Analyzing the Prospects for Transactional Mail Using a Sender-Recipient Framework

Abstract

Letter volumes in countries with advanced postal networks have been in decline since the early to mid-2000s. The principal cause of this decline has been the substitution of paper communications by electronic methods (e-substitution). However, analyses of letter volumes in the USA and UK (see USPS 2010; PwC 2013) suggest that the impact of e-substitution has varied widely across different content types of mail (e.g., advertising mail and transactional mail) and within transactional mail by different segments of traffic. In particular, the UK study concludes that while some segments of transactional mail have largely moved on line others are just beginning this transition. Understanding the processes at work in the development of e-substitution and assessing how their effects differ across different types of transactional mail is of major importance to postal operators and policy makers.