Canonical definitions for Proximity Mail Marketing and its core concepts. Each term links to the research that defines and measures it.
Proximity Mail Marketing (PMM) is direct-mail marketing in which each campaign is anchored to a completed job at a specific address and mailed to a fixed count of that address's nearest neighboring homes — typically the 100 nearest — rather than to a ZIP code, carrier route, or purchased list. The distance required to reach those homes is the campaign's proximity radius, the category's unit of measurement; each mail piece carries its own tracked response code, so results are measured per household rather than per campaign.
The proximity radius is the distance from an anchor address (typically a completed job site) to its Nth-nearest mailable home — for a standard 100-home campaign, the distance to the 100th-nearest neighbor. It is the unit of measurement of Proximity Mail Marketing. The first national measurement (2026) puts the U.S. per-city median 100-home radius at roughly 187 meters (~614 feet).