EDDM for campaigns: reach every mailbox without a mailing list
Every Door Direct Mail is the cheapest way to put your message in every mailbox in your district. Here's how to plan a route-smart campaign mailing.
Why campaigns love EDDM
Traditional political mail needs a voter file, addressing, and per-piece list costs. Every Door Direct Mail® skips all of it: you pick postal carrier routes, and USPS delivers your mailer to every mailbox on them, at one of the lowest postage rates the Postal Service offers. At the time of writing that's 26¢ per piece (USPS EDDM Retail rate, effective July 12, 2026); the EDDM price table always shows the current rate.
For local races, that trade is usually a win. For school board, city council, or county commission, your district is a set of neighborhoods. Blanketing them costs less than renting, cleaning, and addressing a list, and you reach the new movers and low-propensity voters a voter file misses.
Picking your routes
USPS's free EDDM route mapper shows all carrier routes with household counts. The moves that matter:
- Match routes to your district lines. Routes follow ZIP codes rather than city or precinct boundaries, so expect some spillover into neighboring towns. Pick the routes that sit mostly inside your district; a little waste at EDDM postage rates is usually cheaper than a surgical list.
- Sort by turnout as well as size. If you know your strong precincts, mail them first and work outward as budget allows.
- Residential routes only. The mapper lets you exclude business addresses, and campaigns almost always should.
Or skip the mapper: tell us your target ZIP codes in your order notes and we'll map the routes with you.
Go jumbo
Each mailer in the stack that day is competing for one glance over the recycling bin. EDDM's size rules require larger-format pieces. We print four sizes: 6.5" × 8", 6.5" × 9" (the most popular), 8.5" × 11", and 6.5" × 12". Use the space the way a yard sign uses a lawn: name huge, message short, one clear photo of your face.
Timing your drops
A single mailer builds name ID; a sequence builds a campaign. The classic local-race pattern:
- Introduction (3–4 weeks before ballots drop): who you are, why you're running
- Issue/contrast (as early voting opens): your top issue in one sentence, backed by proof
- GOTV (the weekend before election day): when, where, and how to vote
Allow 4–6 business days for printing plus USPS's delivery window on each drop. Build your calendar backward from election day and lock the dates before you write a word of copy.
EDDM or a voter list?
EDDM reaches every door, including homes with no registered voters. If you only want to reach one party's voters, or only likely voters, a voter list mailing costs more per piece but wastes nothing, and for a single-party audience it usually costs less overall.
What it costs
You pay two things: printing and mail prep (see the EDDM price table) and postage at the USPS rate, confirmed against your exact route counts before anything prints. At the rate above, a 5,000-household drop runs about $1,300 in postage plus printing. For full-district reach with zero list costs, nothing else in politics comes close.