51% of ad mail gets read. Here's the data.

Section 01: Attention rates

61% of ad mail gets attention. And the rate is rising.

The USPS Household Mail Survey tracks 5,000 households through a one-week mail diary each year. In FY 2025, 51% of advertising mail pieces were read by at least one household member and another 10% were set aside for reading later, a combined 61% attention rate. The other 39% went in the bin unread, so this is not a claim that everything gets looked at. It is a claim that the majority does, which is not true of any inbox or feed you can buy into.

And the trend is running in LocalAd's favor. The share of ad mail discarded without being read has fallen from 48% in 2015 to 39% in 2025 as advertisers got more selective about who they target. Fewer mailers per household, more attention per mailer.

Source: USPS, Household Mail Survey, FY 2025 (published March 2026). Figure 5.7 (reading trends), Chapter 5 (advertising mail). Filed as PRC filing 139572 on 2026-04-01.

Section 02: Response rates

Cold mail converts at 3%. Repeat mail converts at 25%.

Read the whole table, because the flattering row is not your row. A saturation drop lands with strangers, so the number that describes your first card is the prospect row: 36% read it and 3%say they are very likely to respond (8 or higher on a 1–10 scale). Mail to someone the business has already served does far better, 64% read and 25% likely to respond.

That gap is the argument for mailing the same zone twice. Drop one buys you the introduction at prospect rates. Everyone who calls, scans, or books moves into the row worth eight times as much, and drop two lands on a street where your name is already familiar. A coupon roughly doubles intent in both rows, from 2% to 5% on prospects and 18% to 37% on past customers, which is why the design step pushes you to put an offer on the card.

These aren't vendor benchmarks or self-selected marketing surveys. They're diary entries submitted by 5,000 U.S. households to the USPS annual survey, then filed with the Postal Regulatory Commission as public record, the most authoritative direct-mail measurement the country produces.

Source: USPS, Household Mail Survey, FY 2025 (published March 2026). Table 5.5 (reading and response rates by past relationship), Table 5.6 (coupons). Filed as PRC filing 139572 on 2026-04-01.

Section 03: LocalAd's method

How we build on the baseline.

The numbers above are for anydirect mail piece. LocalAd's format is designed to compound them, not just ride them. Three decisions do the compounding:

• Category exclusivity.One business per trade per card. The reader never sees two plumbers competing for their attention on the same piece, so your ad isn't fighting its direct rival for recall.
• Zone-level saturation. We ship to every active delivery point on the carrier routes you buy, not a purchased list. There is no list to buy and no targeting model to be wrong about, so nobody in the neighborhood is missed because a data broker had them filed under the wrong household.
• QR → digital retargeting. Every card carries a unique QR code. Scans are attributed, measured, and re-engageable through your dashboard, so the physical glance turns into a tracked, retargetable visitor on the web.

Section 04: Verification

You don't have to take the baselines on faith.

Industry averages are useful, but they aren't your data. The whole point of the QR code on every LocalAd postcard is that you get to audit the claim on your own campaign in real time.

After your drop mails, your merchant portal at /portal/analytics surfaces every scan: total scans, unique visitors, timestamps, device class, and approximate location. If the baseline does not hold for your zone, your category, and your offer, the evidence shows up in your own dashboard within a week.

We'd rather be auditable than persuasive.