The challenge

Holidays can be full of surprisingly stressful tasks. Locating your passport, getting to the airport on time, avoiding that ill-advised local dish…

Add to this: sending postcards. With the greeting otherwise unlikely to make it home before you do, the first morning can easily turn into a manic dash to source, write and send. To the extent that most postcards should really read: “Beach probably nice. Spent morning queuing in post office.” 

This is one holiday stress imail commercial director Andy Barber would like to eliminate. His £15m hybrid mailing company is the brains behind a product called Postcards from Pete, which enables holidaymakers to turn pictures they’ve taken into postcards, using a special app, and send them from anywhere in the world to anywhere else for around £1. 

Crucially, the system’s designed so all postcards are delivered within 48 hours, meaning no tight-lipped, spoiler-wary holiday accounts before a relation finally receives their postcard... around two months after it was sent.

Postcards from Pete is just one of the latest of many products that imail offers, aimed at cutting costs and delivery times through the firm’s tie-up with parent company UK Mail, one of the largest express delivery companies in the UK.

Imail was launched in 2009 to compete with Royal Mail’s First Class service. Though the company has recently branched out into consumer products – Postcards from Pete and SWALK (Sealed With a Loving Kiss) greetings cards – it started off catering for SMEs.

It wanted, explains Barber, to cater for businesses that typically don’t have the volumes of mail to benefit from downstream access companies like UK Mail.

“We could see that our downstream access set-up was more for large corporate type mailers which left a real gap for SMEs,” says Barber. “The problem before was that with downstream access you have to send a vehicle to pick up the mail. It costs us to send a vehicle so if we’re picking up just one piece it doesn’t make sense.”

Luckily 2009 was around the time when broadband speeds were picking up nicely. So the obvious solution was for customers to send their documents across electronically for UK Mail, or rather imail, to print and post. 

Barber explains that the idea is to target those businesses who would otherwise either be printing on a desktop or office printer, or, put off by rising postal costs, have migrated marketing activity away from print entirely.

“Our biggest competitor is office printing and stamps and franking machines, the incumbent way most small businesses tend to do traditional marketing,” says Barber. 

He adds: “Our target market is the small SME, the type of business the large print and mailing houses wouldn’t want, because they might distract them from big clients. These tend to be small ad hoc unforecast volumes, which wouldn’t fit well with a print operation that’s got a very set client roster that must be top priority.”

And thus a speedy, cost-effective mail and print set-up was born.

The method

Imail started off with a print facility in Bristol and one in Birmingham. In July last year, it added a print and sort centre in Livingston and has just opened a new facility in Slough.

The first products to really take off were marketing postcards and direct mail products. But today the company prints a wide range of items, including letters and transactional documents. 

Products are sent across using imail’s bespoke online ordering platform, with printing continuing at each site until 11pm each night.  “We print up until 11pm so anything that comes through before 6pm is printed for us to hand over the next day for delivery,” says Barber. 

Crucial to speedy printing has been the company’s choice of print kit, believes Barber. Imail has always been a Konica Minolta house, starting life originally with C6500s and now boasting eight Konica C8000s.

“If we’re sending a document electronically all the way to Livingston, it’s absolutely key that the printer is working, and that it is also calibrated to the same standard as any other site,” says Barber. “We do find the consistency across all the C8000s is spot on.”

He adds: “Our business is very different from your usual print and mailing set-up where you have jobs scheduled in. And Konica always excels with response times – the engineers have now become part of the print operations we’ve got around the UK.” 

The imail team themselves also have to be highly responsive to ensure tight turnarounds, says Barber: “You’ve got to have a brilliant team around you, right from the sales and commercial team into production. Everything needs to be gelled and knitted together to be absolutely seamless.” 

Of course, small, time-poor businesses still wouldn’t come to imail to benefit from downstream access cost efficiencies if the kind of speedy turnarounds offered on print and mailing weren’t replicated on the ordering side.

Imail’s strategy has always been to take hassle away from businesses, not only by doing their printing for them, but also by making the ordering process as easy as possible. For this, carefully designed, purpose-built software is crucial.

“All of our software is UK Mail’s proprietary software. We decided we didn’t like the off-the-shelf solutions because when we started talking to our clients every client had a slightly different take on it, because they were creating mail in a slightly different way. So we wanted our own system so we could tweak it to clients’ needs,” says Barber. 

He adds that the system is the result of a circa £500,000 investment, and is worked on by an 80-strong team at UK Mail who also oversee the company’s track and trace postage technology.

Getting a company targeting specifically SME businesses off the ground, is also of course a real sales challenge. The solution for imail, explains Barber, has always been working with a number of partners in various sectors.

“We work with an e-POS (electronic point-of-sale) provider within the hair and beauty industry. That gives us access to 2,500 beauty salons,” says Barber, adding: “At the same time we have a really dynamic telesales team.”

The result

The results for imail have been pretty impressive by anyone’s standards, with the company growing 65% year on year since launching.

“What we’ve been able to do in building a £15m business from scratch is a great thing. Digital print is a booming area if you have the right product,” says Barber. “Five years ago we hadn’t printed one document; now we do 55m-60m images a year.”

Barber explains that the affordability and user-friendliness of the system has encouraged plenty of SMEs to switch back to print. “Where a lot of them switched to online applications, we’re finding a lot are now switching back to print because print works,” he says.

And it’s not just SMEs imail is attracting. The company now works with a wide range of clients including retailers, telecoms brands and some of the UK’s largest banks. 

“The late cut-off time has been such an advantage. We have lots of clients who have noticed cost savings in excess of 50%,” says Barber.

A highly reactive production and logistics set-up, as well as full control of imail ordering software, have been key to adding such large and prestigious customers, says Barber. 

“For example, just before a council tax mailing recently, the council told us they wanted to merge the council tax bill and revenue statement to save on postal costs. So we looked at the system and tweaked it to allow that,” says Barber.

Now, with its Postcards from Pete product and SWALK greetings cards, the company has branched out into the consumer market. Both are based on imail’s, now proven, model of closely tied together print and downstream access mailing facilities. 

Postcards from Pete is going very nicely, reports Barber. He reveals that imail is currently holding talks with mobile phone brands inter-ested in buying the Postcards from Pete app as a white label solution to be included as standard on some handsets.

The new SWALK app enables consumers to easily create greetings cards from their iPhone pics, and send these by requesting postal addresses from their Facebook friends. The app is similarly generating plenty of interest from those keen on partnering on a white label solution, this time from a range of charities, reports Barber. 

Currently around 31% of the work imail prints is DM postcards and consumer postcards, 19% DM letters and the other 50% transactional documents, often mono work, printed either on one of the C8000s, or on a Konica Minolta bizhub Press 1052 mono printer.

Barber anticipates the SWALK offering could grow to such an extent that it eventually makes up half of imail’s card volume, however.

So imail certainly has plenty of plans for future growth. And all of these stem from one core principle: affordable and speedy mailing enabled by a savvy print and mailing house tie-up. 

VITAL STATISTICS 

Imail

Location Bristol, Birmingham, Livingston in Scotland and Slough

Inspection host Andy Barber, commercial director

Size Turnover: £15m; Staff: 38  

Established In 2009 as a rival to Royal Mail’s First Class service and as the hybrid mail offshoot of UK Mail, one of the largest express delivery companies in the UK

Products The company prints a range of letters, transactional documents, direct mail, marketing cards and other forms of correspondence for large corporates and SMEs. It also prints and posts postcards and greetings cards for consumers, who send artwork imail’s way through specially created apps

Kit Eight Konica Minolta C8000s, one Konica 1052 (two further on order to handle recent large public sector contracts wins), two Neopost DS1200s, two Neopost DS200s, four Neopost DS140s, two Kalmar C5s, Morgana DigiFold, DocuMaster Pro and various other items of finishing kit 

Inspection focus Launching a print and downstream access mail business

TOP TIPS

If you’re dealing with a wide range of document types and your whole business is geared around accommodating unforeseen orders on a daily basis, it stands to reason a highly reactive team will be key. “Our success has been geared on a dynamic team that adjust very very quickly to changing customer and market conditions,” says Barber. “For example we have seen a real take-up in public sector volume over the past year and that changes the whole dynamic of print, as we’re printing more mono items than ever before.”

A slick ordering process is crucial. Imail built its own software so it can be tailored to suit each individual customer’s needs and changed at short notice to accommodate new requests. “Imail is at the moment more of a DM tool, whereas the next iteration will take us more into the templated web-to-print application,” reports Barber. 

Choosing a reliable print kit supplier has apparently been crucial to imail’s success. Imail’s kit delivers high-quality results with strong service, according to Barber. Support in integrating the machines’ RIP has also been strong. “When you’ve got a stable system like imail you have to be really careful with change control – a Fiery front-end could potentially sit out of kilter with the rest of the network,” says Barber. “But clearly we were prioritised by Konica and I think the way they’ve handled implementation has been superb.”