Introduction: As a technician, I have developed a habit over the years, I like to think from a technical point of view in everything, and sometimes it is inevitable that Taishan will not be seen, this article will inventory the corporate mailbox.
1. Is the enterprise mailbox expensive?
Domestic mainstream enterprise mailbox providers are Tencent, Alibaba Cloud, Netease, 263, etc., Alibaba Cloud as early as 2017 announced the number of enterprise mailbox users peaked, but at this time Tencent Mail is still the first place in revenue, let's look at the pricing of the top two enterprise mailboxes.
Tencent enterprise mailbox price minimum purchase of 5 users, per capita 200 yuan / year, the more you buy, the greater the discount, 5 users of small and micro enterprises each user subscription fee of 190 yuan / year, and 500 users of medium enterprises each user subscription fee of 99 yuan / year.
Alibaba Cloud Enterprise Email is more favorable for small and micro enterprises, with a subscription fee of RMB 120/year per user for small and micro enterprises with 5 users, and RMB 70/year for medium enterprises with 500 users.
Is the subscription fee of 100-200 yuan per year for corporate mailboxes expensive? For most enterprises, if they build their own enterprise mailboxes, considering continuous maintenance and security operations, even if an operation and maintenance can maintain 10 similar services at the same time, the annual cost is tens of thousands of yuan, and the purchase of enterprise mailboxes is not expensive.
Under the subscription charging model, even if enterprise users do not send mail, the subscription fee cannot be reduced by a penny, is it reasonable?
If you provide charges based on email sending volume, are more user-friendly pricing, and will not increase additional operating costs to vendors, can you get a piece of the enterprise mailbox market?
2. Pay according to the volume, how to charge?
China has not seen a pay-as-you-go service vendor, but AWS provides SES (Smiple Email Service) service overseas (including the Asia-Pacific region), how to charge? 1000 emails 0.1$.
For example, a business sends 250,000 emails, each 32KB in size, and the approximate cost is $26.
According to the data of Anqisin's report "2021 China Enterprise Email Security Research Report", there are about 180 million users of enterprise mailboxes, and 760 billion emails were sent and received in 2021, and each user sent and received 4,000 emails per year, including more than half of the spam.
If SES is used to send emails on a pay-as-you-go basis, 250,000 emails are equivalent to the sending scale of 62 users, equivalent to 3 yuan per user, plus one equivalent to 1/50 of Tencent's enterprise mailbox and 1/30 of Alibaba Cloud mailbox.
What's more, if the business rarely sends mail in a year, it doesn't charge money.
Can pay-as-you-go SES become the dragon slayer of corporate mailboxes? If you develop enterprise mailboxes based on this, can you kill Tencent Mail and Alibaba Cloud Mailbox.
3. Unequal price comparison
Although SES is also a fully managed service, there is little daily operation and maintenance, but AWS SES is not the same as the positioning of enterprise mailboxes, in addition to normal sending and receiving emails, enterprise mailboxes also have more additional functions such as enterprise address book, email recall, mail archiving and backup, anti-spam, automatic classification of incoming letters, recovery of accidentally deleted files, CC/secret CC, mobile client, access to IM (WeChat, DingTalk, etc.), etc.
If you want to compete with the participating enterprise mailboxes, these functions are also indispensable, and you can imagine that there is a lot of research and development costs required from SES to enterprise mailboxes.
As a technician, you may only see that the operating costs of SES are relatively low, and the quotation of enterprise mailbox to users is the product terminal price. In general, the financial data of commercial products can be divided into the following aspects:
- Operating income, that is, how much money is received from users, the number of users * customer unit price (considering discounts);
- Operating costs, including the daily operating expenses of delivering products to users, such as mail server resource costs and operation and maintenance labor costs
- R&D costs, including R&D costs for the development of new product features and the repair of legacy problems, mainly R&D personnel salaries;
- Marketing and marketing expenses, including advertising on various platforms, marketing activities, salaries of marketing personnel, etc.;
- General administration, including salaries and administrative office expenses of the company's management team;
35 Internet is an old enterprise mailbox service company, although the enterprise mailbox business has shrunk now, we can still see the approximate operation of the enterprise mailbox from its public financial report data, in 2021, the operating income of the enterprise mailbox business is 21 million, the operating cost is 4.5 million, and the operating gross margin is 78%. Although the scale of the business is already small, the enterprise mailbox business can still maintain a gross margin of 78%, but it does not mean that the company is living well.
It is speculated that the enterprise mailbox charges users 100 yuan, the actual operating cost is 22 yuan, and the SES service will reduce 22 yuan to 3 yuan, what about the end-user price? How to complete the relevant product functions of enterprise mailbox, how many users can be reached, and how many paying users can be brought are the embodiment of the real competitiveness of the product. Compare your own operating costs with other people's terminal prices, think that you have found the dragon slaying knife, don't fool yourself.
When we enter the market with our products, operations, marketing and marketing in place, we find that we face unequal competition across the board.
4. Expand the scope and unequal overall competition
Before the technical threshold of enterprise mailbox is not high, there are dozens of large and small enterprises, and many enterprises build their own mailbox systems, even so, Netease, 263 enterprise mailbox, three five Internet and other major head enterprises also occupy about 50% of the market share, now this track has been reshuffled.
The enterprise mailbox business of 35 Internet has shrunk from 70 million revenue in 2013 to 21 million in 2021, and Ali DingTalk and WeChat have replaced it, these two platforms automatically generate each user's corporate mailbox, and are deeply connected with the enterprise collaboration platform, such as the integration of DingTalk and Ali Mailbox, and also embed the email into almost all communication information flows, collaborators can directly reference the DingTalk file in the email, create an invitation schedule, and initiate audio and video conferences. Even penetrate messages in group or private chats as cards, process messages in chats, or convert messages into chats.
This is no longer a problem of expensive or cheap, the needs of customers have shifted from enterprise mailbox to collaborative office, and a large number of customers are switching from independent mailbox services to DingTalk, enterprise WeChat collaborative office + mailbox camp. When we talk about enterprise mailboxes, we are essentially talking about collaborative office, and in the long run, products that cannot meet the needs of users will gradually go out.
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