The argument this settles
Every small business owner who prints door hangers hears it sooner or later: why walk when the mail carrier goes to every house anyway? The honest answer is money. EDDM saves your legs and costs you postage on every piece.
So we priced both. Same 4.25″ × 11″ size, same quantities, same homes. One version is a door hanger you or your crew hang, the other is an Every Door Direct Mail postcard that USPS delivers.
How we worked it out
Printing comes from our own price list, the same one the cart uses, so the study updates when prices do. Shipping is UPS Ground from the nearest of our six hubs to a ZIP code in each state.
Postage is the USPS EDDM Retail rate of $0.260 per piece. Household and housing counts come from the Census Bureau's American Community Survey, five-year estimates for 2020 to 2024.
The hourly figure is simple division. Take what door hangers save, divide by the hours it takes to walk the route, and you get what that walk pays you per hour.
How fast can one person hang them?
We did not time anyone, so we show three paces: 60, 90 and 120 doors an hour. Spread out suburbs and hills pull you toward the slow end. Tight rows of houses with short driveways push you toward the fast end.
At 90 doors an hour, 5,000 homes is about 56 hours of walking. Two people working Saturdays get it done in about three weekends.
Where door hangers make the most sense
A door hanger needs a door you can walk up to. Detached houses are the easy case, and the U.S. has about 88.1 million of them.
Apartments and gated communities are the hard case, since you often cannot reach the doors at all. In those areas EDDM wins, because the carrier gets in where you cannot. The state table below shows how much of each state is detached houses.
When paying the postage is the smarter move
If your time bills at more than the hourly figure above, mail it. The same goes for routes you cannot walk safely, big areas spread over many miles and any week your crew is booked solid.
And you can mix the two. Plenty of our customers mail an EDDM postcard to a wide area, then hang door hangers on the streets closest to the shop. Price either one on the door hanger page or with the EDDM cost calculator.
What this study leaves out
It does not measure response. A hanger on the door and a card in the mailbox get read differently, and only your own tracking will tell you which one brings calls.
It also leaves out gas, wages you pay a crew, design and sales tax. Census households are estimates with a margin of error and do not match USPS route counts exactly. Our printing and shipping prices are ours alone, while postage is the same wherever you print.
