The two flavors, defined
EDDM (saturation mail) delivers an oversized card to every active address on a USPS carrier route. No list, no names, no permit. You choose geography; the USPS does the rest. Postage is the cheapest available (24.7 cents per piece in 2026) because the carrier delivers one to everyone anyway.
Addressed mail sends a card to named people at specific addresses: your customer list, lapsed customers, or a purchased prospect list. It costs more per piece but every piece goes to someone you chose, the card can greet them by name, and delivery is trackable piece by piece.
Side by side
| EDDM (saturation) | Addressed (list) | |
|---|---|---|
| Who gets it | Every home on the routes you pick | Exactly the people on your list |
| List required | None | Yours, or purchased (5 to 15 cents/record) |
| Postage | $0.247/piece (2026 retail rate) | First-Class or Marketing Mail rates |
| Card size | Oversized (6.5 by 9 jumbo) | Standard sizes (4 by 6 and up) |
| Personalization | None (no names) | Name greetings, per-person offers |
| Delivery tracking | Not tracked per piece (delivered with the route) | Trackable piece by piece via USPS barcodes |
| Waste | Some (renters moving, mismatched homes) | Low if the list is good |
| Cost per household reached | Lowest | Higher, but zero waste on a clean list |
Choose by how your customers actually reach you
- Radius businesses choose EDDM first. Restaurants, cafes, dentists, gyms, salons, dry cleaners: if most customers live within a couple of miles, paying the lowest possible price per nearby household is the right math. The jumbo card is a bonus: it is physically the biggest thing in the mailbox that day.
- List businesses choose addressed first. If you already hold a customer file (past jobs, lapsed patients, quote requests that never closed), addressed mail to that house list is the highest-response mail you will ever send. Industry benchmarks put house-list response at 5 to 9 percent versus 2 to 4.4 percent for prospect lists.
- Job-site businesses use both in sequence. Roofers, HVAC, landscapers, painters: saturate the streets around completed jobs (the neighbors saw your truck), and separately mail your quote list by name. Two different messages, two mechanisms.
How this maps to StampSherpa plans
We built one plan per flavor and one for both, priced flat per month with design, printing, postage, and response tracking included. Neighborhood ($349 per month) is saturation: about 200 homes on a route around your business each month, extra homes $1.75 each, picked on a map with a circle and a slider. Residence ($199 per month) is addressed: 100 cards a month to a list you upload or type in, $2 per extra card. Complete ($549 per month) runs both channels at once. Every card, either flavor, prints a scannable code that logs responses to your dashboard. Details on the pricing page.