In a typical week, how many emails do you send, versus how many pieces of physical mail? If you are an individual, and you are reading this article, chances are you send many more emails than you affix postage stamps to envelopes. But it’s a near certainty that paper mailings are an integral part of your employer’s commerce.

Have you ever considered the complexities of replacing our current paper postal system with a digital one? As far as I’ve ever thought about it is: It could be done, if every person and business on the planet were online, if it were truly secure, if you could undo two hundred and sixty years of cultural habit, and if nobody wanted paper copies of anything.

Frankly, I hadn’t imagined any of these changes happening in the foreseeable future, but I also never thought television would be going all-digital, forcing Great-Uncle Henry to have to surrender his rabbit ears for some box he has to figure out how to hook up to his 30-year old television.

Zumbox™ has thought further about it than I, and in fact, has taken an enormous step toward revolutionizing this country’s postal system, creating a parallel digital delivery system that, when embraced, will substantially reduce companies’ printing and mailing costs while also making possible a broad-scale environmental change.

An all digital postal service must meet the following: employ the standard street address system, employ bank-level security and best-of-class privacy, offer control and ease-of-use to consumers, and deliver mail for a low-cost...

Despite the proliferation of digital media and marketing channels, the street address remains the standard point of interaction for nearly all business-to-consumer communications. –Zumbox White Paper, October 2008

Here are the specifics. Zumbox™ is a secure digital delivery platform with 150 million virtual mailboxes, corresponding to each physical street address in the United States. If you have a physical address in this country, you already have a secure Zumbox™ mailbox webpage. (You’ve got mail!)

Mail requires paper and ink and printing, which consume forests and petroleum and foul rivers and streams. And the raw materials and the finished product must be trucked and hauled from place to place, and most of them end up in landfills. –Zumbox White Paper, October 2008

Because business-to-household mailing represent the vast majority of paper postal traffic (over 85%), it is to this activity that Zumbox™ has tailored its solution. Virtually any item that would typically be mailed on paper (postcards, invoices, statements, advertisements, event invitations, city notices) can be sent via Zumbox.

Businesses, non-profits and governments register under Zumbox’s Free Postage Program (yes, free), and then use the same sources of their current paper mailings - such as Adobe or Word documents, typical desktop publishing formats, graphics, HTML, Flash, mail merge letters to their databases - to conduct business communications with their customers. Or to send mail to all addresses in a geographic area. Or to all addresses in a particular zip code. The Zumbox™ mailing interface makes all of these things quite simple. And developers can integrate applications and workflow processes into the Zumbox™ platform.

Advertisers and marketers pay a whopping five cents per street address mailed to. (To put this in perspective, a business using the Postal Service’s cheapest bulk mail service will pay 19.9 cents per piece for a postcard, whether mailing one hundred pieces or ten thousand. Then add in the cost of producing the card.)

Individuals register at their Zumbox™ street address and are ready to send and receive mail (also free). If you think that as an individual you wouldn’t use this service yourself, you could, for example, send a block party invite to your neighbors, send out a “Lost turtle, have you seen him?” announcement, a garage sale notice or a city council meeting alert without having to know your neighbors’ email addresses.

More importantly, you can further exert your social responsibility by informing the companies with which you do business that you want to go paperless with Zumbox™. Likewise, businesses can provide incentives to customers to go paperless with Zumbox™ by offering Zumbox-only specials and offers.

If, with an acid edge, you say, “An electronic communication system already exists - it’s called email,” as my friend did the other night, well, you are right, as far as it goes. The fact is that your email address is liable to change much more frequently than your physical street address, such as when you change internet or digital service providers, employers, or when you change your mind. There are other interesting differences presented at the Zumbox Blog.

If your response is, “I already transact my business electronically,” you should know this:

1. Even if you’ve gone completely paperless in your transactions, in 2006 24 million tons of paper was produced in the US for printing and writing, and 2 billion pounds of industrial ink is used yearly in this country. As evidence that most of this ends up in the mail, the average household receives 500 to 1,000 pieces of advertising and commercial mailings a year.

2. There is a difference between the current way businesses provide secure electronic information to their customers and the Zumbox™ method. If you are already doing business electronically with say, your bank, it sends you a notice that your new statement is ready for viewing. To view the statement however, you must log in to the bank’s secure network, because email itself is not secure.

With Zumbox™, the statement is actually sent electronically to your Zumbox, eliminating (or rather, replacing) the steps of having to log in to your bank’s customer service website to view your statement, logging in to your phone provider’s service website to view your current bill, your insurance company’s website for your policy renewal information, et cetera.

To meet this specific need, Zumbox™ employs bank level security and is compliant with the following security standards:
–Certified PCI-DSS Compliant (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard)
–HIPAA Compliant (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act)
–BITS Compliant (Banking Industry Technology Secretariat)

“All paper mail sent via the U.S. Postal Service can now be sent via Zumbox™.”

Think about that. The excellent Zumbox White Paper What’s the REAL COST of a 42 Cent Stamp? raised my awareness about the current state of America’s paper mailing system. It’s definitely worth a read, and then I’d love to hear your ideas for getting Zumbox™ quickly into broad scale use. So please leave your comments!