The whole process
How a shared card actually gets made
Shared mail is a simple idea wrapped in a lot of vague promises. Here is the entire mechanic, including the parts that are usually left out of the sales pitch.
- 1
Claim your category
Check that your trade is still open on the card for the zone you want, and reserve it. One business per category, per card.
- 2
Pay for the slot in full
One payment, no deposit and no balance later. Until the card locks, that money is refundable and is not spent on anything.
- 3
We build and proof the ad
Send a logo and an offer, or nothing at all. We design the ad and send you a proof. Any changes you ask for are made before it prints.
- 4
The card fills, prints and mails
The card prints once every slot is filled. USPS Every Door Direct Mail delivers it to every home on the chosen carrier routes.
- 5
You judge the response
Your ad carries its own QR code and we count the scans for you. Every card also asks the reader to mention it when they call, and an offer that exists only on this card means every redemption can only have come from it.
A zone is a set of carrier routes, not a zip code
The postal service divides every town into carrier routes. A route is one postal worker walking one loop, somewhere between three hundred and six hundred homes. Every Door Direct Mail lets a business buy an entire route at a reduced rate, on the condition that every address on it gets the piece.
A zip code is a blunt instrument. It can take in an apartment block and a gated golf community a few streets apart, and a roofer wants very different things from each. So we build zones by hand out of individual routes, sized to land about five thousand homes, and we pick routes on what the housing stock actually looks like rather than on what the postcode says.
That matters to you because you are paying for reach you cannot pick apart afterwards. If a thousand of the homes on a card are rentals and you sell roof replacements, you did not buy five thousand prospects. You bought four.
What we look at when building a zone
- Homes per route
- USPS delivery counts
- Owner occupied
- Census block group
- Median home value
- Census block group
- Age of housing stock
- Public records
- Recent permit activity
- County permit data
The card fills before it prints
This is the single most important thing to understand about how we run, and it is the thing most worth asking any shared mail operator about.
A card mails full or it does not mail
The economics of a shared card only work when the slots are filled, because the printing and the postage cost the same whether four businesses are on it or a full card. An operator who mails a thin card is either losing money or has quietly raised your price to cover it. We set a minimum advertiser count per card and hold to it.
A date, and a choice attached to it
When you reserve a slot you are told the date by which that card must fill. If it has not filled by then, you decide what happens next. Take a full refund, with no forms and no conversation about it. Or stay with the card, wait for it to fill and mail, and take 20% off your next one for the wait. There is no version of this where we keep your money and mail a thin card.
What about the last slot or two? If a card is one or two slots short as its date nears, we fill the gap rather than hold everyone else up or drop the price: with our own ad, or by giving the slot to a respected local business. Either way the card mails full, and no advertiser is ever charged for a card that went out lighter than promised.
Payment, artwork and who owns what
Paid in full, up front
One payment, no deposit and no balance to chase later. Until the card locks, that money is refundable and we treat it as yours rather than as revenue. It is the simplest arrangement for both sides and it is why the refund promise above can be unconditional.
We design it, you approve it
Send a logo and the offer you want to run. We lay the ad out and set it for press. The proof you get shows the whole card with your ad in position. Nothing goes to print without your approval in writing.
The ad file is yours
Ask and we will send you the finished artwork for your slot in a print ready file. Use it in a newspaper, on a flyer, anywhere you like. We are selling you distribution, not holding your logo hostage.
Judging it honestly
We do not fudge results and we would rather say so plainly than produce a number that flatters the card. What we can do is make the card easy for you to judge.
Put a code on the offer that the caller has to mention to claim it. Every redemption then has to have come from the card. The measurement costs nothing and never expires, and it belongs to you rather than to us. Watch your own call volume for the three weeks after the drop against the three before it, and you have the comparison that actually matters. Or for retail or restaurants, include a unique coupon or offer.
After the drop, tell us how it went. We would rather hear that a card was quiet than find out when you do not renew, and it is the only way the next zone gets picked better. If the answer is that it did not work for your trade in that zone, that is worth knowing on card one rather than card three.
An offer only this card carries
A figure, a package or a code to quote. A redemption can only have come from the card.
A line on every card
We ask the reader to mention the card when they call, so the question is already in the conversation.
A code on every ad
Your own QR code opens your website or page, and we count the scans and show you them. Switch it off on your artwork page if you would rather not have one.
The QR code on every ad
Every ad on the card carries its own QR code in its top-right corner. It is included in the slot price and it is on unless you switch it off. Somebody who points a phone camera at it lands on your website, or on your free landing page if you do not have one.
The code goes through a short postcardadvantage.com address first, and that is how we count the scans for you: once per phone per 30 minutes, with link previews and robots left out. We keep the time and whether it was a phone, never who scanned. Your results page shows the total and the scans day by day.
A scan is a floor, not the whole response. Plenty of people read a card and simply phone, which is why the line asking them to mention the card and an offer unique to the card still matter. The code in the center band is ours, for businesses that want a slot on the next card.
Optional: count every call with a tracking number
Call tracking is a paid add-on at $49 a year, and you do not need it to advertise with us. You pick an area code (usually your own) and then choose one of a handful of local numbers in it. That number prints on your ad where your own phone number would go, on every card you are on that year.
When someone calls it, your phone rings with the caller's own number showing. When you pick up you hear "Postcard Advantage call. Press 1 to accept." Press 1 and you are talking to the caller, so a person always hears it is a postcard call, even when a phone app or office system picks up first. For each call we log the time and how long it lasted. The only thing kept about the caller is their area code. We never record or transcribe a call.
Your results page shows real calls (answered, 20 seconds or more), missed calls, and short or likely spam calls separately, day by day. It renews yearly with reminders before each renewal. If you stop, the number keeps ringing through for 60 days and is then released. It is never given to another business.
For phones that ring all day there is busy call tracking, $149 a year instead of $49 a year, with 5,000 forwarded minutes a year, and the busy receptionist, $249 a year instead of $99 a year, with 1,000 messages a year. Each part upgrades on its own, for the difference. Everything about call tracking
Optional add-on: an AI receptionist for the calls you miss · $99 a year
The AI receptionist add-on requires call tracking: it is $99 a year on top of call tracking ($148 a year for both), paid as its own yearly subscription that renews on the same day. If call tracking ends, the receptionist ends with it.
When a call to your tracking number is not taken (no answer, busy, or nobody pressed 1), the caller is not turned away. A virtual assistant answers with your business name, says it is your virtual assistant and that you cannot come to the phone right now, and offers to take a message so you call them right back. It asks what they need, their name, how urgent it is, and the best time and number to call back, plus where the job is for trades that come to you. You can reword that question, switch it off, or add up to three questions of your own. It reads the message back once.
You get the message by email within seconds, and it is in your account. The assistant only tells callers what you have told us about your business, such as your hours, services and the area you cover. It never quotes a price, promises a time or books a job; anything else, it says it will pass the question on. Calls are never recorded, and we keep only the written message.
For trades that get emergency calls you can switch on emergency handling: an emergency is marked urgent and sent straight away, and only a caller who describes danger to life, such as a gas smell, a fire or someone hurt, is told to hang up and call 911. Without it, the assistant never mentions 911. You can turn the assistant or emergency handling on and off in your account at any time. Everything about the AI receptionist
What Every Door Direct Mail actually is
Every Door Direct Mail is a postal service program that lets a mailer buy a whole carrier route at a reduced rate without holding a mailing list and without addressing a single piece. The trade is that everybody on the route gets it. You cannot skip a house and you cannot pick the households you like.
That constraint is exactly why it is cheap, and for a local trade it is barely a constraint at all. If you fix roofs in a neighborhood, every house in it is a plausible customer eventually. Paying to reach all of them is not waste in the way it would be for a business selling something only one household in fifty could use.
The cost comes in two parts. There is the postage per piece, which is set by the postal service and moves when their rates move, and there is the printing, which depends on the size of the card and how many are run. Neither has anything to do with how many advertisers are on the card, which is the whole reason sharing one works.
The paperwork is the part that puts individual businesses off. Pieces have to be bundled per route to a specification, counted, documented on the right postal form and delivered to the right facility on the right day. Getting one detail wrong holds the entire drop. Doing that once a month for one card is manageable. Doing it for your own single mailing is a genuinely annoying afternoon. Mailing houses usually charge at least $400 for this part alone.
What EDDM does and does not let you do
- Pick carrier routes
- yes
- Skip individual homes
- no
- Need a mailing list
- no
- Address each piece
- no
- Target by household
- no
- Choose the drop week
- yes
Targeting happens when the zone is built, not when the mail goes out. That is why which routes are in your zone matters more than anything else about the drop.
Questions worth asking any shared mail operator
Including us. If an answer is vague, that vagueness is the answer.
What happens if the card does not fill?
You want a date and a consequence, not reassurance. Ours is a refund date on your confirmation, and two ways out of a card that misses it: your money back in full, or 20% off your next card if you are willing to wait for this one. If the answer you get elsewhere is that it always fills, ask what happened the time it did not.
Exactly which routes am I paying for?
A real answer is a list of carrier routes and home counts. A vague one is a zip code or a colored shape on a map. You are buying specific mailboxes and you are entitled to know which.
Is my category genuinely exclusive?
Ask specifically whether a competitor could appear under a different label. Roofing and roof replacement. Lawn maintenance and landscaping. If the categories are loose enough to allow that, exclusivity is a word rather than a rule.
How will I know whether it worked?
A straight answer about what can and cannot be measured. Scans of a printed code can be counted; a call from somebody who read the card cannot, unless they say so. Anyone promising per-customer attribution from a postcard is selling you a number they cannot produce. Ask what the mechanism is, who owns it, and what it misses.
When exactly does it mail?
A week is a fine answer. Some time next month is not. Seasonal trades in particular need to know whether the card lands before or after the moment their customers start thinking about them.
Can I see a card you have already mailed?
A real operator has physical cards and a route list from previous drops. A mock up is not the same thing, and it is a reasonable question to ask before handing anybody a mailing budget.
One last thing about timing
Direct mail rewards patience more than almost any other channel, and that is the hardest part of it to sell honestly. A card that lands in March is still working in May, because a household that keeps it does not need you on the day it arrives. Judging a drop on the first week of phone calls consistently understates it.
That is also the argument for booking more than one drop in a zone rather than testing once and drawing a conclusion. The second and third time a household sees the same name is doing more work than the first, and a single card is a fair test of the mechanics but a poor test of the channel.
Rather talk it through? Leave a name and number and we will call you back.
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Pick your category before someone else in your trade does. One business per category, per card.
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