What is Every Door Direct Mail (EDDM)?
If you’re a business owner without the million dollar advertising budget of a big company or are struggling to find a marketing niche that covers your investment with its ROI, it’s time to see what an EDDM campaign can do for you.
In the booming digital age of advertising, it’s easy to lose sight of advertising roots in favor of flashier online marketing options. With every email campaign we send, every AdWords account that’s opened and every mobile marketing hit that’s tracked, we lose more and more faith in the old standbys—especially direct mail.
A dying form of communication… or is it?
Direct mail advertising was once a staple of marketing because it was a surefire way to make sure thousands of people would all venture out to their mailboxes and see your message, plain as day. But, as time has gone on and the direct mail market saturated, junk mail became the scourge of mailboxes everywhere and soon, it was nearly impossible for anyone to distinguish what was junk and what was worthwhile.
In the wake of the booming junk mail era, people started to rely less on their physical mail and more on their email and over time, email has slowly taken the place of snail mail for many people. The only problem with this is that the junk mail has also migrated and today, it’s nearly impossible to keep your inbox free of spam—including advertisements you may want to see!
All of this is a roundabout way of saying that people are paying less and less attention to their email these days and as an effect, email campaigns are on the decline. It’s just too easy for someone to hit “delete” and in fact, this often happens to expensive marketing campaigns.
But let’s take a step back for a moment and look at the big picture: if it’s so easy for people to flag emails or delete them on sight, how is a marketer supposed to succeed when it comes to direct mail? The answer might surprise you.
Going back to your roots
With such a market saturation of email, smart marketing professionals have begun to look for ways to revive traditional direct marketing, the result is Every Door Direct Mail (EDDM). And the pioneer of such a brilliant direct mail comeback? The United States Postal Service, of course!
Think about it: it costs fractions of a cent for spammers to send out email after email, flooding the inboxes of unsuspecting victims—email spam is truly the lowest cost solution to disseminating junk mail. So why would a spammer pay to produce and distribute snail mail for several times that cost? They wouldn’t, which leaves a safe niche for quality advertisers to fill when it comes to direct mail.
Every Door Direct Mail
EDDM works like this: advertisers go online and block sections of neighborhoods, subdivisions, towns, cities or counties that they want to target with their next direct mail advertising campaign. This data is fed into the U.S. Postal System and assigned to various mail carriers. Using materials generated by an advertiser, specifically for this specialized EDDM campaign, postal workers will deliver direct mail along with the usual mail, thus blanketing specific areas with quality advertising!
EDDM is so simple that it is genius and it’s gaining the favor of more and more smart marketers out there. From local businesses looking to spread the word about their commerce, to larger companies that want to bolster business in targeted areas, EDDM is driving traffic like no other direct mail campaigns—and it’s rapidly being touted over email campaigns that are losing ground to spammers. And, as experts in the budding advertising niche of EDDM, AlphaGraphics is here to help you create one success after another, one piece of direct mail at a time.