Posted on 19 July 2026 by Jeff Fuge | Reading time 5–6 min
Theodore Levitt famously wrote of how railroad companies lost out when air travel came along by seeing themselves in the railroad business, not the travel business. Even today, more than 65 years after Levitt’s Marketing Myopia article was published, such shortsightedness still exists. Royal Mail is a good example.
When our post arrived the other day, I got thinking about Royal Mail. By seeing themselves in the business of delivering physical letters rather than in the broader business of delivering written communication, they have missed some first class opportunities.
Royal Email: a digital complement to traditional post
I first started using email around 1996. Back then, new to its workings and the idea of domain names, I was confused about why I needed to join the likes of CompuServe or Hotmail to send and receive electronic post. “Why aren’t Royal Mail doing this?” I thought.
Dusting off that idea 30 years later, it feels like Royal Mail missed an opportunity back then that might still be open to them now.
What if Royal Mail provided dedicated email addresses and delivered to your inbox as well as your letterbox?
If Janet and John live at 1 Acacia Drive, Bath, BA1 2CD, they could have email delivered to a ‘Royal Email’ address for their property. This could take the form of 1BA12CD@royalmail.com, or it could be a personal variant such as Janet.1BA12CD@royalmail.com and John.1BA12CD@royalmail.com.
The idea is that the email address marries up with the street address, so is specific to your property. You would be given a username and password to access that mailbox. And – as with your street address – the email address would change and mail would be redirected if you move.
While all of that simply establishes Royal Mail as another email provider, here’s the twist: sending email to and from a Royal Mail address would require a stamp. Yes, unlike free services such as Hotmail or Gmail, Royal Email would come at a cost.
If that sounds self-defeating, hear me out.
Royal Email could stamp out spam
The big downside of email is spam. Back in the day, spammers were famous for trying to flog Ugg boots, fake Rolex watches and knock-off versions of Viagra.
Nowadays, our inboxes get filled with more subtle and frequent forms of spam. For example, there are the fake emails purporting to be from your bank, asking you to reset your password.
And there are the daily price promos from the company you bought a pair of socks from a three years ago. (You’ve only yourself to blame, of course… you ticked or unticked the wrong box when hastily navigating the fleet of opt-in and opt-out boxes at the checkout. “Tick this box if you don’t want us to not send you marketing”.)
But with a Royal Email address, that marketing-happy fashion brand and those folk phishing for your bank details would have to pay to email you.
Royal Email stamps could be graded just like their physical counterparts. First and Second Class could be used for delivery of email either immediately or 48 hours later. And as with physical stamps, there could be a size limit, say 2MB. Above that but below 5MB a costlier large-letter stamp would be needed.
And for file sizes that are bigger still, Royal Email would also have been perfectly placed to offer large-file transfers: a service where brands such as WeTransfer have since cornered the market.
For now, though, back to stamps.
If First and Second Class email stamps were 10p and 5p, it’s a small enough price if you want to send occasional messages from your Royal Email address. But where the cost really benefits you is that it becomes massively expensive for spammers and overzealous marketers.
Spammers are successful because it currently costs them next to nothing to email their ill-gotten mailing list of a million people. However, spamming a million Royal Email addresses would require a minimum of a million Second Class stamps at a cost of £50,000.
Meanwhile, marketers relentlessly bombing the inboxes of 20,000 customers twice a week would face an annual postage bill of over £100K.
The net result is that as an owner of a Royal Email address, your inbox is free of much if not all of the junk that everyone hates and no one reads.
While a Royal Email address imposes a cost on sending truly legitimate emails – such as a purchase confirmation and details of a delivery time – that 5p or 10p is easily borne. (After all, the brand spent way more that that on PPC to drive you to their website.)
Junk filters now do a pretty good job of dealing with spam these days, of course. But remember that these did not exist back in the 1990s or for much of the early 2000s when email was taking off – and when Royal Mail’s opportunity was at its zenith.
Royal Email is great news for enlightened marketers
If it sounds like adding cost to sending messages to Royal Email addresses is solely a spam-reducing win for the recipient and an off-putting financial burden for businesses and marketers, there’s another side to this.
Unlike other email services, Royal Email addresses enable precise geographic targeting.
Just like traditional direct mail, marketers could focus a campaign on specific postcodes and addresses. This could prove especially useful to promote the opening of a new shop or local amenity, or for local authorities and utility services to advise people of road closures and disruptions to water, gas or electricity supplies.
And the cost of doing this by email would be less than by traditional post. A small business opening a new coffee shop can run a campaign targeting 2,000 nearby homes for £100 worth of Second Class e-stamps. (This is a gain not a loss for Royal Mail as a small business would never spend the corresponding £1,820 on physical stamps.)
While such an email is unsolicited, news about that coffee shop or a forthcoming road closure is likely to be welcomed or at least seen as relevant – unlike those messages for Ugg boots and Rolexes.
It’s not utopia, but it’s better than myopia!
Over the last 30 years, most news stories about the Royal Mail have been negative ones. Prices for stamps are going up again. Delivery frequencies are reducing again. Profits have dropped – or losses have increased – yet again.
These Royal Email ideas may not be a silver bullet for the company’s woes, but they show how the brand could have found – and could still find – new relevance and a valuable new source of revenue.
They are also aligned with the brand’s core purpose: meeting their so-called Universal Service Obligation of delivering to any address in the UK for the same fee.
And where the British public’s deep-seated love of Royal Mail has been eroded over the years, these ideas could help restore some of that brand-boosting affection.