You can buy language training courses, the latest movies on DVD, office supplies (including inkjet printers shredders and other hardware items) and even a few toys for the kids. It appears that, in these times of diversification and the need to make a profit wherever possible, the processing of mail is almost an afterthought.

In Germany, even the Post Office itself may have disappeared, with Deutsche Post kiosks now taking up a small area in the corner of a local bank. Deutsche Post has sold off nearly all of their properties over the last fifteen years, going from 29,000 buildings down to around just 25. In some smaller towns and villages, the postal service may even be run by a resident from their house, rather than having a dedicated Post Office.

Why is this?

Mail volumes are decreasing at a rate of between 2-3% per annum across most of Europe, leading to an ever diversified portfolio at the local Post Office and an increasing number of cost-cutting measures. 1

While all the national postal services still deliver to all addresses in their respective countries six days per week, the threat of replacement that has come with the digital age has caused a wave of change.

Naturally then, postal services are changing the way they operate and are embracing the information age with solutions that are designed to replace the door-to-door delivery of bills and correspondence with a digital mailbox that you can access anytime, from anywhere.

As with many technology solutions in Europe, the Scandinavian countries were first to the punch, launching Digital Mailbox products as far back as 2001. This is not an unusual situation in our region; Finland and Sweden were among the first to gain any real traction with consumers for Internet Banking services thanks to a good Internet infrastructure, invested in by a government that wants to stay technologically ahead of the game to help them compete with larger countries. This wide consumer acceptance makes it natural that countries from the same region were early to the market with Digital Mailbox schemes.

A good example of how successful Digital Mailbox services can be is e-Boks, a company that is jointly owned by Post Danmark (Danish Post). While the service has been available for 11 years now, e-Boks have around 3.5 million subscribers in Denmark, which is two thirds of the entire population. 2

Figures released at the beginning of this year suggest that 187 million documents were sent via e-Boks during 2011, 27 million or 17% more than in 2010 when 3 million Danes were using the service. Finland’s NetPosti solution was also launched in 2001 and has seen rapid growth in recent times as more people move to digital mailboxes. 3

More recently, we have seen the launch of other similar services from Switzerland, Germany, Norway and France.

And it isn’t just postal service providers that are moving into the digital mailbox arena. Global consulting firm Accenture announced its intention to launch a digital mail platform in March 2011 at a London postal conference.

Research delivered by Accenture during that event suggests that mail will decline 44% by 2020 owing to the shift from physical to digital communications. This level of decline, if you take figures from 2009 as a baseline, would amount to a loss of 297.2 billion pieces for the world’s top 26 postal agencies. Indeed, Accenture are predicting an annual 5% year-on-year slide in volumes “for the foreseeable future”, which would be evidence that the degradation of traditional mail is accelerating.

Advocates of Digital Mailbox services say that those who use them have increased customer satisfaction and that it has helped those consumers save money. While there is a raft of complex mathematics behind the question of whether these services do, in fact, offer a positive environmental benefit, nobody can deny there is a perception from the consumer that they do have a ‘green’ aspect to them.

Digital mailboxes can receive, store and archive transactional documents and client communications while offering full search and sort capabilities, something that isn’t as easy to achieve when working with paper. Of course, and as with anything, the model needs to make money as well as save money in order to be effective, so where does that leave the traditional ‘direct mail’ marketplace?

Some would say that nothing has changed in this area. PostNord, which services both the Danish and Swedish postal organisations, offer a chance for smaller companies to advertise through the digital mailbox. Their literature makes it clear which direction this is going - “It’s just as natural for PostNord to ensure that your offer reaches the right customer at the right time via satellite and cyberspace as via a traditional postman”.

And as transpromo technologies (transactional promotional) take hold more companies will include one-to-one communications and advertising on the statements they send to their clients.

Whatever happens next, it is clear that the next two years are going to be important for the Digital Mailbox marketplace and for other closely related areas too. With the ever increasing abilities of (currently US-based) bank consolidation and bill payment apps like Mint and PageOnce competing with the likes of the services we’ve mentioned here, we’re headed for an interesting battle to see who comes out as the ‘consumer favourite’ for receiving, storing and managing digital correspondence and transactional documents.

Want to know more about Digital Mailbox services from a North American perspective? Read our Q&A from the January edition of the Crawford Courier.

1 Source: Copenhagen economics; figures for period 2007-2009 were -2.4% as an average across 19 EU countries.
2 Data correct as of January 2012
3 Source: All e-Boks statistics are from an e-Boks press release, January 2012

[Image credit: Bourget_82]