How Much Does It Cost to Advertise to 5,000 Local Homes?

Reaching 5,000 homes in the Charleston area with a printed card costs somewhere between $2,600 and $5,250 if you run the whole mailing yourself, or from $249 for a spot on a shared 9x12 card that several local businesses split. The gap is not the postage, which is the cheapest line on either bill. It is who pays for the design, the print run and the handling, and whether that cost is carried by one business or divided among several.

Here is where the money goes on each route, what the shared card costs at today’s rate sheet, and the handful of things that move the number up or down.

What you pay for when you mail 5,000 homes on your own

Mailing 5,000 homes yourself means paying for six things: design, printing, mailing preparation, postage, choosing the routes, and some way of tracking what came back. Postage is the line everyone quotes and the one least likely to surprise you. The rest is where the bill is made.

• Design. A two-sided oversized card from somebody who has laid out direct mail before runs $250 to $800. You can do it yourself, but a card that looks homemade gets binned at the mailbox and the postage was the same either way.
• Printing. $750 to $2,500 for 5,000 pieces, depending on the size of the card and the stock. Print is a setup-cost business, so a smaller run does not save much per piece.
• Mailing preparation. EDDM pieces go out in bundles with a facing slip on each, and the bundles go to the specific post office that serves the routes you picked. Pay somebody and it is $300 to $650 all told; do it yourself and it is a day.
• Postage. About 26 cents a piece at the EDDM Retail rate, so roughly $1,300 for 5,000 homes. Genuinely cheap, and genuinely a quarter to a half of the total.
• Route selection. You buy whole carrier routes, which come in lumps of a few hundred homes each. Getting to 5,000 means picking routes off the USPS map and usually overshooting a little.
• Tracking. Not a line on the invoice, but a QR code, a landing page or a unique offer is what tells you whether any of the above worked. Budget an hour to set it up.

All in, that is $2,600 to $5,250 for one drop, or 52 cents to just over $1.05 a home. The full working, line by line, is in what EDDM actually costs, and the figures above are that page’s, so the two agree.

What shared postcard advertising changes

Shared postcard advertising puts several non-competing local businesses on one 9x12 card, so the design, printing and postage that a solo mailer pays alone are split among everyone on it. A card mailed to 5,000 homes costs about the same to produce whether it carries one business or eight, which is the whole reason the per-business price drops as far as it does.

Three rules keep it useful rather than cluttered. One business per category, so a roofer is never on a card with another roofer and a dentist is the only dentist. Design, print and postage are included in the spot price, so there is no separate invoice from a printer or a designer. And the card goes out as one piece, so nobody bundles anything or drives to a post office.

What you give up is space and timing. You get a portion of the card rather than the whole of it, and it mails when that zone’s card mails. The overview of how the shared card works covers the mechanics.

What a spot costs right now

A spot on a shared card to 5,000 homes currently starts at $249, and the prices below are read from the rate sheet as the page loads rather than typed in, so they are the ones you would pay today.

Every size on the table reaches the same 5,000 households. What changes with the price is how much of the card is yours when it gets picked up, and how much you can say. A small spot carries a name, an offer and a number; a large one has room for a photo, hours and a map. Larger formats, up to a whole side of the card, are on the pricing page.

What changes the number

Four things move the price of a shared spot: the size you take, whether the card reaches 5,000 or 10,000 homes, how many times you mail, and whether you bring finished artwork. Only the first two change the invoice much.

• Spot size. The biggest lever, and the table above is the whole story. Per home, a larger spot costs more; per home that actually notices you, the gap is narrower than it looks, because a bigger spot is the one the eye lands on.
• 5,000 or 10,000 homes. Most zones offer a 10,000-household mailing as a step up. At current prices the smallest spot on a 10,000-home card is $299, which is 3.0¢ per home, a little less per home than the 5,000 card, because the design is paid for once. Whether it is the better buy depends on whether your service area really covers the second 5,000.
• Mailing more than once. One mailing is an introduction. The same homes two or three times is when a name starts to be recognized, and a run of mailings is usually priced below three bought separately; see the current specials. Per mailing the cost is the same or lower; per year it is obviously more, so plan the run rather than the card.
• Supplying your own artwork. Design is included in the spot price either way, so bringing a finished file is mostly about control and speed rather than a discount. It shortens the run-up to the artwork deadline and means the spot looks exactly the way your other material does.

How to think about it per customer rather than per home

The per-home figure is for sizing a budget; the number that decides whether to mail at all is what one customer is worth to you against what the spot costs. A cost of a few cents a home means nothing on its own, because a mailing that produces no customers was expensive at any price.

The arithmetic is short. An HVAC company in Summerville whose average job runs into the thousands needs one customer from a mailing at $249 for it to have paid, and everything after that is margin. A restaurant in Mount Pleasant, where one table is worth a fraction of that, needs several of them, which is still a small number out of 5,000 households but is not one. A dentist sits in between, with a new patient worth a great deal over time and very little on the first visit.

The calculator does that sum for your own figures: what a customer is worth, what the spot costs, and how many responses the mailing therefore needs. Be wary of anybody who fills in the response rate for you. Industry averages are mostly drawn from campaigns to past customers, which is a different thing from a cold neighborhood, and the worth-it guide explains why to treat them with suspicion.

Which Charleston-area zones can you reach

Any of the mailing zones on the calendar, each of which is 5,000 households per mailing with a 10,000 option. Summerville covers ZIPs 29483, 29485 and 29486, which takes in Nexton and Cane Bay along with the older town; Mount Pleasant covers 29464 and 29466. West Ashley, James Island, Daniel Island, Goose Creek, North Charleston and the islands each have a card of their own.

Which one to pick is a question about where your customers already come from, not about which zone is largest. A pressure-washing company working out of Nexton wants the Summerville card; a dentist on Johnnie Dodds wants Mount Pleasant. The mailing calendar shows which cards are coming up and which still have room in your category.