The Postage Increase Is the Best Thing to Happen to Direct Mail in Years

My position, up front

Most multi-location brands should mail fewer pieces this year and spend more per piece. Not because mail stopped working. Because the 4.8% postage increase that took effect on July 12 finally made the waste in a loose list expensive enough that somebody will actually go fix it.

That's an opinion, and people I respect disagree with it. The most common response I've heard since July is to hold the budget flat and cut drop volume by the same percentage in every market. I think that's the worst move on the table, and I want to show you why using our own campaign data rather than a theory.

Two numbers moving in opposite directions

On July 12 the Postal Service raised mailing services prices about 4.8%. Marketing Mail letters and flats went up roughly 5 to 6% depending on presort level, and the Postal Regulatory Commission signed off in late May, so none of this arrived as a surprise.

Now the number that got less attention. Forrester expects a third of consumers to choose offline over online brand experiences this year, and found 52% of US online adults actively seeking out in-person, tactile experiences. At the ANA's conference, 70% of marketers said brands should increase investment in physical touchpoints over the next year.

The channel got more expensive in the same year it got more valuable. An even cut across every market prices in the first fact and ignores the second.

What an even cut actually does to you

Here's the part that gets missed. An across-the-board volume cut is not neutral. It takes the same percentage away from the trade areas that were paying for themselves and the ones that were quietly losing money. You keep your waste in proportion and you shrink your winners.

Blended reporting is what lets this happen. A brand-level response rate averages the locations carrying the program with the locations underwater, and the average looks survivable. You cannot fix by location what you cannot see by location, so you end up funding the mean and calling it discipline.

What we see in our own campaigns

I'd rather show you a real one than argue in the abstract.

We ran a plastic postcard program for a Bonefish Grill location that had just finished a remodel. Nearly 10,000 pieces, mailed within a few miles of the restaurant, targeted to households over age 29 in the $50,000 to $125,000 income range, carrying two offers: a $10 dining card for lunch or brunch and a $20 card for dinner. Average redemption came in at 19.42%, and the campaign returned $138,000.

Look at what's doing the work there. It isn't volume. Ten thousand pieces is a modest drop. It's a tight radius, a defined household profile, and an offer sized to the daypart. We reported redemption back by offer, by age range, by income band, and plotted where redeemers actually lived relative to the restaurant, which is how you learn whether your radius was right in the first place. You can read the full writeup in our case studies.

A program built that way absorbs a 5% postage increase without flinching. A program mailing a carrier route because it was easy does not.

The four-drop audit

This is the thing I'd actually do, and you can run it yourself this week without buying anything.

1. Pull your last four drops and re-sort response by location instead of by campaign. Most reporting defaults to campaign, which is exactly why this stays hidden.
2. Calculate the spread between your top quartile of locations and your bottom quartile. Not the average, the spread.
3. Compare that spread to 4.8%. If the gap between your best and worst locations is wider than the postage increase, postage was never your problem. Selection was.
4. For every location in the bottom quartile, check three things in order: whether the mailed radius matches the distance people will actually travel to that store, whether recent buyers and unservable addresses were suppressed, and whether the offer fits what that market buys.
5. Then decide per location, not per brand. Tighten the selection, reduce the frequency, or stop mailing that market. All three are legitimate answers.

Step five is where most brands flinch. Deciding per location means admitting some locations shouldn't be in the program, and that's an uncomfortable conversation with a franchisee. It's still the right call.

Where I'd push back on myself

Saturation isn't dead, and I'd be overstating my case if I implied it was. There are situations where blanketing a carrier route is the correct buy: launching a new location where nobody knows you exist, a genuinely dense trade area where most of the route is addressable demand, or a brand with a broad enough product that household selection buys you very little. We use EDDM deliberately for exactly those cases.

What I'm against is saturation as a default because targeted selection takes more work up front. That's a process decision dressed up as a media strategy.

There's also a version of this where the honest advice is to stop. If a market can't reach meaningful frequency at the budget available, we'll say so rather than print it. A franchisee with a small monthly budget running mail, search, social, and streaming at once is running four things badly, and two of them run properly will beat it.

The honest limit

Mail match-back is good, not perfect. Household-level matching depends on the address data you hold and the consent you've collected, and some redemptions will never tie cleanly back to a mailed household. We'd rather tell you the match rate up front and use the best available proxy for the rest than present a proxy as proof. Overstated attribution always gets found out, and it usually gets found out in front of a CFO.

What I'd do Monday

Run step one and step two of the audit. Nothing else. If the spread between your best and worst locations comes back wider than 4.8%, bring that number to your next planning meeting instead of a volume-reduction proposal, and let the number start the conversation.

Sources

• U.S. Postal Service, "USPS Recommends New Prices for July," April 9, 2026.
• Forrester, "2026 B2C Marketing, CX, and Digital Business Predictions."
• Association of National Advertisers, reported findings on physical touchpoint investment.
• Venkatraman, Dimoka, Vo, and Pavlou, "Relative Effectiveness of Print and Digital Advertising: A Memory Perspective," Journal of Marketing Research (American Marketing Association).
• Harvard Business Review, "Research: What Physical Retail Stores Deliver in a Digital Economy," August 2026.