The future of snail mail

The end of snail mail has been predicted several times before, whenever new technologies like the telegraph, the telephone and email are introduced. Some entrepreneurs bet that the combination of a widely adopted, secure, fast Internet, concern for the environment and the ever-present desire to cut business expenses may spell doom for postal services.

As trust in technology's security and privacy grows, the traditional mail service looks more and more outdated. People are becoming used to shopping, trading, working and meeting romantic partners online, meaning that they no longer look upon a piece of paper as the ultimate standard of proof and reliability. Many people pay bills and receive paychecks from employers electronically. An email can have as much validity in law as any paper correspondence.

A tax on our resources

The printing, transporting and delivering of mail uses huge amounts of labor and natural resources. The environmental effects of reducing the amount of mail are significant simply because of the volume of mail sent every working day. In 2008, 202.7 billion pieces of mail were delivered in the U.S. alone. Imagine how many trees could be saved and trucks taken off the road if that were reduced even a little. Concerned citizens who are anxious to further reduce their carbon footprint are a large market for new paperless services.

Most businesses currently use mail services to send and receive payments and to deliver their marketing materials. In addition to location-based marketing for retail businesses, street addresses are profiled so that marketers know where their potential customers live. They can then craft messages to appeal to customers in target postal codes. The new paperless services are planning to retain the street address profiles so that this advantage is not lost to marketers and enhances whatever profiling their software can create on the mass of data they will collect.

A time for opportunity

This is the time to start up new mail-delivery services, as the entrepreneurs behind Zumbox have noticed. Slightly different business models, all of which involve the use of secure scanning and electronic delivery, are popping up. In the same way that a multitude of search engines and social media sites proliferated in the early 2000s before a few like Google and Facebook emerged as dominant, we can expect to see lots of experiments before a truly useful model is in use by a sufficient number of people to make it the new standard.

References:

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN1830441220080619

http://www.triplepundit.com/2009/02/first-all-digital-alternative-to-snail-mail-launched/