If you search WhatTheyThink for "Zumbox," you come up with lots of entries, including a news story that has Pitney Bowes filing against them for patent infringement.  (Currently this lawsuit is subjected to a Motion for Stay requested by Zumbox pending patent reexamination.)

But that hasn't seemed to have slowed down the activity level at Zumbox. We first spoke with Zumbox CEO John Payne in February, following the Volly announcement by Pitney Bowes. Although the company was the first on the scene with a digital postal mail offering, this was about the time that the company had added a partnership with Kubra, a large mailer, to its partner portfolio, which includes DST Output, probably the largest mailer in North America, and perhaps the world. It has also added GovDelivery, Computershare and 3i Infotech to the mix, assimilating quite an impressive level of access to transactional mail.

There have also been a number of other important announcements, including licensing of the Zumbox platform by the New Zealand Post and a partnership with Crawford Technologies Inc., a leader in print-stream transformation and document re-engineering software solutions

In May, the company made available its Zumbox Digital Postal Mail Gateway (DPM Gateway), a secure network appliance that will automatically and securely deliver postal mail via a digital channel to consumer households. Once the gateway is installed and configured, mailers simply direct their print stream to the DPM Gateway installed inside their corporate firewall. This allows mailers to achieve paper suppression targets, reduce postage and other mailing related costs and improve customer communications.  It also gives Zumbox easy access to smaller mailers. This was preceded by an April announcement of an API that allows mailers to connect with the service.

For a decade, there have been many rash projections about the suppression of paper mail by migrating particularly transactional documents to electronic delivery and it has been a long, slow haul to make that transition happen. Even with billers pushing incentives for consumers to switch to paperless billing, the transformation has not occurred as projected.  However, solutions such as Zumbox may break the logjam by offering a single, secure place where consumers can receive , manage and archive statements and other mail online, rather than having to visit each individual biller to see monthly statements.

Key to its success is being able to aggregate a sufficient number of mailers into its partner portfolio to allow consumers to begin seeing the opportunity for a significant volume of their business and transactional mail aggregated in one spot, and by partnering with the largest mailers in North America, as well as offering an easy-to-use appliance for smaller mailers, Zumbox is well on its way to achieving that.

Meanwhile, it has been quiet on the Volly front, a similar offering from Pitney Bowes, launched in early January of this year. Since the end of the first quarter, there has been little news from Volly. The company stated it would be focusing first on the financial services market and is partnering with Broadridge, a leading IT and outsourcing provider to the financial services industry, with whom Pitney Bowes has already been partnering for 30 years. This presumably captures billers who are producing and sending mail onsite rather than using an offsite outsourcer such as DST Output. We are working on an update on Volly from Pitney Bowes, so stay tuned for that. However, I did sign up for the Volly beta, where I was asked which billers I wanted to include, and received notification that the company is adding more partners to its network to make it a great experience and that they would be in touch. So the beta has not yet begun.

Meanwhile, I also signed up for Zumbox, but face a bit of a conundrum since it requires me to provide a U.S. address where I live or work.  Well, as many of you know, I don't live in the U.S., and I use multiple mailing addresses depending on the mailer. So I am not quite sure where that will go! This probably has to do with the sweepstakes (see below).

What caught my attention recently with Zumbox was the announcement of its formation of an Industry Advisory Board designed to drive the future of digital postal mail.  Members of the board include:

The Board asked to meet three times per year, instead of the two Zumbox had planned. InfoTrends' Matt Swain also participated in the first meeting of the group, but no one from the USPS was present.  I asked Payne about that, and he replied, "We are friendly with the USPS, we talk to them frequently, but today they are not playing in that space."

He points out three constraints the USPS faces in terms of introducing new services such as this, including the requirement to provide universal service, regulatory constraints on what businesses they can enter, and their unions. A Reuters report on Sunday, August 21st, reiterated the insolvency of the USPS and its inability (to date) to get Congress, "bogged down by partisan sniping," to approve major structural changes, including elimination of Saturday mail delivery. Although the USPS has a lot to do just to survive, one of the key causals of its troubles is the analog-to-digital transformation which has been one factor among many to drive down mail volumes, and thus revenues, leaving the USPS burdened by an expensive infrastructure its revenues simply cannot support.  With initiatives such as Zumbox and Volly, that can only get worse.

One interesting learning from the first Zumbox advisory board meeting, according to Payne, was that it was always assumed that the key driving factor to paper suppression and the growth of digital mail would be postal savings. He says, "That is clearly important, but there are other things that are surfacing in the minds of our partners' customers.  This includes optimizing support. There are very limited ways a consumer interacts with a paper document.  With paper, customers usually call. With digital, they can get real-time support on the spot, self-serve support that can channel people to the optimal support mechanism so they don't get lost. This can help with customer retention and reduction of churn. With a digital document, you not only know whether the consumer responded, but you have made it easy for them to do so. And your database includes the response, increasing the knowledge you have about your customers, allowing you to continue the dialog.

Payne explains how this might work, saying, "On a cell phone bill, we provide a panel at the bottom of every piece of digital postal mail which is typically used for support, cross-selling and general branding. Say you have been a customer for a couple of years, your contract is about to expire and you have an old Android phone. The provider can market right in the context of the bill, perhaps offering the newest Android phone for free with a 4-year contract. Just one click takes the consumer to a page where she can order that phone right now." Payne points out that this is interactive mail rather than one-way mail, a two-way conversation instead of a one-way broadcast.

When asked about where marketing mail was in the plan, Payne replied, "What consumers want is their business mail-bills and statements-all in one place, and that gives you the right to send them marketing mail.  This will be a 2012 initiative for us."

What else is Zumbox doing to drive consumer participation? How about a million dollar giveaway?  Well, I guess it worked for Ed McMahon, so why not? Payne explains, "There are 120 million households in the U.S., and there are 7,500 winners. Zumbox has created a digital mailbox for every street address (house, apartment, condominium or any other residence) in the US. Any resident can claim and verify the household Zumbox for their street address for free at www.zumbox.com for a chance to win. To enter the giveaway, residents simply claim and verify their Zumbox, a free digital mailbox tied to their street address. Inside each Zumbox is an instant-win envelope that, when opened, lets them know if they have won one of the thousands of prizes." I guess that's why I couldn't sign up!

Whether they win or not, Zumbox is counting on consumers telling friends and family about the giveaway using social media or other means.  If a referred friend wins, the referring friend gets exactly the same prize.  I don't think Ed McMahon did that …

Although Zumbox is not disclosing numbers, Payne says that household acquisition has been favorable since launching the sweepstakes.  He also reports that the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul have endorsed Zumbox, giving the company an added boost in that geography. Payne points out, "After more than 10 yeas of effort, only 5-15%of customers are paperless though 70%+ transact online. This support and promotion in the Twin Cities area has resulted in an average of 37% paper suppression on signup and 46% after the second billing cycle for selected billers as show below: