The Year of Digital Postal Mail

by John Payne on July 12, 2011

With the announcement last month of the Zumbox $1,000,000 Giveaway (it’s actually $7 million if you add up all of the prizes and different ways to win), we have made a big shift from product development, market testing and partner integration to consumer acquisition, digital mail delivery and serving lots of consumers with their digital postal mail needs across the United States.

The shift kicks off with the Zumbox $1,000,000 Giveaway, a consumer incentive with many great prizes for consumer households who verify their Zumbox to receive digital postal mail:

  • Up to six $1 million grand prizes of cash
  • 20 Nissan Leaf automobiles
  • 40 iPads and 14 laptop computers
  • 300+ Amazon.com gift cards
  • 8,000+ premium coffee gift cards

The giveaway is intended to drive verification of Zumbox households and to dramatically improve paper suppression for organizations delivering mail via Zumbox. Our mailers can participate in the giveaway and ALL our marketing programs, with consumers reminded to go paperless at every step of the process.

Behind the $1 million giveaway you’ll see a wide variety of marketing programs from us that assure a large base of Zumbox consumer households. These promotions include:

  • Mailer marketing promotions intended to drive paper suppression.
  • Press and blog coverage which will build over time as we announce over 5,000 winners in the giveaway.
  • Social media campaigns to promote the time-saving and cost-saving aspects of digital postal mail, the green benefits and – of course – a bunch of different ways to win $1 million, a car or thousands of other prizes.
  • Online marketing programs, including paid media campaigns reaching our target audience through various web properties, networks and email marketing.
  • Targeted campaigns with strategic marketing partners like GovDelivery, a provider of electronic communications for over 350 state, federal and local agencies.
  • City governments, who find Zumbox a great fit that allows mayors and other senior officials to simultaneously deliver cost savings, environmental and sustainability benefits and improved citizen communications.
  • The Apple App Store: With the recent release of version 1.0 of Zumbox for iPad, you’ll see lots of downloads as we promote this powerful channel that reaches 100,000,000 U.S. homes.

We spent the past year refining the Zumbox digital postal system in the United States through test market activities in places like Chicago and the Twin Cities. From those tests we gathered a ton of valuable data, some of which we’d like to share with you:

  • Paperless request rates by new Zumbox users are steadily climbing. Multiple market tests have shown rates of 30% in the first twenty-four hours after becoming verified households and the numbers continue to increase after that. Since we don’t force consumers to go paperless unless the mailer insists, this is a solid indication that Zumbox users will have a strong desire to eliminate physical delivery of mail.
  • Acquisition rates for consumer households are, in many cases, triple the average Internet marketing response rates. Consumers are clearly responding to the digital postal mail concept and demonstrating that they all understand the pain caused by their paper mail and the Zumbox cure for that pain.
  • Based on 30% paper suppression rates in a market, a simple 5% penetration can easily result in 2% increase in overall paper suppression, which would lead to thousands of dollars in immediate monthly savings for a utility or other mailer.
  • One surprise from our market tests; we thought the primary savings for mailers was paper suppression and the impact on postage and materials, but discovered that the benefits of directing customers to optimum payment and support systems, improving collection times and customer satisfaction plus truly interactive cross selling within the digital postal mail document were valued almost as highly.

We also spent last year and the first part of this year developing partnerships and integrating solutions with key partners including print service providers, leading technology and software providers and others, including:

  • DST Output with 700 mailers representing multiple consumer vertical markets.
  • 3i Infotech with hundreds of well-known mailers including financial services providers and key insurance industry customers.
  • KUBRA with 400+ clients including several utilities across the United States and Canada.
  • Computershare, leading provider of shareholder communications for well known public companies including Citi, Coca-Cola, Hewlett-Packard, Wal-Mart, Xerox.
  • Crawford Technologies, leading provider of software for print stream management, who developed and delivers a Zumbox Enabler to their core CrawfordTech software offerings to facilitate rapid, efficient redirection of paper mail print streams to Zumbox as digital postal mail.

These partnerships will enable a rapid deployment for mailers and help create a network effect that improves the value of digital postal mail to consumers as more and more mailers begin participating.

We are also expanding our “Customer Interest Program” which allows mailers to reach out to their customers through Zumbox to gauge their interest in digital postal mail and receiving their important household mail online. This process can be initiated very simply and we’ll pass the data back to the mailer for their own internal evaluation.

In addition, we released the Zumbox Digital Postal Mail Gateway, an appliance that can be deployed in any production network to act as a highly secure, rapid deployment gateway for delivering digital postal mail or as a report server, providing quick access to the rich data about consumer mail interactions, including open rates, dates and times, and other valuable information that we make available to large mailers and through our print service provider partners.

2011 is the year of digital postal mail, and with the launch of the Zumbox $1,000,000 Giveaway, we are officially on our way to get consumers signed up to receive their postal mail in one secure place online. In the coming months we will share more details around our consumer acquisition programs, adoption rates and other important data, and you will also see the launch of our newsletter later this summer plus more posts right here on our Zumbox Industry Blog.

Finally, I encourage you to reach out to me or other contacts at Zumbox with any questions you have about the benefits of digital postal mail or how to implement. And if you haven’t yet claimed your personal Zumbox, this would be a great time to do so!

{ 0 comments }

Understanding Zumbox & Digital Postal Mail

by John Payne on May 27, 2011

2011 is shaping up to be the year digital postal mail goes mainstream.

This follows years of experimentation, numerous market tests, extensive technology development and a decade-long feeling that “there’s got to be a better way, but we’re not there yet.” And we weren’t.

However, improved technology, coupled with greater consumer awareness, means we are there now.

Digital postal mail is more than a reality in 2011; it is becoming an important way for mailers to save money. Postal rate hikes and environmental concerns have focused mailers’ attention on the benefits of going paperless.

Over the years, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and mailers themselves have spent large sums to create electronic alternatives to postal mail. Thus far, none have generated broad consumer interest. The industry’s best-case average for paper suppression is a woeful 15 percent.

That low success rate has created a great opportunity for companies seeking to “do it right” by developing solutions that meet mailers’ needs and delight consumers.

Zumbox is of those companies.

The technology is ready, mailers recognize the need, consumers want a “better way” and I am expecting spirited competition as different approaches emerge, which is good for everyone.

This is the first in a series of posts intended to help mailers better understand digital postal mail and the vendors in the space. The first deals with market realities that should be considered in making a decision about which provider(s) to select.

As CEO of Zumbox, I am obviously biased toward our solution, which has been more than three years in development and underwent extensive market testing in 2009 and 2010. However, several companies are emerging and each offers a different value proposition. I expect more than one will reach mailer and market acceptance and become a commercial success.

As the market develops, large mailers will likely choose to work with more than one provider of digital postal mail services. We are hearing from mailers and service providers across the industry that they plan to support multiple approaches from three to four different vendors in an effort to let the consumer markets decide who is really the winner. We are also gratified to hear from them that Zumbox is always on that list as the leading innovator of the digital postal mail market since 2009.

This makes sense because consumers will be the path to success and mailers will want to work with the providers that offer the easiest and best way to reach different types of consumers.

Exclusive Don’t Make Any Sense

The relationships Zumbox forms with its mailers, print service providers and mailing industry technology providers are expressly non-exclusive across the board. Our clients and partners should be free to choose the vendors they wish to work with, unconstrained by complicated legal agreements. (While we have heard of other vendors asking for exclusives in these relationships, the most common reaction from mailers seems to be “How stupid do they think I am?”)

The necessary communications infrastructure, absolute requirements for encryption, secure transmissions, availability, redundancy with the ability to meet high service levels in these areas, plus mandatory requirements for real privacy and security will limit many companies from entering and succeeding in the digital postal mail business.

I believe there will be three to five market participants who successfully enter the market and begin serving customers. From that group, consumers and mailers will choose an even smaller number of winners.

Why This Is the Time to Choose

While I believe Zumbox is a best-of-breed provider that understands, after 18 months of market testing with consumer households, exactly what the consumer wants, there is probably no wrong choice for a mailer today except for choosing not to participate. Even if you don’t choose Zumbox, I strongly urge you to choose somebody to work with now, provided that they can deliver the security, privacy, integrity and consumer experience that customers require.  You should begin to realize cost savings and learn from the experience in 2011.

The opportunity to provide consumers – perhaps your customers – with the solution to their paperless worries is too great not to dive in at this point. For forward-thinking mailers that are always looking to enhance customer communications and increase paper suppression rates, exploring digital postal mail is on their top list of initiatives today and beyond.

In my next post: I will offer specific criteria you can use to select a digital postal mail service provider, including security, privacy and the necessary consumer experience. In the meantime, please feel free to contact me directly with questions or to find out more about working with Zumbox.

 

{ 0 comments }

What’s Suppressing Your Paper Suppression?

by John Payne on April 29, 2011

In the 1990’s when usage of the Internet was really beginning to grow, everyone assumed that paper postal mail would quickly go away. In fact, mail volumes actually increased by more than 20% over the subsequent 10 years. Today, while over 70% of households pay bills, make transactions and buy things on the Internet, only 5-15% of those households have given up receiving paper mail. This means that more than 55% of households could easily be paperless, but aren’t.

When we ask consumers why this is, we get exactly the same answer they gave Forrester Research in their 4th Quarter study in 2010:

  • “I need the files for my records…” – Consumers want a paper copy of important mail for their files. In the past, major banks, enterprises and credit companies only offered to store paperless bills and statements for a limited amount of time.
  • “I need my files all in one place under my control…” – Consumers receive bills from multiple businesses each month, creating what we at Zumbox call the 20 mailbox problem. According to the US Postal Service Household Mail Diary from 2009, most households have up to 21 different logins and their documents are scattered widely around the Internet, only available for a unknown periods of time ranging from a month to a couple of years. Consumers want a central consumer archive containing ALL of their mail, not remote access to 21 different biller archives hidden behind 20 different logins they often can’t remember.
  • “I use paper mail to remind me to take action and pay bills on time…” – Consumers bring their paper mail in from the mailbox, write notes on the most important piece of mail and prop it up somewhere prominent where they walk by it all the time, often called the “mail cubby.” This reminds them to take action each time they walk by it. (I know, but try asking the questions yourself, you’ll be surprised at the answer.)
  • “It needs to be secure…” – Both consumers and enterprises do not consider email secure enough to handle sensitive information. Due to these concerns, communication sent to customers via email is limited, forcing them to, again, visit multiple sites to access their private information or store their paper files in bankers boxes and file drawers at home.

In response to these concerns, at Zumbox we centralize a consumer’s mail in a single, central, highly secure place, provide them with notifications and reminders by a variety of channels when they need to take action and archive it for each household forever, for free. We have seen that by solving these consumer problems, consumer households feel confident and secure enough in their digital recordkeeping to be willing to let go of paper records and files. This means dramatic cost savings for large mailers who at the same time actually improve customer communications.

 

{ 0 comments }

New Zealand Post to Deliver Digital Postal Mail with Zumbox

by Joergen Aaboe on April 11, 2011

Today, we’re excited to announce a licensing agreement with New Zealand Post, which has a national exclusive on the use of the Zumbox Platform for Digital Postal Mail. We’re helping New Zealand provide mailers and consumers a quick, easy and cost-effective option for secure digital delivery, management and storage of postal mail.

The transition from paper to digital is inevitable, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the delivery of mail. A recent report issued by the Government Accountability Office last year backs this up, highlighting that the delivery of first-class mail has declined 19 percent since 2001 and will continue to sink by 37 percent over the next decade.

As postal services around the world begin transitioning to digital delivery, today’s announcement validates Zumbox as the digital mail technology provider leading the seachange of how consumers interact with their mail. Sohail Choudhry, GM Integrated Communications of New Zealand Post, had this to say about the agreement:

“As customer preferences change with technological advancements, New Zealand Post is committed to a future that meets our customers’ mailing needs both physically and digitally. We have identified a clear interest – both among consumers and businesses – in a digital postal system here in New Zealand, and we are eager to test this service on the Zumbox Platform.”

If you’re interested in learning more about today’s announcement, check out the press release here, or read through a great article that hit online today from Dean Takahashi (Twitter: @deantak) at VentureBeat.

{ 0 comments }

Zumbox and 3i Infotech Partner to Fuel E-Billing Adoption

March 30, 2011

At Zumbox, we’ve had a great start to 2011 and are excited to build on that momentum by announcing a strategic partnership with 3i Infotech, a global information technology and business process outsourcing company. The latest in a series of recent partnership announcements, this new agreement enables 3i Infotech clients to send electronic bills and [...]

Read the full article →

2011: The Year We (Finally) Go Paperless

March 2, 2011

A great piece inked this month in Billing & OSS World profiling the digital mail delivery landscape. If you haven’t had a chance to review Tim McElligott’s piece, ‘Going Paperless Is an Upgrade’, we suggest checking it out. We had the chance to catch up with Tim last month, and discussed the reasons 2011 is [...]

Read the full article →

Interesting News from DEMO Spring

February 28, 2011

DEMO is a place where a variety of companies, both new and those established, launch new products and services. One that caught our eye today was the private beta of Manilla, sponsored by Hearst Corporation. Hearst is a major publishing house and its new service signifies the company’s necessary shift toward digital services due to [...]

Read the full article →

Zumbox Announces Partnership with KUBRA

February 9, 2011

One of the leading providers of customer interaction management solutions decides to make Digital Postal Mail delivery via Zumbox available to all its clients. Today we announced an exciting partnership with KUBRA, a company that annually delivers 1 billion customer interactions on behalf of some of the largest utility, insurance, financial services, health care, and [...]

Read the full article →

Zumbox Platform™ Goes Global

May 17, 2010

The Zumbox paperless postal platform is now available for license by postal authorities and commercial entities worldwide. Last week we announced that the platform that powers the Zumbox service here in the U.S. is available for license. In response to demand from international postal authorities and commercial entities, we are developing a subsidiary known as [...]

Read the full article →

Fox News Syndicates Zumbox Story Across the U.S.

January 4, 2010

A Fox News feature story about Zumbox originally aired on Saturday, January 2nd, and is now being syndicated to Fox affiliates across the U.S.   (MYFOX NATIONAL) – You say can goodbye to snail mail for good thanks to a new paperless postal service called “Zumbox.” To cut down on his mail, Ryan Mickle of [...]

Read the full article →