Stamps.com 2009 Annual Report Download - page 9

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
2010 Business Strategy
Our PC Postage Business
Our 2010 strategy for the PC Postage business includes the following major initiatives:
•
Increase and Optimize our Small Business Marketing
. We plan to modestly increase our customer acquisition
investment in our small business marketing channels in the non-enhanced promotion channels. Based on recent analysis
and trends, we believe that the lifetime value of a non-enhanced promotion customer continues to be more than twice the
cost of acquiring those customers. We also plan to continue increasing our investment in our direct mail channel as well
as refining our acquisition through online advertising, affiliates, partners, telemarketing, traditional media, and other
areas. We plan to increase our small business PC Postage customer acquisition spending in the non-enhanced promotion
channels by an estimated 10% to 15% in 2010 versus 2009. Our goal in this part of our business is to maintain a
reasonably strong investment in our customer base during the current economic downturn and be well positioned when
the economy improves to return to higher investment levels. Although our online enhanced promotion channel tends to
attract lower quality customers, we continue to see an attractive return on our investment, and we plan to continue to run
this channel until we no longer find the returns to be attractive; however, based on recent trends, we currently expect to
continue to reduce our marketing spend in this area in 2010 versus 2009.
•
Improved Customer Experience
. We plan to continue improving our overall customer experience by optimizing our
web site, registration process, software installation process, initial product experience, initial customer communications,
customer welcome kits and delivery of promotional items to make the initial experience a customer has with us as good
as it can be. We plan to expand our presence in social networking sites and improve our customer web portal and multi-
media and content on our website. We are continuing to add new propriety SKUs to our Supplies Store, such as a new
convenient line of Certified Mail envelopes and labels, to improve our overall customer experience. We also have several
planned product enhancements in 2010 including improvements to our batch capability, expansion of our ecommerce
integrations, enhancements to our Certified Mail capabilities, and better integration with Quickbooks for our customers.
•
Enhance and Market our Corporate Enterprise Solution
. Customers continued to be attracted to our corporate
enterprise solution versus a postage meter based on our dramatically lower cost of ownership and visibility into
individual employee activity from our sophisticated front-end reporting tool with real time data, improved web-based
postage management tools, and enhanced web-based financial and administrative controls for central decision makers,
which are not available with a postage meter. In 2010, we plan to increase our sales team headcount by at least 25%
compared to 2009 and continue investment in hiring and training top personnel to improve the efficiency and quality of
our sales team. Also in 2010, we plan to continue increase our enterprise marketing and lead generation efforts in a cost
effective manner. We also plan to launch version 2.0 of our Enterprise service, which will include a dramatically
improved web-based enterprise reporting system with a sophisticated front end reporting tool providing real time data,
improved web-based postage management tools, and enhanced web-based financial and administrative controls for
central decision makers.
•
Enhance and Market our High Volume Shipper Solution
. In 2009 we made several enhancements to our shipping
technology including: (1) batch capability that allows users to print a large volume of shipping labels all at once, (2)
database integration technology for seamless automatic import and export of information to and from a customer’s
internal order database and (3) direct integration with eCommerce platforms including eBay, PayPal, Amazon.com,
Yahoo and Google, so that a user can read and write order information directly from our software into and out of these
platforms. In 2010 we plan to continue investing in our shipping technology and sales and marketing efforts by (1)
continuing to improve our batch capability with easier order management and order flow, (2) adding shopping cart
integration for easier data export and import from the tools that customers
5