EDDM Routes: How to Pick the Right Ones for a Tree Service

Matt Morovic at Upright Tree Care in Wisconsin runs five quotes in two hours because they’re all in the same neighborhood. That isn’t luck and it isn’t a scheduling trick. It’s what happens when the EDDM routes under a mail campaign are picked on purpose.

Most tree service owners never get there, because route selection is the step everybody rushes.

They open the USPS map, click the neighborhoods that look nice, check the total cost, and hit go. Then they wonder why 4,000 letters produced six calls and four of them wanted free firewood.

What an EDDM Route Actually Is

A carrier route is every address one letter carrier covers in a day. That’s it. No demographic filter, no list, no household names.

Every Door Direct Mail sells you those routes whole. You can’t pull twelve addresses out of one and mail just those, and you can’t skip the rental duplex on the corner. The carrier walks the route and your letter goes in every occupied box on it.

So the route is the smallest unit of decision you get. Pick a good one and every dollar lands on a street with trees and money. Pick a bad one and you paid postage to reach 600 apartments with no yards.

That’s the whole game, and it gets decided before a single letter is printed.

How to Find EDDM Routes in the USPS Tool

USPS runs a free mapping tool at eddm.usps.com. Type in a ZIP code and the map draws every carrier route inside it as a shaded shape you can click.

Switch to the table view and each route lists out with real numbers attached:

Column in the USPS tool	What it tells you	What it does not tell you
Route	The carrier route ID, like R012 or C043	Nothing about who lives there
Residential	Live count of homes on the walk	Whether they own or rent
Business	Storefronts and offices on the route	Whether any of them have trees
Total	Pieces you’ll pay postage on	How many will actually read it
Age	Percent of the route in an age band you set	Whether that age band hires tree crews
Size	Average household size	Lot size, which is the one you want
Income	Average household income	Property value or home age
Cost	Postage for that route at current rates	Print, design, bundling, or your time

Two rules before you click anything. USPS requires at least 200 pieces and caps EDDM Retail at 5,000 pieces per ZIP code per day, and EDDM Retail postage currently runs $0.26 per piece for USPS Marketing Flats. Going through a Business Mail Entry Unit lifts the daily cap and shaves the rate slightly.

Now here’s the part that costs people money.

What the USPS Route Data Leaves Out

Look back at that right-hand column. Everything USPS gives you describes the people. Nothing describes the trees.

Average household income tells you a route can afford a $3,800 removal. It doesn’t tell you there’s anything to remove. A brand new subdivision with $180,000 household income and six-foot ornamental pears in the front yards will grade out beautifully in that tool and produce almost nothing for you.

Meanwhile the 1962 neighborhood two miles away, lower income on paper, has 70-foot silver maples leaning over every garage.

Which one do you want your letters in?

Average household size is the other trap. It’s a proxy for family density, not property size, and tree work is priced off canopy and access, not how many people sleep in the house. A route full of townhomes can post the same household size as a route of one-acre lots.

The USPS tool is genuinely useful for what it is: a live count of deliverable addresses with basic demographics. It was never built to find tree work. We go deeper on the difference in EDDM vs targeted direct mail.

The Five Signals That Make an EDDM Route Worth Mailing

Here’s what actually predicts whether a route produces calls for removals and large trims.

Signal	What good looks like	Why it matters for tree work
Tree density and canopy	Mature closed canopy over homes and drives	No trees, no jobs. This outranks everything else
Home age	Built 1950 to 1990	Trees planted with the house are now at removal size
Owner occupancy	High owner-occupied share	Renters call the landlord, not you
Lot size	Quarter acre and up	Bigger lots mean bigger trees and crane access
Household income	Comfortably above the local median	A $4,000 quote has to be signable, not just needed

Notice the order. Income is fifth, not first, and that’s on purpose. Money without canopy is a dead route, and every tree service owner who has mailed a wealthy new-build subdivision already knows it.

Canopy without money is a different problem: the calls come in, the quotes get written, and half of them stall. You want both, in that order.

The full framework for grading a neighborhood is in how to find the best neighborhoods to market your tree service.

How Many EDDM Routes Should You Mail at Once?

Fewer than you think, more often than you think.

The instinct is to spread 5,000 pieces across as much of the map as possible. That produces one call here, one call forty minutes away, and a week of windshield time. Matt’s five-quotes-in-two-hours afternoon happens because the mail was concentrated, not scattered.

Concentration also gives you something to learn from. Mail eight routes twice and you get a readable signal on all eight. Mail thirty routes once and you get noise.

And repetition matters more than reach. A homeowner who sees your letter in March, then again in April, then walks outside in May and notices the dead limb over the driveway is going to reach for the one they recognize. That’s the compounding argument we make in how direct mail compounds over time.

So what’s a reasonable response to expect? The 2025 ANA/DMA Response Rate Report puts the average direct mail response rate at 4.4% across all industries, but that headline number leans hard on mail sent to existing customers. Cold saturation mail to a carrier route full of strangers sits far below it. Judge your routes against each other, not against a cross-industry average.

How to Tell Which EDDM Routes Actually Produced Calls

This is where DIY EDDM quietly falls apart.

You mail twelve routes. Thirty-one calls come in over six weeks. Which routes sent them?

With one phone number on the piece, you cannot know. You can guess from the caller’s address, if you remember to ask, if they tell you, if you write it down, if somebody enters it somewhere you’ll look again. Nobody does that consistently in July.

So month two looks exactly like month one. Same twelve routes, same guesses, same spend. Results stay flat because there’s no feedback loop to make them do anything else.

Across 250+ tree service companies, our internal data shows roughly 75% of calls come from about 50% of the routes mailed. Half your postage is buying almost nothing, every month, and without per-route attribution you cannot see which half.

The fix is mechanical, not clever: a unique local tracking number printed on the letter for every single carrier route. A client running forty routes carries forty numbers, all forwarding to their main line, so the call log doubles as a route report. Route-level call tracking turns month two into an edit instead of a repeat: cut the dead routes, put that money into the producers, and watch cost per call fall while the mail budget stays flat.

Picking Routes You’d Never Have Found by Hand

There’s a practical ceiling on doing this yourself. A mid-size metro has hundreds of carrier routes. Grading each one on canopy, home age, lot size, and ownership means scrolling satellite imagery for days, and you’d still be eyeballing it.

Tree Traction holds 295 data points on every carrier route, including satellite analysis of tree density, canopy health, and lot size, and it’s the only company in the country with tree density data at the route level. That’s what makes it possible to rank thousands of nearby routes at once instead of clicking around a map, and to find removal-rich streets you’ve never worked. The imaging side is explained in satellite data for better tree service leads.

Our pricing runs $0.52 to $0.70 per letter depending on volume, which covers design, printing, postage, the per-route tracking numbers, and an account manager who reads the route data monthly so you don’t have to. If you’d rather understand the underlying mechanics first, carrier route targeting lays them out plainly, and is EDDM worth it for a tree service runs the cost-per-booked-job math.

Start With Eight Routes, Not the Whole ZIP

If you take one thing from this: your EDDM routes are the campaign. The letter matters, the offer matters, the timing matters, but none of them can rescue mail that landed on streets without trees.

Pick eight routes with real canopy, mature housing stock, and owners who can write the check. Mail them twice. Track which ones ring. Then cut and scale.

Book a 15-minute call and we’ll pull the carrier routes around your shop, show you tree density and income on each one, and tell you which are worth mailing before you spend a dollar on postage. If your market doesn’t have the canopy to support it, we’ll say so. You can also see how the whole process runs first.

Your move.