Mar 25, 2008
More Talk about Blue Water and Grapefruit
Why Friend-to-Friend Mail Can Be a Reality IMO
One of the great things about going to industry events like On Demand and XPLOR is that you get to see people you haven’t seen in a long time—many of them people with whom you used to work. It’s a small industry. There are always old faces in new places.
After I presented on new technology—a speech mainly about grapefruit and blue water (see previous columns for an explanation)—I took a walk on the show floor and ran into an old colleague. I was pleased to learn that he regularly reads this column and was doubly pleased that he agreed with most of what I have written about in this space. But then he kind of chuckled and said that my idea about reviving mail as a “peer to peer” or “friend to friend” channel was abjectly (he used another word) ridiculous. He has a son in college and said there’s no way the kid would ever send a letter. The most typical communication between them—requests for more money—were all made via cellular telephone or email.
I’ve always been one to appreciate cheerful skepticism, polite doubt, even wanton cynicism, so appreciate the feedback. I’m getting used to it. In one of the panel sessions I participated in for XPLOR I brought the idea up and claimed that it would save the USPS: it passed by without a single comment by attendees or panelists. Later on, another ex-colleague politely told me that it’s too far-fetched to contemplate: mail is dead. But I remain optimistic.
The reason is technology. I predict that the same technology that “killed” mail will revive it: the Internet. The Internet will enable us to automate the mail and offer mail as a service. If we automate this currently manual process and eliminate the folding, stuffing, addressing and stamping, then what is left—personal content—is all good. And millions of people will respond to it when it happens. The USPS will see a rise in first-class mail and our mailboxes will be full of letters from people we know because it’s fun to get mail. And you have to send mail to get mail.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. The first step is to automate. Using the Internet to automate the mail creation process will first benefit small businesses that need to leverage postal mail as their main customer communication channel. Consider this quote from Andy Coleman, Director of Strategic Accounts, eBay:
“In the early days, our sellers would get an email from eBay, hand write the address on the package, get in their car and drive down to the post office, and that was their mailstream. The technology we’ve put together with Pitney Bowes has enabled us to provide automated tools allowing sellers to become more efficient with that process and so increasing their business, which in turn increases our business and helps us grow.”
The increasingly fragmented business world we now live in has led to growth in the small business sector: the growth rate of additional small businesses is about 5% per year. One of the first things small business owners experience is sticker shock over the cost of postage for the direct mail that drives new business and for transactional mail, which is still considered more reliable than sending an invoice or bill as an email attachment.
In the UK, Sureprint, LLC provides mail as a service for many small businesses. They formed strategic partnerships with the providers of small business accounting and accounts payable software and service: Sage, Pegasus, JD Edwards and Oracle. Rather than printing communications and inserting them into envelopes, billers hit the enter button on their desktop computers and their mail is printed and processed in a centralized location, co-mingled with other pieces in order to gain postage discounts, and mailed for them. The service costs less than what they would spend doing it for themselves. There is no reason to believe that “Mail as a Service” (MaaS) will also work here in the USA.
I believe that the same technology provided by Sureprint can be applied in a way that will attract people—especially young people—who may already be in search of a more tangible way to express themselves than texting or talk.
Here’s a truth about technology: it tends to find a niche. Radio was supposed to be dead after TV came along but it found a role and continues to thrive. Email replaced some kinds of mail—for example, email alerts carrying a link to a billing site have replaced some statements and email attachments replaced the overnight mail that used to carry important contracts from businesses to clients. But like other media, first class mail will find a niche. One could say it already has: greeting cards for special occasions. But why is it still used for sending greeting cards? What is it about mail that makes email greeting cards still mostly unacceptable for this application? It may be that mail has a formality to it that other forms of communication do not. If you don’t believe me simply send your mother an e-greeting on Mother’s Day and see if she appreciates it.
Formality may also be the reason that most bills and statements are still sent through the mail. It may be bad form to informally ask someone to send you money. There is also a trust factor. The bottom line is that consumers prefer getting bills in the mail. As a case study I recall an effort a few years back by a mortgage company that wanted to lower its postal mail costs. They offered a number of raffle tickets for a fancy sports car to anyone who added online statement presentment. The campaign was a huge success. As a follow-up, they offered even more tickets to anyone who turned off the paper. This campaign was a dismal failure. The consensus among consumers was “I like the car but I need my house.” Paper is trustworthy, tangible and familiar. We’ve learned that presentment and payment are two very different activities, each with a preferred channel. And we’ve learned that there are rules or, at the very least, customs, that are tough to change.
Perhaps not coincidentally, mail has more than held its own as a direct marketing channel: people who receive direct mail buy one-and-a-half times more merchandise on retailers’ web sites than those who were contacted only by electronic channels; and, with all the recent chatter about transpromo replacing direct mail, it must be acknowledged that transpromo mail will not help businesses add a single new customer. Transpromo can be a great cross-seller, a great up-seller, a great way to strengthen the consumers’ relationship with your brand, a great brand-builder….but transpromo does not help you acquire new customers. So direct mail will likely persist.
The catalogue of the near future is very far from the classic JC Penney/Sears catalogue model: it will be much more targeted and personal, with catalogues of four to six pages becoming more prevalent than those with dozens or hundreds of pages. Personalization and predictive modeling will put an end to spray and pray tactics that greatly bother us when we go to the mailbox.
And where personal messaging has changed, it has changed continuously with new channels forcing older forms into a niche: ie., while first faxes and then email replaced some letter mail, they have in turn been replaced by instant messaging and texting. For younger people, email is just as passé as mail: texting, with it’s unique diminutive language, is much more fun and vital and immediate than email. But LMTYS: texting is fun because inventing a new language is fun: all the abbreviations are fun to use and learn and teach others. Millenials like to influence one another—they like being hip to new things and passing them on. My kids use expressions like “sketchy” and “awkward” to describe things that we used to say were unfortunate or bad.
But something is missing. If texting is an “in” thing, where the hipper you are the more you get the foreshortened lingo, it’s also true that the level of creativity is not very satisfying. And if reductive langauge is en vogue now, IYKWIM, the next big thing might just be more expansive: ie., using the letter page and (even more so) the envelope page and (even more so) the stamp itself as a broad canvas for creativity. The only limits are the limits of ones imagination and the templates that they must be squeezed into in order to be machine-sortable and deliverable. The most difficult part won’t be generating the letter, which is done on MS Word, or obtaining payment through PayPal or similar channels. These are already the engrained habits of the millenial generation. The difficult part will be associating a physical street address for a generation that is more used to working with an email address. But that can be overcome.
I see nothing to hold back this initiative.
The revitalization of friend-to-friend mail depends on applying the technology, partnering with social websites, co-marketing the service to young people and allowing them to use the imagination to create unique pieces that will impress their friends and stimulate a response in kind: after all, everyone loves to get mail. And like my mother always told me: you have to send it to get it. YKWIM?
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