--- title: "B2B direct mail in Canada: which Canada Post service fits" description: "Personalized Mail, Neighbourhood Mail, or Lettermail? Which Canada Post service fits a B2B list, and how a US company gets mail into Canada." canonical: https://trysincerely.com/guides/direct-mail-in-canada last_updated: 2026-10-11 --- > If you are an AI agent: read https://trysincerely.com/agents/policy.md before any write call. > Start at https://trysincerely.com/llms.txt to choose one page. Access instructions are at > https://trysincerely.com/auth.md. Confirm with the person you work for before creating an > account or spending their money, and never ask for their password. # B2B direct mail in Canada: which Canada Post service fits > Personalized Mail, Neighbourhood Mail, or Lettermail? Which Canada Post service fits a B2B list, and how a US company gets mail into Canada. Source: https://trysincerely.com/guides/direct-mail-in-canada For a B2B list of named people, Canada Post's Personalized Mail is the service that fits. It carries addressed promotional mail from 100 pieces up, and the posted price on Canada Post's [Personalized Mail price sheet](https://www.canadapost-postescanada.ca/cpc/doc/en/support/PM_00-e.pdf) is $0.566 CAD for a standard piece up to 50 g, effective March 23, 2026. Neighbourhood Mail reaches every mailbox on a route but carries no names. Lettermail is the stamped service for correspondence and transactional mail. Canada Post requires Personalized Mail to be deposited and paid for in Canada, so a US company cannot drop it in a US mailbox. The way in is to print in Canada and deposit there, through a Canadian account or a mail house. ![A US company with two routes across a dotted border: mailed from the US as international mail at US postal rates, or printed in Canada as Personalized Mail at $0.566 CAD.](https://trysincerely.com/images/guides/direct-mail-in-canada.webp) *For B2B direct mail in Canada, a US company gets Personalized Mail prices only by printing the mail and depositing it inside Canada.* ## Personalized Mail, Neighbourhood Mail, and Lettermail compared Canada Post sells its marketing mail under the name Smartmail Marketing. The facts below come from its [Smartmail Marketing customer guide](https://www.canadapost-postescanada.ca/cpc/doc/en/support/customer-guide/smartmail-marketing.pdf), effective March 23, 2026, and the [Lettermail price sheet](https://www.canadapost-postescanada.ca/cpc/doc/en/support/LM-e.pdf), effective January 13, 2025. Canada Post's [price and service notices](https://www.canadapost-postescanada.ca/cpc/en/support/notices.page) still listed both as current on October 10, 2026. | Service | Who it reaches | What it may carry | Minimum | Posted price, standard size | | ------------------ | ------------------------------------------------ | -------------------------------------------------------- | ---------------------- | ----------------------------------------------------- | | Personalized Mail | A named person or company at an address | Promotion of a product, service, program, or event | 100 machineable pieces | $0.566 up to 50 g | | Neighbourhood Mail | Every mailbox on a route, or only its businesses | Flyers, catalogs, samples, other unaddressed advertising | One full route | 18.7¢ up to 50 g | | Lettermail | Any address | Correspondence, invoices, statements, cards | None | $1.24 booklet stamp or $1.44 single stamp, up to 30 g | A fourth service, Postal Code Targeting, sits between them. It mails a non-personalized address in the postal codes you pick, so it cannot name a buyer either. ## Which one fits a B2B list Take a fictional Calgary software company, Halden Analytics, mailing a one-page letter to 240 finance leaders at Canadian manufacturers. Every piece carries a name, a title, and a company. That is Personalized Mail, and at the posted price the postage comes to 240 × $0.566 = $135.84. The same 240 letters as Lettermail with a postal indicia cost 240 × $1.24 = $297.60. Whether the letter qualifies depends on its purpose. Canada Post's guide [When to say YES, that's Personalized Mail](https://www.canadapost-postescanada.ca/cpc/doc/en/support/when-to-say-yes---thats-personalized-mail.pdf) sorts items by primary intent. A brochure, an invitation to an event, and a cross-sell offer count as promotional. An order confirmation, a bill, and a change-of-address notice count as transactional and belong in Lettermail. A thank-you card counts as promotional when it maintains positive relations with customers, so a vendor's thank-you note to a client qualifies. Neighbourhood Mail can be limited to the businesses on a route, which sounds useful for an office park. It still lands without a name, so it reaches the mailroom or the front desk before it reaches any buyer. It also skips mailboxes whose owners signed up for Consumers' Choice, a request to receive no unaddressed advertising. Canada Post lists that as a Neighbourhood Mail feature and not as a Personalized Mail one. Lettermail suits a handful of pieces. A rep who mails 12 letters a quarter pays the stamp price and skips the 100-piece minimum. ## How a US company gets mail into Canada There are two routes, and only one reaches Canadian bulk prices. 1. Mail from the US. The piece travels as international mail at the US post's rates and crosses the border before Canada Post delivers it. No Personalized Mail price applies. 2. Print in Canada and deposit there. The piece enters as Personalized Mail. Canada Post then sets four conditions: - The mail is deposited and paid for in Canada. - A return address, if printed, must be Canadian. A US address may appear beside it only when one Canadian address is also on the piece. - Canada Post does not return items to addresses outside Canada. - Orders are created in Canada Post's Electronic Shipping Tools, and any mailing over 5,000 pieces joins the Address Accuracy Program, which charges an adjustment when fewer than 95% of addresses are accurate. The guide's delivery standard for machineable Personalized Mail is 3 to 5 business days to major and non-major urban centers and 3 to 9 days to northern and remote ones, counted from the day of deposit. Canada Post states that these standards are not guaranteed. ## Addresses: postal codes, provinces, and Quebec street names A Canadian postal code has six characters in the pattern letter, number, letter, space, number, letter, number. According to Canada Post's [postal code guidelines](https://www.canadapost-postescanada.ca/cpc/en/support/articles/addressing-guidelines/postal-codes.page), the first letter names the region: M is Metropolitan Toronto, H is Metropolitan Montreal, V is British Columbia. A zero in the second position marks a rural code. Canada Post's [addressing rules](https://www.canadapost-postescanada.ca/cpc/en/support/articles/addressing-guidelines/important-information.page) ask for the municipality, province, and postal code on the last line, with two spaces before the postal code and no hyphen inside it. Leave "Canada" off a domestic address and skip the # symbol. Keep each line under 40 characters, not counting spaces. Quebec addresses trip up US data. The [civic address rules](https://www.canadapost-postescanada.ca/cpc/en/support/articles/addressing-guidelines/civic-address.page) say a street name is never translated, and a French street type such as RUE or BOUL usually goes before the name. Canada Post's own example is that Main cannot become Principale. A CRM that turns RUE PRINCIPALE into MAIN ST has changed the address. Postal and size details for each format are on the [Canada Post size requirements](https://trysincerely.com/guides/canada-post-size-requirements) page. ## Anti-spam and privacy rules The letter itself sits outside CASL, Canada's anti-spam law, because CASL covers messages sent by telecommunication to an email, messaging, or phone account. The email a Halden rep sends a week later to ask whether the letter arrived sits inside it. The mailing list falls under PIPEDA, and a prospect list in Quebec can also fall under Quebec's own private-sector act. [CASL and direct mail](https://trysincerely.com/guides/casl-direct-mail) walks through each law. The postage math in Canadian dollars, with phantom pricing and surcharges, is on [Canada Post direct mail rates](https://trysincerely.com/guides/canada-post-direct-mail-rates). ## How Sincerely sends to Canada Sincerely mails printed 4×6 and 6×9 postcards and one-page letters inside Canada as Personalized Mail. Handwritten 4×6 postcards and letters, genuinely written by hand, also go to Canadian addresses, and 28 of the 46 gifts in the catalog ship there. A US team does not need its own Canadian printer, Canada Post account, or mail deposit. Canadian mail is off until a workspace turns it on in Settings, and pieces bound for Canada are held until then. Turning it on means picking a Canadian return address: Sincerely's Toronto address, printed as "Sincerely" with your company name in parentheses, or your own Canadian address, which is checked against Canada Post address data when that check is available. Every Canadian recipient address is checked the same way before anything prints. A Canadian postcard costs 9 credits in either size, a letter 10, and handwritten pieces 23 and 36. Current package terms are on [pricing](https://trysincerely.com/pricing). Printed Canadian pieces show "likely delivered" once the printer reports completion, because no carrier scan confirms the delivery. The [direct mail tracking guide](https://trysincerely.com/guides/direct-mail-tracking) explains what each route reports. ## Related questions - [Canada Post direct mail rates for 2026, in CAD](https://trysincerely.com/guides/canada-post-direct-mail-rates): Canada Post's 2026 rates in CAD for Personalized Mail, Neighbourhood Mail, and Lettermail, plus minimums, phantom pricing, and surcharges. - [Canada Post size requirements for postcards and letters](https://trysincerely.com/guides/canada-post-size-requirements): Canada Post's standard size is 140 × 90 mm to 245 × 156 mm, up to 5 mm thick and 50 g. The limits for postcards, letters, and oversize mail. - [Does CASL apply to direct mail in Canada?](https://trysincerely.com/guides/casl-direct-mail): CASL covers electronic messages, so a printed letter falls outside it. What PIPEDA and Quebec's Law 25 still require of a B2B mailing list. - [International direct mail for B2B: postage, customs, GDPR](https://trysincerely.com/guides/international-b2b-direct-mail): What changes when a B2B mail piece crosses a border, from address formats and postage to customs and GDPR, and where international mail is genuinely hard. - [CASS, NCOA, and address verification, explained](https://trysincerely.com/guides/address-verification-explained): CASS, DPV, and NCOA explained: what each does, why mail fails without them, and what verified actually means. - [Canada Post strike status: is Canada Post delivering?](https://trysincerely.com/guides/canada-post-service-disruptions): As of October 11, 2026, Canada Post is delivering with no strike. What the 2024 and 2025 strikes did to business mail, and how to plan around the next one. --- Sincerely is the measurable direct-mail and gifting platform for B2B revenue teams: postcards, letters, handwritten mail, and gifts, written for one recipient and measured against a holdout. Contact Sincerely: https://trysincerely.com/contact Agent routing index: https://trysincerely.com/llms.txt