Use Every Door Direct for Efficient, Cheaper Mailings!

A large part of our job, as real estate virtual assistants, is to find ways to find the best, most efficient tools that our clients can use to complete their high-priority marketing tasks. While many of our efforts focus on the most tech-centric methods, we still assist many of our clients with mailings. Sending out letters and postcards is still one of the most effective ways to keep in touch with your sphere of influence. The problem for most is that printing and mailing companies are quite expensive. Most are willing to pay, since mailings are a necessary part of their overall marketing plan, but we’ve discovered a service that will save you money and allow you to reach your sphere of influence, and that is the USPS’s Every Door Direct service.

With Every Door Direct, you can go online and select various USPS mailing routes that you want to reach. You narrow down the search based upon mile radius and how many pieces you want to mail. From there EDD helps you narrow down the best routes and you select which ones you’d like to send your mailing to. Below is a video outlining the basic process for using Every Door Direct:

The biggest benefit to using Every Door Direct in place of a service like Vistaprint is that you save a lot of money. Let’s break it down this way:

You are going to be sending out 1,122 Just Listed postcards to your sphere of influence. Besides the time spent creating the appropriate mailing list and designing the postcard, you need to upload the postcard to Vistaprint, set your parameters for the postcard (glossy or not, jumbo postcard vs. a standard size, etc.) and then place your mailing order. If your order through Vistaprint, here is how the cost breaks down:

$187.48 for the postcard creation and printing
$540.01 for a mailing fee and first class postage
Total, that comes out to $727.49 for one mailing

If you use Every Door Direct, you would go online, put in the zip codes that you want to use, and select the highest number of entries for that zip code. If you’re in the right area, this could be more than 1,122. For the sake of example, let’s say you come up with 1,173 addresses. The cost would be as follows:

$200 for printing the postcard through VistaPrint, (or cheaper if you go through a local printer, but this would require some research)
$170.08 in mailing costs through Every Door Direct
Total, that comes out to approximately $370.08, if you choose to print the postcard through VistaPrint.

The amount you save is significant, and you can reach more people in your sphere of influence through each mailing. As with everything, however, there are a few pitfalls to using the Every Door Direct service:

•    You have a 200 piece minimum requirement. You definitely only want to use this for bulk mailings.
•    There is more work involved on your end. You need to bundle all of your mailing pieces yourself, and this could leave room for error if you miscount the amount per bundle. This is something a local printer could take care of on your behalf, but there may be some extra cost involved. You’ll also have to deal with your postcards getting mailed to you directly from VistaPrint or ExpressCopy unless you choose to go through a local printer.
•    You have less control over who gets the postcards. You can select which mailing routes you want your marketing pieces to go to, but the mailing will go to every address on that route, so you won’t be able to eliminate certain streets.

If you have the right size mailings and don’t mind putting in a little extra legwork, Every Door Direct really can work for you! The money that you’ll save will far outweigh the extra steps you’ll need to take to bundle your marketing pieces or extra printing costs. As your real estate virtual assistants, we think that it’s exceedingly important to know where to invest your marketing dollars, and in today’s tech-driven society, it seems that putting it all into mailings isn’t the best way to allocate your budget. This is a solution that allows you to save money, and it’s user-friendly and effective!

Feel free to contact us if you have any questions about Every Door Direct! We’ll be happy to answer them for you. Have a great day!

Sarah Kay
Social Media and Copywriting Team Leader