More and more businesses are beginning to replace paper mailings with electronically delivery. Company mailings include things like bills, account statements, sales and marketing documents, legal documents, and general company communications. While electronic delivery has the potential to save large amounts of money compared to paper delivery, the transfer to electronic delivery has been slow. Why is that?
Doculabs and researchers at the University of Illinois tried to answer that question and studied a wide variety of industries, ranging from financial services to manufacturing and engineering companies to see if they could come up with an answer. Thair results were published by AIIM in October 2007.
The study found that the amount of mail being sent out by companies annually is absolutely staggering in scale:
- 27 percent of companies send out 100+ million pieces of mail
- 17 percent of companies send out 51 – 100 million pieces of mail
- 25 percent of companies send out 11 – 50 million pieces of mail
And the trend, rather than declining, seems to be increasing at a healthy pace:
- 43 percent of companies intend to increase their mailings
- 33 percent intend to maintain the same level of mailings
It looks like paper mail will be with us for some time. But, some companies are making the effort to go digital:
- 33 percent of companies intend to improve their electronic delivery moderately or substantially
- 50 percent of companies will only slightly improve their electronic delivery
In a slow but sure pace, many companies are targeting a gradual conversion to electronic delivery that is in the range of 5-10 percent annually. Reasons for the slow change include regulatory compliance, security and privacy. And consumers are slow in accepting the change — although in the area of financial services, many companies are providing financial incentives to sign up.
