Why Print and Mail Still Matters — And How to Make It Work Better

Every few years, a new round of digital adoption data prompts a fresh wave of predictions about the imminent death of print. And every few years, the print and mail operation is still running, still consuming budget, and still generating complaints when it does not perform.

The reality is more nuanced than either the optimists or the pessimists tend to acknowledge. Print and mail is not dying. But it is changing, and organizations that have not updated their approach to managing it are paying for that lag in ways that are sometimes visible and often not.

The Case for Print: It Is Not Sentiment, It Is Preference Data

Consumers are not uniformly moving to digital communications. The picture is more segmented than that. Research from ACI Speedpay consistently shows that roughly 42 percent of consumers prefer to receive some or all of their billing communications as physical documents. Among older demographics, the preference for print is higher. Among consumers who receive bills in both formats, the response rate to the physical document is typically higher.

For organizations in financial services, insurance, and healthcare, this creates an operational reality that cannot be wished away: a substantial portion of their customer base expects and prefers physical communications. Eliminating print for those customers, or allowing the quality of physical communications to degrade in favour of digital investment, is a customer experience decision with real consequences for engagement, payment rates, and satisfaction.

Beyond consumer preference, there are regulatory requirements that mandate physical communication for specific document types regardless of consumer preference. Adverse action notices, certain insurance communications, and specific regulatory disclosures in various jurisdictions must be delivered in physical form. The print and mail operation is not optional for organizations subject to these requirements. It is a compliance function.

The Problem With How Most Organizations Manage Print and Mail

The challenge is not that organizations are running print and mail operations. The challenge is that most of them are running print and mail operations that were designed for a different volume, a different technology environment, and a different cost structure than the one they are in today.

Print and mail is a cost centre that rarely gets the senior leadership attention it warrants. It gets set up, it runs, and as long as complaints stay below a visible threshold, it is left alone. The result is an operation that drifts from its original design — workflows that were efficient at a previous volume become bottlenecks at higher volumes; vendor contracts that were competitive when signed become overpriced as the market evolves; quality controls that were rigorous at implementation become perfunctory as institutional memory fades.

The organizations I have seen spend the most on print and mail relative to their volume are almost never the ones that made a deliberate decision to do so. They are the ones that stopped paying attention.

What a Well-Managed Print and Mail Operation Looks Like in 2026

Omnichannel by design, not by exception

A well-managed print and mail operation in 2026 is not a separate channel that runs in parallel with digital. It is one component of an integrated customer communication strategy that delivers the right format to each customer based on their preference and regulatory requirements. The operational question is not print versus digital. It is how to manage both effectively within a single operational framework.

Vendor relationships that are actively managed, not passively maintained

Print and mail vendor contracts should be reviewed and benchmarked on a regular cycle. The market for print and mail services has changed significantly over the past several years, and organizations with contracts that have not been formally reviewed in three or more years are almost certainly not reflecting current market pricing. This is not a criticism of vendors — it is a description of how contract management works. Rates that were competitive at signing will not stay competitive without the discipline of regular review.

Workflow designed for no-touch processing

Every manual step in a print and mail workflow is a cost and an error risk. The design objective for a high-performing operation is to minimize manual intervention at every stage: automated job setup, automated quality verification, automated inserting, automated postage optimization. The gap between a heavily manual workflow and a well-automated one is measurable in both cost per piece and error rate, and it is larger than most organizations expect.

Digital suppression that actually works

Organizations that have invested in digital migration without achieving their suppression targets have a process problem, not a technology problem. Effective digital suppression requires a combination of customer communication, frictionless enrollment, and ongoing management of preferences — not a one-time campaign. The organizations that achieve and sustain high suppression rates do so by treating digital enrollment as an ongoing operational priority, not a project with an end date.

Leadership ownership

The most important variable in print and mail performance is not technology. It is accountability. Operations that have a senior leader with clear, undivided ownership of the print and mail function — including the authority to make vendor decisions, redesign workflows, and set quality standards — consistently outperform operations where the function is distributed across departments without clear accountability at the top.