These are the cards people hold on to!
Your message in about 5,000 Sarasota homes. Shared space on a gigantic postcard.
Mailing a neighborhood by yourself is expensive. Sharing one oversized card is not. You get a full color ad on a card that reaches every home on the route, in whichever size suits you.
One business per category, on either card. Your card does not mail until it fills.
9x12 jumbo Sixteen businesses, about 5,000 homes, $499 a slot
6x11 community card Sixteen businesses, about 2,500 homes, $249 a slot
The math
Why anyone shares a postcard in the first place
Direct mail works. That was never the problem. The problem is that mailing five thousand homes on your own means paying for five thousand pieces of postage, five thousand pieces of printing, and a designer to lay it all out and someone to prepare EDDM mail for the post office, before a single phone rings. For most local businesses that is a four figure check written on faith.
A shared card removes the faith. Sixteen businesses split the same print run and the same postage, so each one pays a fraction of what a solo mailing costs and reaches exactly the same mailboxes. Nobody is buying a smaller audience. They are buying the same audience for less.
The reason it does not feel cheap to the person holding it is the format. A 9x12 card is usually larger than everything else that arrives that day. It does not fit in the stack of window envelopes. It gets looked at on the walk back from the mailbox, which is the only moment that matters. Best of all, these cards tend to go on the refrigerator for weeks or months!
What a solo mailing costs you
- Postage, about 5,000 homes
- about $1,200
- Printing, about 5,000 cards
- about $1,300
- Design, both sides
- about $600
- EDDM preparation
- about $400
- Total to mail it yourself
- about $3,500
- Your slot on a shared card
- $499
Postage and print are typical retail EDDM rates for a jumbo card and move with USPS pricing. Design is what a good freelance designer charges for a two-sided 9x12. EDDM preparation is the bundling into hundreds, the facing slips, the paperwork and the drop at the destination post office, which a mail house does for a fee or you have to do yourself. Your slot is a flat number, so there is nothing to estimate.
Start to mailbox
Four steps, and we do three of them
You pick a category and send us a logo and an offer. Everything after that is ours.
Claim your category
Tell us your trade and which neighborhood you want. If that category is still open on the next card, it is yours and it closes to everyone else in your trade. If it is taken, we will tell you plainly and put you on the next card rather than sell you a second slot beside a competitor.
Send a logo and an offer
That is genuinely all we need. We design the ad, size it to the slot, set it for press and send you a proof showing your ad in place on the real card next to the other fifteen. You approve it or you tell us what to change.
The card fills, then it prints
A half empty card is a worse card, so we do not mail one. When the card reaches its advertiser count we lock it, print it and book the mail date. If it has not filled by the date we promised you, you decide: a full refund, or you stay with the card and take 20% off your next one for the wait.
It lands, and it keeps working
A card does not scroll away. It sits on a counter or a fridge and it is still there in three weeks, which is most of the reason paper still works. Put a code on your offer that the caller has to mention and you will know which calls came from it.
Whether this works for your trade
Shared mail is not universally good, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling. It works best where one new customer is worth a lot more than the slot, and where being nearby is part of the reason someone picks you.
Trades with a high job value, like roofing, air conditioning replacement or window installation, only need a single conversion for the card to have paid for itself several times over. Recurring services, like lawn maintenance, pool care or pest control, are the same story from a different direction: one customer who stays for three years is worth many times what the slot cost.
It works less well where the job is worth thirty dollars and the customer never comes back, or where your service area is the whole state and geography is irrelevant to the buying decision. In those cases the arithmetic is genuinely hard, and we would rather say so before you book than explain it afterwards.
The honest test is to work out how many jobs it takes to cover the slot. If the answer is one or two, this is straightforwardly worth trying. If the answer is twenty, be skeptical of anyone promising you it will work.
Where a shared card tends to earn its keep
- The job is worth four figures or more
- Or for businesses with repeat customers
- Being local is part of why they pick you
- You can name the neighborhoods you want
- You have one clear offer, not nine services
Pick three of those and it is worth a conversation. Pick one and it probably is not, and we will tell you that.
Why paper, in this decade
It is a fair thing to be skeptical about, so here is the actual argument rather than a slogan.
The inbox is full and the mailbox is not
A local business competes with hundreds of emails and an endless feed for attention online. It competes with a handful of pieces of mail at the box. Scarcity of competition is worth something, and mail is one of the few channels where a small operator still has it.
It reaches people who are not searching
Search advertising is excellent at catching somebody who needs you today, and useless at reaching the person whose water heater will fail in November. Mail reaches both, because it does not require the household to be looking for anything at the moment it arrives.
A physical object stays in the house
A card on a fridge or in a kitchen drawer is still working weeks or months later. Nothing about a scroll past does that. This is the least measurable advantage of mail and probably the largest one. No Facebook ad can do that!
Everyone in the zone gets it, once
Every Door Direct Mail goes to every address on a carrier route. There is no targeting to get wrong, no audience to misconfigure and no household quietly excluded because of what a platform assumed about them.
Sharing removes the risk
The reason most local businesses never test mail is the size of the first check. Splitting the card between sixteen businesses turns a serious commitment into something you can try once and judge on the numbers.
And you can tell whether it worked
The old objection to mail was that you could never tell what it did. Put a code on the offer that a caller has to mention, (or add a coupon) and watch your own call volume or walk-in traffic in the three weeks after the drop against the three before.
What we will tell you before you book
Which carrier routes make up the zone and how many homes that really is. What the slot costs, in full, with nothing to pay later. The date the card must fill by and what happens if it does not. And the date it lands in mailboxes. If any of those four is vague when you are being sold a shared card by anybody, that vagueness is the answer.
Rather talk it through? Leave a name and number and we will call you back.
The rule that makes it work
One business per category. No exceptions, no tiers.
Plenty of shared mail sells the same trade twice on one card and calls the second one a different category. Roofing and roof replacement. Lawn care and landscaping. It is the easiest way to add revenue to a card and it is the fastest way to make every advertiser on it regret being there.
We do not do it. When a category is claimed on a card it is closed in our system, not just on a spreadsheet, and the next person in that trade is told the truth: the slot is gone, here is the date of the next card.
You are not next to a competitor
The homeowner comparing two roofers is not doing it on your card.
Scarcity is real, not a tactic
A card has a fixed number of slots. When they are claimed the card is closed, and we say so rather than inventing a deadline.
Renewals get first refusal
If you were on the last card, your category is held for you before it goes back on sale.
A category is what you sell, not what you are
Food is not one category. A pizzeria, a sushi place, a taco stand and an ice cream parlor compete for nothing and can all be on the same card. Two pizzerias cannot, and neither can two sandwich shops or two seafood restaurants. The line is drawn where a customer actually chooses between you.
Two formats
Pick the one that fits the budget
Both follow the same exclusive-category rule. Both carry sixteen slots. The jumbo commands more attention, and one advertiser can take two slots on it together as a double; the 6x11 costs least per slot and suits a business testing the channel for the first time.
The 9x12 jumbo card
Full color on both sides, printed on heavy stock. At nine inches by twelve it is bigger than the bills, bigger than the flyers, and physically awkward to ignore. This is the card that gets carried inside and put on the counter.
The 6x11 card
Sixteen slots in a smaller footprint, and the same exclusivity. Your ad is smaller and the card reaches half as many homes, which is exactly why it is the cheapest way to try the channel. It still mails at oversized rates and still stands out from letter mail.
Optional extras
More for your business, beside the card
None of these is needed to advertise with us, and each is paid separately. They are for owners who want to see what the card brings in, catch the calls they miss, and give people who look them up somewhere good to land.
Call tracking
A local number of your own on your ad, ringing straight to your phone. Every call is counted for you and every missed call is emailed, and nothing is ever recorded.
AI receptionist
A friendly virtual assistant that answers the calls you cannot take, takes a message and emails it to you within seconds. It says it is a virtual assistant and never quotes prices.
A website, written and run for you
Most people who see your ad look you up before they call. We write, build and host a complete website for your business, so what they find is clear, current and quick on a phone.
Ready to reserve a slot?
Pick your category before someone else in your trade does. One business per category, per card.
Reserve a slot (888) 348-1992