits, a way to score carrier routes with your own job history, the prep and drop-off steps, and how to track every drop to completed jobs.

What EDDM costs and the rules that matter

USPS lists two versions of EDDM. Retail is the one most contractors use; BMEU is for larger mailers working through a mail house.

Source: USPS Every Door Direct Mail page.¹ The Retail rate matches the $0.260 EDDM Retail price in USPS Price List Notice 123, effective October 4, 2026.² Postage is the only cost you can verify exactly; printing, design and any mail-house fees depend on your vendor and quantity, so get quotes before you plan.

Size. EDDM requires flats. Under USPS physical standards for commercial mail, a piece is generally flat-size if it's more than 11.5 inches long, more than 6.125 inches high or more than 0.25 inch thick, and it can't be more than 15 inches long, 12 inches high or 0.75 inch thick. USPS allows narrow exceptions for simplified-address Marketing Mail (for example, pieces longer than 10.5 inches), but a 4 by 6 postcard fits none of them.³ That's why EDDM printers sell sizes like 6.25 by 9 and 6.5 by 11 inches, and why a standard 4 by 6 postcard doesn't qualify. Check the final size with the Mailpiece Size Checker in the EDDM Online Tool before you print.¹

Addressing. EDDM pieces carry no names or addresses; they're addressed to "Postal Customer". The postage indicia must sit above and to the right of the address block, in capital letters, at least 4 point type and larger than half an inch by half an inch.¹ Most EDDM printers include a compliant indicia template; check it anyway.

Scoring routes with your own job history

The EDDM Online Tool lets you search by address, city or ZIP Code, show a table of carrier routes, and filter by residential count, age, household size and income, using U.S. Census data.¹ Those filters describe who lives on a route. They don't tell you whether people on that route hire contractors like you. Your job history does.

Here's the idea this guide adds: score each route by what your completed jobs say about it, then let the Census filters break ties.

That gives you revenue per 100 homes for each route. Routes where you already earn well are full of households like your best customers. Neighboring routes with similar Census profiles and a low score are where you're under-represented, which makes them the strongest candidates for a new-customer drop.

A worked example

Take an example HVAC company considering one ZIP Code with six residential carrier routes. It matches its completed jobs from the last 12 months to the routes (by address, using its ZIP and route lists) and builds this table. All numbers are illustrations.

C001 and C002 are your territory already: you're well known there, and a neighborhood blast mostly reaches people who'd call you anyway. Mail your past customers on those routes with addressed pieces if you want to stay in front of them. C003 and C006 look like C001 and C002 in the Census filters but score far lower. Those are the routes where an EDDM drop has the most room to add new customers. C004 and C005 have a different Census profile and low scores; the homes there look less like the ones that already pay you, so they wait for a later test.

The drop: C003 and C006, 1,310 pieces, which fits comfortably inside the 5,000-per-ZIP daily limit.

At an assumed $0.15 per piece for printing, that's $0.41 per piece and about $537 for the drop. Replace the printing figure with your printer's quote.

Prepping and dropping the mail

1. 1

   Select routes in the EDDM Online Tool

   Search the ZIP Code, open the route table, filter to residential if you don't want business addresses, and select the routes you scored. The route table shows residential and total counts and the cost for each route.

2. 2

   Print to EDDM specs

   A flat within the size limits, up to 3.3 ounces for Retail, with the EDDM Retail indicia and 'Postal Customer' addressing.

3. 3

   Add the drop's tracking number and link

   A phone number used only by this drop, and a short web address or QR code that lands on a booking page tagged with the same campaign.

4. 4

   Bundle the pieces

   Stacks of 50 to 100 pieces, no taller than 6 inches, each with a completed EDDM facing slip showing the route and piece count.

5. 5

   Complete PS Form 3587

   Include the form with the carrier route information on the back, as USPS instructs.

6. 6

   Drop it off

   Take the mailing to the Post Office serving the selected ZIP Code, or ship it to that Postmaster by Priority Mail with a sample, the form, payment if unpaid and a Postmaster letter, boxes labeled Every Door Direct Mail-Retail and Open Immediately.

All of these steps come from USPS's EDDM instructions.¹ One more detail from the same page matters for a service business: if someone asked you to stop sending them mail, list their address in the Do Not Deliver column of the facing slip.¹ Keep the same address marked Do Not Mail in your customer records so your addressed lists respect it too.

Tracking every drop to booked jobs

The tracking number does most of the work. Every call to it is a response to this drop and nothing else, so you don't need coupon codes or guesses at the counter. If the number carries the drop's campaign, every job booked from those calls keeps the campaign through to the invoice.

If you mailed two route groups with different numbers, compare them directly. In the example above, the honest test of the route score is whether C003 and C006 produce new customers at a cost per completed job you'd accept. If they don't after two drops, rescore with a different time window or move on to the next pair.

Response counts can flatter a drop that went to routes where you already work, because some of those callers would have called anyway. Our Field Notes post on direct mail for home services explains how to measure that with a holdout group; EDDM's route-level targeting makes it practical to hold back a comparable route and compare.

When EDDM is the wrong tool

• You already know who needs you. Aging equipment, unsold estimates and lapsed members belong on addressed mail or email, not on every door. See the direct mail hub for that decision, and email marketing for HVAC companies for the cheapest first touch to the same lists.
• The office can't take the calls. A drop that lands in a full week sends callers to voicemail and then to a competitor.
• The offer needs a name. "Your 2011 furnace" can't go on an EDDM piece. Personalized offers need addressed mail.
• You can't track it. Without a drop-only number and link, you'll never know what the drop did, and you'll make the same decision again next year on a hunch.

If TradesForce or an agency plans your marketing calendar, give them the route scores and drop dates; the tracking line on each drop is what lets them, and you, judge the result on completed jobs rather than call counts. To compare the numbers across channels, the glossary entry on lead source attribution explains how jobs keep their source.