The Royal Mail's new Mailshots Online service is further evidence that it is targeting SMEs in a big way, as the "Partner for Growth" campaign attests. This latest development is noteworthy because it seems to me that this, and services such as the Unity Hybrid Mail and ViaPost offerings, have the potential to open up a whole new market for print that could be truly enormous.

Royal Mail bills the service as "bringing the 30 minute mailshot to UK businesses". Enabling SME enterprises to easily produce full-colour personalised mailings, of varying degrees of sophistication, has to be a good thing. The fact that with a few clicks of a mouse users are able to send one mailout or just as easily 100 or 1,000 is going to allow small businesses to experiment with different mailings, different designs, and different frequencies at extremely low cost. And the ability to access third-party mailing lists is certain to have appeal.

IMHO on first inspection the Mailshots Online interface could be a little slicker and user-friendly, but it's early days and I'm sure they will polish it up. In fact, if you want an example of a print-generating website that is so slick and clever it pushes all the right buttons (I can only describe it as the print equivalent of a chocolate shop) check out Moo.com. Moo's offering is also pretty special in that it has appeal to consumers and SMEs alike.

The businesses mentioned provide powerful pointers to where web-to-print is going to take the industry by the simple fact of making print easy, accessible and affordable, and as such appealing to a whole new world of potential punters.