Do you answer your emails? For a sector in that exists to connect people I believe that our communications skills could be better
I’ll be honest, and this isn’t me blowing my own trumpet, but I’ve been inundated this last week with folk contacting me with comments regarding my last article regarding great and gruesome leaders in the transport industry.
A few have sent me cryptic messages trying to get me to reveal who I was referring to, whilst others have shared their own horror stories. The postbag has been bulging and I apologise to all those to whom I haven’t replied in a timely manner – and regret any inconvenience caused.
It’s been an odd week, though, and I’ve reflected a lot on the challenges of communication, mainly due to my own tardiness in responding, coupled with struggling to solicit simple responses from others in my day job. Indeed, I estimated that in a typical week, 25% of my time is spent either trying to chase or contrive a response from transport employees, or discussing with colleagues strategies to get folk to respond to my contact! Of course, that statistic might tell you something about me and the eagerness of many to give me the cold shoulder or my irrelevance, but mates in the sector tell me that the percentage of their time engaged in this activity is the same, if not higher. Imagine if that 1.25 days a week were better utilised to create compelling strategies to make public transport a better place, rather than just trying to force, at worst, the courtesy of a response.
I’ve pontificated on the different sources of communication now in play and in doing so stumbled across a LinkedIn post from a former colleague at Royal Mail, Stephen Agar (its former managing director, letters), suggesting that our previous employer would be better focusing on marketing the benefits of sending correspondence by post than just accepting managed decline across its letters business and seeing parcels as the only game in town. He remarks: “So maybe Royal Mail need to change how they talk about letters to emphasise the premium quality of the form of communication, and the care which needs to be taken to craft a meaningful letter.”
I have for some time concurred with Agar’s standpoint and have long believed that letter writing, and indeed print marketing per se, has a real place in business, and in particular in public transport. Marketing managers in bus and rail are so fixated on digital media that they neglect the risks of online saturation or of producing content so contrived that it looks inauthentic. In the bus sector, it tends to be the old school managing directors and their direct reports who persist with concepts such as household leaflet drops, and they are derided by these marketeers (generally those at ‘the centre’) as dinosaurs for doing so. I speak from personal experience of handing out leaflets at strategically well-positioned places (along tourist routes and in hotel foyers, for instance) and witness people reading them in detail and putting the leaflets in their pockets, in a way they might not look twice at yet another cheesy message on their crammed social media feed.
I’m also sure that I’m not the only one who, when picking up mail on the doorstep, reads a leaflet as I walk down the hallway, maybe into the toilet or bath, or it’s left lying on the kitchen table for ages, maybe cluttering up the mess. All the time it’s not been put in the recycling, it may get looked at. At worst, the brand is still on the periphery of my vision and in the subconscious. Or I may pin it to the noticeboard, where it will remain for years because no one at home ever has the time or inclination to go through the fiddly task of taking stuff off the board – and dropping the drawing pins unsafely into the cat-eating bowls below. The beauty of print marketing now is that letters through the front door are so low that your transport leaflet will stand out – just as if you subscribe to a paper version of this magazine, it looks far better (including the mugshot of me!) and smells lovely.
Letter writing and indeed print marketing per se has a real place in business
A leaflet or brochure often stays around long enough to influence decisions over time rather than being scrolled past in a second. The Joint Industry Committee for Mail (JICMAIL) has undertaken research that found the average piece of direct mail receives 108 seconds of attention over 28 days, while the average door drop gets 46 seconds, which is far stronger than the fleeting attention most online ads receive. More recent JICMAIL data also shows direct mail attention rising to 133 seconds per item in Q4 2024, underlining how printed material can hold attention in a way that many digital placements struggle to do. It is particularly impactful for the older demographic, whose lives are less digitally centric.
All this really matters commercially. The Data and Marketing Association’s 2025 Door Drop Report says door drops generated an average return of £2.90 for every £1 spent between 2021 and 2024, alongside a 0.5% average response rate, and JICMAIL’s 2025 conference data reported average ROI figures of £9 for warm direct mail, £3.90 for cold direct mail and £2.60 for door drops.
Letter writing can serve to reinforce the importance of a previous digital correspondence. I often write a letter as a last resort to try to solicit a response. In sending invoices, they can easily get missed in someone’s email inbox or they see it and think ‘I’ll deal with it later’ and forget, whereas if the hard copy is printed off and put in the post, they will curiously wonder when they see an envelope in their in-tray addressed to them and open it, only, of course, to be disappointed when it’s only an invoice from a clown like me. It’s the same with a business proposal.
In many respects, a letter is a near cast-iron guarantee (the reality is that stuff very rarely gets lost in the post), that the recipient will receive it. For several months, I have been in contact with a large train operating company about an initiative to help their customers and also bus companies. I stand to make no monetary gain out of this, but I am just trying to facilitate the initiative because it seems a ‘no-brainer’. But the challenge of getting someone at the company to respond and discuss the art of actually making it happen has been impossible. So, I wrote a letter and hand-delivered it last week – all other attempts having failed. At least I have peace of mind it will be read, even if shoved straight in the bin.
A letter can also be slightly more formal than other means of communication. It shows clear intent and has often been borne of greater reflection, preparation, and crafting than a casual, impulsive email, WhatsApp, or text. A takeaway can also be provided – at Great Scenic Journeys, we have some (in my view) lovely, glossy-looking pamphlets promoting our wares, which cannot do justice when sent out as a PDF attachment. However, the problem of posting letters hasn’t been helped by the ‘work from home’ culture. A mate told me last week not to send letters to local authorities or transport owning group bods as most of them go so infrequently into an office, so your mail could just be sitting there for months on end, and it’s not as if, of course, you can ask for their home address.
If anything, the range of communication mechanisms has slowed down effectiveness, rather than enhanced it. Folk can pick and choose which form to use, and more time is spent guessing what works best or worst for the potential recipient. I’ve lost count of how much time I’ve wasted in conversations with colleagues along the lines of ‘X doesn’t do email, so try WhatsApp’ or ‘Y is hopeless at answering texts, but try a Facebook DM, then you’ll get him’. You need a black book of perceived personal preferences of industry people, just to work out what will give you the biggest hit rate.
Then, of course, there is the old-fashioned thing called a phone. Hardly anyone picks up the phone nowadays. It’s not just me – transport top dogs tell me that whole day’s pass and they never receive a call or make one. However, just like the paucity of the post, this can create novelty value and easier access – I’m increasingly just calling someone to get an answer – if they don’t store your number, they will answer out of curiosity (it could be a headhunter!) and then even if they sound gutted when they realise it is me, it’s difficult for them to not give me the information I need! The problem is that many believe that to call someone is actually an invasion of privacy, whilst when I suggested to someone that I text someone who was ignoring my emails recently, they said ‘that might come across as creepy’. You can’t win. Another alternative is to put 141 in front of your number, so it doesn’t show – it’s a trap that has around a 50% success rate, so, on balance, worth trying.
I do believe that the transport industry has got worse at communicating
WhatsApp is increasingly an effective way of communicating. If you can’t be bothered to talk to someone or text them a message, play telephone tennis or get interrupted with a poor signal, leaving a long voice note is brilliant – besides, they can’t interrupt, and you can get your message across. WhatsApp groups are also good for quick communication and inclusivity, but be careful not to stray into too much informality.
I do believe that the transport industry has got worse at communicating, almost as if it’s fashionably acceptable to ignore people. Behaviours breed behaviours, and if you are discourteous to colleagues and others with a vested interest in making our sector better for customers, then this disrespect will spill over into the treatment of those customers. It’s the same story for how companies treat colleagues. If you’re rude and contemptuous toward fellow employees, you can’t just flip a ‘be nice’ switch when leaving the depot or office and interacting with customers. What happens in the dressing room spills out onto the pitch. So too, if the sector can’t even master managing various communication channels to send simple responses to colleagues, it’s little wonder that when mass, multi-faceted communication is required during service disruption, the industry falls short.
I’ve also witnessed bigwigs literally paralysed and incapable of dealing with any incoming communication. At best, they will reply if you’ve by luck ‘got them in the moment’. At worst, everyone in the industry knows it’s a waste of time trying to make contact – they’ve got a derogation from having to interact with others, something engineering directors have been doing since time began. Heaven knows how these people manage an entire department or organisation; they can’t even manage themselves without their PAs spoon-feeding them. A good PA is always useful to befriend as they’ll make sure the recipient of your email will respond.
All this sounds depressing, but it need not be. Well, may folk not wish to communicate with a mindless moron such as I, though, as indicated, I’m not the only one struggling here. I know some who have grumbled that the belligerent wall of silence from some when they send communications has affected their mental health and sense of well-being. Transport companies waffle on (for show) about their values and behaviours – maybe if we call out their inability to subscribe to these in reality and in the interests of cost-efficiencies (something that the industry also bladders on about), they might want to reduce the wastage and burden on everyone having to devote a large percentage of their working time to soliciting a response for simple request. Then, perhaps we’ll all have a better chance of delivering for our customers and just being better colleagues. It’s not that difficult.
Now I had better check that I have responded to those well-wishers from last week’s missive, before this article hits your doormat or socials.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Alex Warner has over 30 years’ experience in the transport sector, having held senior roles on a multi-modal basis across the sector. He is co-founder of transport technology business Lost Group and transport consultancy AJW Experience Group (which includes Great Scenic Journeys). He is also chair of West Midlands Grand Rail Collaboration.
This story appears inside the latest issue of Passenger Transport.
The challenges of communication
by Passenger Transport on Mar 27, 2026 • 9:35 am No CommentsDo you answer your emails? For a sector in that exists to connect people I believe that our communications skills could be better
I’ll be honest, and this isn’t me blowing my own trumpet, but I’ve been inundated this last week with folk contacting me with comments regarding my last article regarding great and gruesome leaders in the transport industry.
A few have sent me cryptic messages trying to get me to reveal who I was referring to, whilst others have shared their own horror stories. The postbag has been bulging and I apologise to all those to whom I haven’t replied in a timely manner – and regret any inconvenience caused.
It’s been an odd week, though, and I’ve reflected a lot on the challenges of communication, mainly due to my own tardiness in responding, coupled with struggling to solicit simple responses from others in my day job. Indeed, I estimated that in a typical week, 25% of my time is spent either trying to chase or contrive a response from transport employees, or discussing with colleagues strategies to get folk to respond to my contact! Of course, that statistic might tell you something about me and the eagerness of many to give me the cold shoulder or my irrelevance, but mates in the sector tell me that the percentage of their time engaged in this activity is the same, if not higher. Imagine if that 1.25 days a week were better utilised to create compelling strategies to make public transport a better place, rather than just trying to force, at worst, the courtesy of a response.
I’ve pontificated on the different sources of communication now in play and in doing so stumbled across a LinkedIn post from a former colleague at Royal Mail, Stephen Agar (its former managing director, letters), suggesting that our previous employer would be better focusing on marketing the benefits of sending correspondence by post than just accepting managed decline across its letters business and seeing parcels as the only game in town. He remarks: “So maybe Royal Mail need to change how they talk about letters to emphasise the premium quality of the form of communication, and the care which needs to be taken to craft a meaningful letter.”
I have for some time concurred with Agar’s standpoint and have long believed that letter writing, and indeed print marketing per se, has a real place in business, and in particular in public transport. Marketing managers in bus and rail are so fixated on digital media that they neglect the risks of online saturation or of producing content so contrived that it looks inauthentic. In the bus sector, it tends to be the old school managing directors and their direct reports who persist with concepts such as household leaflet drops, and they are derided by these marketeers (generally those at ‘the centre’) as dinosaurs for doing so. I speak from personal experience of handing out leaflets at strategically well-positioned places (along tourist routes and in hotel foyers, for instance) and witness people reading them in detail and putting the leaflets in their pockets, in a way they might not look twice at yet another cheesy message on their crammed social media feed.
I’m also sure that I’m not the only one who, when picking up mail on the doorstep, reads a leaflet as I walk down the hallway, maybe into the toilet or bath, or it’s left lying on the kitchen table for ages, maybe cluttering up the mess. All the time it’s not been put in the recycling, it may get looked at. At worst, the brand is still on the periphery of my vision and in the subconscious. Or I may pin it to the noticeboard, where it will remain for years because no one at home ever has the time or inclination to go through the fiddly task of taking stuff off the board – and dropping the drawing pins unsafely into the cat-eating bowls below. The beauty of print marketing now is that letters through the front door are so low that your transport leaflet will stand out – just as if you subscribe to a paper version of this magazine, it looks far better (including the mugshot of me!) and smells lovely.
A leaflet or brochure often stays around long enough to influence decisions over time rather than being scrolled past in a second. The Joint Industry Committee for Mail (JICMAIL) has undertaken research that found the average piece of direct mail receives 108 seconds of attention over 28 days, while the average door drop gets 46 seconds, which is far stronger than the fleeting attention most online ads receive. More recent JICMAIL data also shows direct mail attention rising to 133 seconds per item in Q4 2024, underlining how printed material can hold attention in a way that many digital placements struggle to do. It is particularly impactful for the older demographic, whose lives are less digitally centric.
All this really matters commercially. The Data and Marketing Association’s 2025 Door Drop Report says door drops generated an average return of £2.90 for every £1 spent between 2021 and 2024, alongside a 0.5% average response rate, and JICMAIL’s 2025 conference data reported average ROI figures of £9 for warm direct mail, £3.90 for cold direct mail and £2.60 for door drops.
Letter writing can serve to reinforce the importance of a previous digital correspondence. I often write a letter as a last resort to try to solicit a response. In sending invoices, they can easily get missed in someone’s email inbox or they see it and think ‘I’ll deal with it later’ and forget, whereas if the hard copy is printed off and put in the post, they will curiously wonder when they see an envelope in their in-tray addressed to them and open it, only, of course, to be disappointed when it’s only an invoice from a clown like me. It’s the same with a business proposal.
In many respects, a letter is a near cast-iron guarantee (the reality is that stuff very rarely gets lost in the post), that the recipient will receive it. For several months, I have been in contact with a large train operating company about an initiative to help their customers and also bus companies. I stand to make no monetary gain out of this, but I am just trying to facilitate the initiative because it seems a ‘no-brainer’. But the challenge of getting someone at the company to respond and discuss the art of actually making it happen has been impossible. So, I wrote a letter and hand-delivered it last week – all other attempts having failed. At least I have peace of mind it will be read, even if shoved straight in the bin.
A letter can also be slightly more formal than other means of communication. It shows clear intent and has often been borne of greater reflection, preparation, and crafting than a casual, impulsive email, WhatsApp, or text. A takeaway can also be provided – at Great Scenic Journeys, we have some (in my view) lovely, glossy-looking pamphlets promoting our wares, which cannot do justice when sent out as a PDF attachment. However, the problem of posting letters hasn’t been helped by the ‘work from home’ culture. A mate told me last week not to send letters to local authorities or transport owning group bods as most of them go so infrequently into an office, so your mail could just be sitting there for months on end, and it’s not as if, of course, you can ask for their home address.
If anything, the range of communication mechanisms has slowed down effectiveness, rather than enhanced it. Folk can pick and choose which form to use, and more time is spent guessing what works best or worst for the potential recipient. I’ve lost count of how much time I’ve wasted in conversations with colleagues along the lines of ‘X doesn’t do email, so try WhatsApp’ or ‘Y is hopeless at answering texts, but try a Facebook DM, then you’ll get him’. You need a black book of perceived personal preferences of industry people, just to work out what will give you the biggest hit rate.
Then, of course, there is the old-fashioned thing called a phone. Hardly anyone picks up the phone nowadays. It’s not just me – transport top dogs tell me that whole day’s pass and they never receive a call or make one. However, just like the paucity of the post, this can create novelty value and easier access – I’m increasingly just calling someone to get an answer – if they don’t store your number, they will answer out of curiosity (it could be a headhunter!) and then even if they sound gutted when they realise it is me, it’s difficult for them to not give me the information I need! The problem is that many believe that to call someone is actually an invasion of privacy, whilst when I suggested to someone that I text someone who was ignoring my emails recently, they said ‘that might come across as creepy’. You can’t win. Another alternative is to put 141 in front of your number, so it doesn’t show – it’s a trap that has around a 50% success rate, so, on balance, worth trying.
WhatsApp is increasingly an effective way of communicating. If you can’t be bothered to talk to someone or text them a message, play telephone tennis or get interrupted with a poor signal, leaving a long voice note is brilliant – besides, they can’t interrupt, and you can get your message across. WhatsApp groups are also good for quick communication and inclusivity, but be careful not to stray into too much informality.
I do believe that the transport industry has got worse at communicating, almost as if it’s fashionably acceptable to ignore people. Behaviours breed behaviours, and if you are discourteous to colleagues and others with a vested interest in making our sector better for customers, then this disrespect will spill over into the treatment of those customers. It’s the same story for how companies treat colleagues. If you’re rude and contemptuous toward fellow employees, you can’t just flip a ‘be nice’ switch when leaving the depot or office and interacting with customers. What happens in the dressing room spills out onto the pitch. So too, if the sector can’t even master managing various communication channels to send simple responses to colleagues, it’s little wonder that when mass, multi-faceted communication is required during service disruption, the industry falls short.
I’ve also witnessed bigwigs literally paralysed and incapable of dealing with any incoming communication. At best, they will reply if you’ve by luck ‘got them in the moment’. At worst, everyone in the industry knows it’s a waste of time trying to make contact – they’ve got a derogation from having to interact with others, something engineering directors have been doing since time began. Heaven knows how these people manage an entire department or organisation; they can’t even manage themselves without their PAs spoon-feeding them. A good PA is always useful to befriend as they’ll make sure the recipient of your email will respond.
All this sounds depressing, but it need not be. Well, may folk not wish to communicate with a mindless moron such as I, though, as indicated, I’m not the only one struggling here. I know some who have grumbled that the belligerent wall of silence from some when they send communications has affected their mental health and sense of well-being. Transport companies waffle on (for show) about their values and behaviours – maybe if we call out their inability to subscribe to these in reality and in the interests of cost-efficiencies (something that the industry also bladders on about), they might want to reduce the wastage and burden on everyone having to devote a large percentage of their working time to soliciting a response for simple request. Then, perhaps we’ll all have a better chance of delivering for our customers and just being better colleagues. It’s not that difficult.
Now I had better check that I have responded to those well-wishers from last week’s missive, before this article hits your doormat or socials.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Alex Warner has over 30 years’ experience in the transport sector, having held senior roles on a multi-modal basis across the sector. He is co-founder of transport technology business Lost Group and transport consultancy AJW Experience Group (which includes Great Scenic Journeys). He is also chair of West Midlands Grand Rail Collaboration.
This story appears inside the latest issue of Passenger Transport.
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