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!
