Mail 2.0: How digital is driving the re-invention of mail
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s: Web 2.0, digital, consumer mail
Alex Batchelor Royal Mail Centre First Floor 35–50 Rathbone Place London W1T 1HQ, UK Tel: + 44 020 7441 4783 E-mail: [email protected]
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Mail 2.0: How digital is driving the re-invention of mail Alex Batchelor Received (in revised form): 12 November 2007
Abstract The transformation of the media and communications landscape following the emergence of digital in the mid-1990s is being given new impetus with Web 2.0. In that context, this paper considers the changing social and commercial role for consumer mail. The first half begins by looking briefly at the evolution of mail and its changing uses. It then looks at mail’s dominance as a communications channel, ‘junk’ mail and mail’s ‘user-value’. The second half focuses on the impact of digital on mail. It shows that, far from sounding the death knell for mail as predicted, digital and mail are enormously complementary. The paper concludes that digital, in combination with the trend towards customer-centricity, is actually serving to re-invigorate and re-invent mail around its three unique strengths. Journal of Direct, Data and Digital Marketing Practice (2008) 9, 260–273. doi:10.1057/palgrave.dddmp.4350101
The evolution of mail A public postal service has been in existence in Britain since 1635, although it was only with the introduction of the Penny Post in 1840 that usage of mail really took off. By the late 1870s, around 900 million letters a year were being posted in Britain.1 A hundred or so years later (in 1979–1980), it had reached 10,870 million (see Figure 1). Mails’ dominance was not seriously challenged by the early forms of tele-communications — namely, the telegraph and the fixed-line telephone — which came into use around the same time as mail.2 Neither provided a ‘mass’ communication channel in the way that mail clearly did — they were more ‘niche’ and so tended to be seen as complementary rather than alternative channels. Mail received the first serious challenge to its dominance in the 1970s, when fixed-line home phone penetration accelerated and went beyond 50 per cent of households for the first time.3 Even then, mail remained the predominant channel for most types of remote one-to-one communications. In large part, this was because mail is tangible and can be consumed ‘any time, any place, anywhere’. By the time digital4 began to take root as a mass phenomenon in the mid-1990s, mail could be segmented into three main categories of usage:5 social mail, transactional mail and direct mail (Figure 2).
© 20 0 8 PALGRAVE MACMILLAN LTD 1746- 0166 $3 0.00 VO L .9 NO.3 PP 260– 273. www.palgrave-journals.com/dddmp
Journal of Direct, Data and Digital Marketing Practice
Mail 2.0: How digital is driving the re-invention of mail 14000
Mail volumes received from a UK source (billion items)
12000
10000 consumer mail, 1998-2007**
all mail, 1839-1980* 8000
Please note: data exclude parcels, express mail and international mail from 1998
6000
4000
2000
0 Mail type 1839
1840
1854
1895 1922-23 1933-34 1947-48
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