Letter Traffic Demand in the UK: An Analysis by Product and Envelope Content Type

National postal operators offer a range of mail products to customers. It is likely that demand elasticities for these products differ across both service types and their requirements for sending mail. This paper examines time series data for addressed inland mail in the UK for three broad product categories of mail in order to identify the key drivers of the demand for letter traffic and letter substitution. For the first time, total addressed inland mail in the UK was segmented into mail content categories and preliminary estimates for the drivers of UK letter mail substitution for social, transactional and direct mail are provided.