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

Section 01: Attention rates

61% of ad mail gets some attention.

The USPS Household Mail Survey runs on a one-week mail diary kept by households and is filed with the Postal Regulatory Commission. 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.

One caution if you hold this against an older edition of the same survey. FY 2025 dropped the “looked at but not read” bucket that earlier editions carried, so the attention figure moves between editions for a questionnaire reason. Comparing two editions of this table measures the survey, not the mailbox.

Source: USPS Household Mail Survey, FY 2025, Figure 5.7, filed with the Postal Regulatory Commission. Open the filing. Verified 2026-07-25.

Section 02: Response rates

Read the prospect row, not the flattering one.

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. Mail to someone the business has already served does far better, 64% read and 25% likely to respond. Note the verb throughout: the survey measures what households say they are likely to do, which is not a measured response rate, and it says so itself.

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 better row, and drop two lands on a street where your name is already familiar. A coupon roughly doubles stated intent among prospects, from 2% to 5%, 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 are diary entries submitted by US households to the USPS annual survey, then filed with the Postal Regulatory Commission as public record. The filing is linked below, so you can read the table rather than take our word for the row we chose.

Source: USPS Household Mail Survey, FY 2025, Table 5.5 (reading and response by past relationship) and USPS Household Mail Survey, FY 2025, Table 5.6 (coupons). Open the filing. Verified 2026-07-25.

Section 03: LocalAd's method

What the format decides, and what it does not.

The numbers above are for any direct mail piece. Nothing below claims to move them: we have shipped no drops and have measured nothing. These are three decisions about how the card is sold and what it carries. Here is what each one actually does:

• Nobody in your trade beside you. A shared card carries one business per trade, so the reader never sees two plumbers competing for attention on the same piece. Buy the card solo and the question does not arise: you are the only advertiser on the front.
• Zone-level saturation. We ship to every active delivery point on the carrier routes we mail in your ZIP, 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.
• A QR code per card. Each card carries its own code, so a scan is counted rather than estimated. Your portal shows the count, unique visitors, the timestamp, the device class and an approximate city. It is a measurement, not an ad audience: LocalAd runs no pixels and builds no retargeting lists.

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 city. If the baseline does not hold for your zone, your category, and your offer, the evidence is in your own dashboard rather than in a claim of ours.

We'd rather be auditable than persuasive.