The 9x12 jumbo card
Sixteen businesses, about 5,000 homes, $499 a slot
Our flagship format. Full color on both sides with sixteen advertiser slots, and physically larger than almost everything else arriving that day.
Two formats
The 9x12 and the 6x11
Both card formats
Two card sizes with the same one-business-per-category rule and the same refund promise. What differs is how many homes each one covers and how big your ad is, which is why the price differs too.
The 6x11 card
Sixteen businesses, about 2,500 homes, $249 a slot
Sixteen slots and the same exclusivity, mailed to about 2,500 homes rather than about 5,000. A smaller ad, and the cheapest way to test the channel.
What is the same, and what is not
The jumbo card covers about 5,000 homes and the 6x11 about 2,500. Both are drawn from the same zone and the same kind of carrier routes. So the cheaper format does reach fewer households, and we would rather say that plainly than let the price look like a discount on the same thing. Every address on the routes a card covers receives it; there is no targeting inside a route either way.
Both carry sixteen advertiser slots with eight to a side. On the jumbo, one advertiser can take two of them together as a double. On the 6x11 your ad is smaller and the card reaches half as many homes. That is the trade, and it is why the smaller card costs less per slot. Both close your category the moment you book, so no other business in your trade appears on that card under any label. Both go through the same design and proofing process, where we lay out your ad, set it for press and send you a proof of the whole card with your ad in position beside the others.
Both carry that advertiser's own web address and phone number, printed at a size a reader can act on.
Side by side
- Homes reached
- About 5,000 vs about 2,500
- Advertiser slots
- 16 on both
- Slots per side
- 8 on both
- Category exclusivity
- on both
- Printed both sides
- full color
- Your web address and phone
- on both
- Refund promise
- on both
How to choose between them
The honest answer is that it comes down to two numbers you already know: what a job is worth to you, and how many of them you would need before the slot has paid for itself.
01
What one customer is worth
If a single job runs into four figures, or a customer stays with you for years, one conversion covers either format several times over and the price difference between them stops mattering. Take the larger card, because the only variable left is how many people notice it. If it would take several customers to cover the slot, the smaller card changes that count meaningfully and is the more sensible starting point.
02
Whether you have done this before
A business that has never tested direct mail is buying information as much as advertising. Buying that information on the cheaper card is rational, and if it works you can move up on the next drop with real redemptions behind the decision rather than a hunch. A business that already knows mail works for it should not be starting small.
03
How much your ad has to say
One offer, a logo, a phone number and a code fit comfortably on either. A list of nine services fits properly on neither, and it will suffer more on the smaller card. If your instinct is to use the space to cover everything you do, that is worth resolving before you pick a size, because it matters far more to the result than the format does.
If you are genuinely unsure, say so when you get in touch and tell us your trade and roughly what a job is worth. Working out which card makes arithmetic sense for you takes about three sentences, and we would rather have that conversation than sell you the expensive one by default.
Why both formats are oversized
Neither of these is a letter sized piece, and that is deliberate rather than a print decision. Direct mail does not fail because households dislike advertising. It fails because a standard sized envelope or flyer gets sorted into the recycling in the few seconds between the mailbox and the kitchen counter, alongside everything else that arrived that day.
An oversized card interrupts that sort. It will not slot into the stack or sit flat on the pile, so it has to be dealt with as its own object. The 9x12 does this most forcefully because it is usually much larger than anything else that arrives; the 6x11 does it too, at eleven inches long, just with a little less emphasis.
Both are printed on stock heavy enough that the piece does not feel disposable, because a flimsy card signals junk before anyone reads a word of it. That is the least measurable thing we do and probably one of the most important.
01
Same zone, different run
The 6x11 covers about half the households, from the same kind of routes.
02
Same exclusivity
Each card takes one business per category.
03
Same promise
Neither card mails unless it fills, and both carry the same choice if it does not.
Why one costs less than the other
The price difference between the two formats is not a margin decision on our side. It is print and postage. A larger piece costs more to produce and it costs more to mail, and the gap between the two slot prices is close to the gap in what the two cards cost us to put in a mailbox.
That is worth understanding because it tells you what you are actually trading. You are buying a physically smaller piece across a smaller run of homes, and paying less because it genuinely costs less to print and to post. Nothing about the service, the exclusivity, the design work or the tracking changes between them.
It also explains why we publish both numbers rather than quoting privately. A published price has to survive comparison with what the same reach costs when you buy it alone, which is the comparison that matters to you. If either of ours ever stopped making sense against that, it should change on the page rather than quietly in individual conversations.
What drives the cost of any drop
Postage is charged per piece, so the number of homes in a zone moves the total directly. Printing scales with the size of the card and the length of the run. Neither has anything at all to do with how many advertisers are on the card, which is the entire reason sharing one works.
Sixteen slots on each card. Those are the numbers that make the arithmetic land at a price a one van business can say yes to. Fewer would mean a higher price each. More would mean ads too small to read, which helps nobody printed on the card.
How both cards actually reach a mailbox
Both formats mail through Every Door Direct Mail, which is worth understanding because it explains what you can and cannot ask for.
What it is
A whole carrier route at a time
The postal service divides every town into carrier routes, each one postal worker walking one loop of roughly three to six hundred homes. Every Door Direct Mail lets a mailer buy an entire route at a reduced rate without holding a mailing list and without addressing a single piece. The condition is that every address on that route receives it.
What it means
Targeting happens when the zone is built
You cannot skip a house and you cannot pick households. For a local trade that is barely a constraint, because essentially every home in a neighborhood is a plausible customer eventually. It does mean which routes make up your zone matters more than anything else about the drop, which is why zones are assembled by hand rather than drawn around a zip code.
What we do
The paperwork nobody mentions
Pieces have to be bundled per route to a specification, counted, documented on the correct postal form and delivered to the right facility on the right day. Get one detail wrong and the whole drop sits. Once a month, for one card, that is manageable. Doing it for your own single mailing is a genuinely annoying afternoon or more or a $400+ fee from a mailing house, and it is a large part of why the shared model works at all.
Either format
Both mail at oversized rates
Neither card is letter mail and neither is priced as letter mail. Both sit in the oversized band, which costs more per piece than a standard envelope and is most of why they get looked at. The difference between the two formats in postage is real but modest; the larger difference between them is print.
Whichever you pick, the format is the smallest decision
It is the one people spend the most time on and the one that changes the result the least. What decides whether a card works for you is the zone it lands in and the offer printed in your slot. A brilliant offer on the smaller card in the right neighborhood will beat a vague one on the jumbo in the wrong neighborhood every time, and it is not close.
So spend your thinking there. Name the streets you actually want more work from rather than the whole county. Decide the single thing you want a household to do, and make it specific enough that somebody could act on it standing at the kitchen counter. Get those two right and either format will do its job. Get them wrong and no amount of card size rescues it.
Rather talk it through? Leave a name and number and we will call you back.
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