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!

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.

When we ask consumers why this is, we get exactly the same answer they gave Forrester Research in their 4^th 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.

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.

The latest in a series of recent partnership announcements, this new agreement enables 3i Infotech clients to send electronic bills and other customer communications via Zumbox. The relationship will help 3i Infotech clients drive electronic bill adoption, promote print suppression and cut costs.

3i Infotech’s CEO, Kathy Hamburger, had this to say about the partnership: “Zumbox’s unique approach of providing a central, digital mailbox will increase consumer adoption of online billing and assist our clients in moving more rapidly from paper to electronic communications.”

The partnership creates an especially compelling solution for utilities, insurance, financial services companies and other businesses that need to be able to quickly accommodate changing preferences in how customers choose to receive and pay their bills.

Starting today, Zumbox will be available to 3i Infotech customers through 3i Infotech’s Global Billing & Payments Center of Excellence. If you are interested in learning more about the new partnership, please check out the full press release here.

We had the chance to catch up with Tim last month, and discussed the reasons 2011 is poised to be the year digital delivery revolutionizes the mailing and e-billing industries. Currently, 15 percent or fewer of most company’s customers have gone paperless, even though many more pay or interact online. Considering it costs $36 billion a year for businesses to distribute their transactional mail – it’s no longer a matter of ‘if’ businesses will partner with services like Zumbox, which directly address consumer pain points with regard to paperless mail, but ‘when’ and ‘with whom’.

At Zumbox, we’re excited for what 2011 has in store for us as a company. We’re expecting record growth, as announced today in a press release on our 2011 outlook. We recently raised $9.7 million in new financing and announced strategic alliances with major mailing houses including DST Output and KUBRA. These relationships alone enable Zumbox to deliver postal mail from more than 1,000 mailers directly – and digitally – to consumers in 2011.

Closing his piece, Tim notes, “If these new models can also help consumers manage their chaotic lives, the stars just may align to make 2011 the year we go or begin to go paperless.” At Zumbox, we couldn’t agree more.

According to a wide range of research, while over 70% of households make payments, purchase goods and do business on the Internet, only 5-15% actually turn off paper mail. When we ask consumers why, they say 1) they need the paper files for their records, 2) they need reminders to pay bills and take action and 3) they want all their bills in one place instead of scattered all over the Internet with 20+ different log-ins. Services like Zumbox and Manilla can help solve these problems for consumers.

Online delivery of bills, statements and other transactional mail cuts clutter, saves the environment by reducing paper waste and allows consumers to organize, manage and store mail forever – and even pay bills online from a single website. A digital mailbox helps people organize their lives easily, in less time. Zumbox has been answering these consumer needs since our launch in 2009. Since then, we’ve been working with key partners, including KUBRA and DST, to provide mail electronically, based on household street address. These two partners provide access to the mail of over 1,000 different companies who will be able to deliver their customers’ bills, notices, statements and other documents directly to them instantly through existing processes and technology.

The digital postal mail market is heating up. Companies are looking for ways to reduce mail costs, and consumers want a replacement for their bankers boxes and filing cabinets. The recognition of increasing demand for services that simplify daily life, by a major media company, validates the growing market. We welcome Hearst to the game.

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 communication companies across North America. Zumbox will be integrated with the KUBRA i-doxs Suite, the company’s flagship e-billing and self-service platform, making it easy for all their clients to deliver Digital Postal Mail via Zumbox.

As stated by their CEO, Rick Watkin, “Our alliance with Zumbox provides us with a powerful way to increase paper suppression rates and dramatically reduce costs for our customers.”

With 15 percent of consumers already paperless and another 30 percent saying they will never suppress paper, the paperless adoption gap is on average 55 percent. For mailers, Zumbox provides an opportunity to address more than $20 billion in direct print mail costs by offering a new channel that lets people easily go paperless once they realize they can receive, manage and store all their important household mail in their very own Zumbox.

In facilitating the transition from paper to paperless, Zumbox enables multi-channel delivery for mailers, which means they can send paper versions of bills, statements and other transactional mail, in parallel with the digital postal mail, until consumers opt out of receiving the paper versions. This provides the reassurance consumers need to feel comfortable going paperless.

If you are interested in learning more about the new partnership, please check out the full press release here.

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 Zumbox Software, Inc. to pursue opportunities related to licensing our offering worldwide.

Designed for those who wish to quickly go to market with a digital post offering, the Zumbox Platform™ is a white label software offering that supports complete, private label branding. This means that a postal operator in any country can license the platform and make the necessary customizations to launch a paperless postal system for that country. The Zumbox Platform™ provides the only complete solution for securely processing, in digital media, the types of mail currently sent through traditional postal systems.

As our VP and General Manager for Zumbox Software, Inc. puts it, “we expect licensing to be an important aspect of our business and look forward to aiding our postal and commercial customers in getting to market with a paperless postal offering much more quickly than was previously possible.”

PRESS RELEASE

WESTLAKE VILLAGE, CA – May 4, 2010 – Zumbox, Inc. announced today the availability of its Zumbox paperless postal platform as a locally deployable, carrier grade white label software offering for license by postal authorities and commercial entities around the world. As part of the announcement, the company declared its plans for the formation of a subsidiary known as Zumbox Software, Inc. to actively pursue opportunities related to licensing the company’s offerings worldwide.

Designed for those who wish to quickly go to market with a digital post offering for transactional, government and financial mail, the Zumbox platform has been live as a hosted consumer service in the United States since February of 2009. Zumbox has created a web-based platform that powers the world’s first paperless postal system. For every street address, there is a corresponding Zumbox – a digital mailbox – which enables postal mail to be sent as digital files and received online. This new category – paperless mail – represents the first practical alternative, or complement, to traditional paper based postal systems.

“The trend toward adoption of digital post offerings is driven by requirements for cost management, environmental efficiency and a basic consumer demand for the convenience of digital vs. paper based delivery,” said Adam Schneider, VP and General Manager of Zumbox Software, Inc., a subsidiary of Zumbox charged with the licensing of the Zumbox Platform™.  “We expect licensing to be an important aspect of our business and look forward to aiding our postal and commercial customers in getting to market with a paperless postal offering much more quickly than was previously possible.”

The offering consists of a license for Zumbox Platform™, the deployable version of the company’s offering, plus training, documentation, systems integration services and an ongoing software maintenance agreement that will deliver updates to the service. The maintenance agreement includes second and third tier technical support for each of its licensees. In addition to providing services directly, the company anticipates that it will shortly announce partnerships with leading consultancies that provide IT services to the postal marketplace for distribution and professional services delivery.

The Zumbox Platform™ is a white label offering that supports complete, private label branding by licensees with administrator control panels that provide flexible configuration of many elements of the service by authorized licensees or third party service providers they may use. The offering is designed to support the postal address database of any country where a licensee may operate.

Zumbox is the industry leader in street-address-based paperless postal systems. The Zumbox Platform™ provides the only complete solution for securely processing, in digital media, the types of transactional and marketing mail currently sent through traditional postal systems.

Zumbox supports a host of industry standard tools and interfaces that help dramatically reduce the time and effort in integrating mail senders, supporting thousands of clients. A powerful, sender facing middleware platform adapts the system quickly and easily to the variety of digital mail stream delivery practices commonly found in the marketplace. This platform includes a flexible suite of API’s that speed integration and minimize ongoing maintenance. The platform operates with online bank-level security and complies on an ongoing basis with PCI, HIPAA and BITS security standards.

Zumbox Developer API’s allow licensees to develop their own tools and open their systems up to the third party development community to create new and exciting applications that increase functionality and improve the user experience.

Automated monitoring of the flow of mail and reports related to usage provide customers with information not currently available through traditional postal systems, leading to efficiency, maximized revenue and increased profits.

Interested parties can contact Adam Schneider, VP and General Manager of Zumbox Software, Inc. via email at adam@zumbox.com or by telephone at (+1) 818-707-7418.

(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 San Francisco has been paying his bills and keeping in touch with friends and family online. Now he is also using Zumbox , a new Web-based postal system that uses his street address for e-delivery.

“With just one click, say I want this [letter] paperless in the future please,” said Mickle. “And I’ll never see a paper copy ever again.”

Rob Reed, vice president of marketing at Zumbox, explained, “We’ve created a digital mailbox for every street address in the U.S., so now all mail can be sent online the same way it’s sent on paper.”

Sending mail online can save a lot of money on printing and postage, which caught San Francisco’s attention. Last year the city sent 7 million pieces of mail at a cost of over $3 million. That is money Mayor Gavin Newsom would like to spend on other things.

“It’s a nice thing … Take advantage of technology, go paperless,” said Newsom. “I think this is unquestionably the future.”

The mayor used Zumbox to notify residents about a new composting ordinance. The letter contained hyperlinks to other eco-friendly programs.

“We’re really trying to encourage residents as well as businesses to cut down on the amount of paper that they’re sending to the landfill,” said Lawrence Grodeska, of the San Francisco Department of the Environment. “Certainly, recycling, but if they can reduce the amount of paper they use up front, that’s the best possible scenario.”

Because Zumbox allows for geo-targeting, users can alert neighbors about a missing pet or other local events.

“The potential for Zumbox is to build and strengthen communities by enabling electronic communication that didn’t exist before,” said Reed.

Cities across the United States are embracing the system’s digital delivery. New York City, Minneapolis and Newark are also using Zumbox to some extent, and with every address in America already on the system, more cities are expected to give this paperless postal system a try.

Also posted in Atlanta, Detroit, Maine, Tampa Bay, Twin Cities, Wausau, Austin, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Boston, Charlotte, DC, and New York