Stamps.com 2013 Annual Report Download - page 9

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Marketing of PhotoStamps
We target our PhotoStamps marketing at consumers and businesses. We market or have marketed our PhotoStamps product through the
following channels:
In recent years, we reduced our consumer-focused marketing spending in order to lower our customer acquisition costs and improve our
expected returns and profitability in the PhotoStamps business.
2014 Business Strategy
PC Postage Business
Our 2014 PC Postage business strategy includes the following major initiatives and plans. These initiatives and plans are subject to change
without notice based on our analysis of market and business conditions, and constitute “forward-looking statements”,
and accordingly are subject
to the cautionary statements, qualification and limitations on forward-looking statements we discuss at the beginning of Part I of this Report.
We plan to continue increasing our investment in direct mail, traditional media and online advertising as well as refining our customer
acquisition process through affiliates, partners, telemarketing and other areas. Our goal is to continue to increase our small business
customer acquisition expenditures while keeping our cost per customer acquired at a reasonable level and maintaining our customer
economics thus resulting in a continued attractive expected return.
5
Table of Contents
4
Remarketing.
We remarket our services to former customers. Our remarketing efforts are generally focused on new features that may relate
to the reasons former customers stopped using our service. We utilize e-mail and regular mail to communicate new features of our products
to our former customers.
4 Shipping Integrations. We market our services through integrations with e-commerce platforms, multi-carrier shipping management
software, shopping cart software and other order-
entry management applications. Our shipping integration partnerships include Amazon, the
USPS, QuickBooks and others.
4 Traditional Media. We utilize television commercials and a variety of traditional and internet-based radio endorsements to advertise our
services.
4 Online Advertising. We work with companies to advertise our services online through paid searches, banner ads, permission-based emails,
and other online advertising vehicles.
4 USPS Referrals
. We utilize the nationwide USPS Account Manager network to market and sell our services to customers. We market to the
account managers by attending regional and national meetings and forums, and participating in local vendor calls. We also receive referrals
directly from the USPS website at www.USPS.com.
4
Enhanced Promotion Online Advertising.
We work with various companies to advertise our services in various places across the Internet.
This channel typically offers an additional promotion directly to the customer by the partner in order to get the customer to try our services.
This channel tends to attract more consumer oriented customers. We reduced our investment in the enhanced promotional channel during
recent years.
4
Online advertising, including paid search, banner ads, permission
-
based emails, and other online advertising methods;
4
Partnerships including HP/Snapfish and others;
4
Retail distribution of a boxed PhotoStamps product;
4
Remarketing to our existing customers; and
4
Traditional offline methods of consumer advertising.
Increase our Small Business Marketing Spending
. Based on recent analysis and trends, we believe we continue to experience a strong
return on our investment in our small business PC Postage customers, who have an expected lifetime value of more than twice the cost of
acquiring those customers. Accordingly, we plan to increase our small business customer acquisition spending by an estimated 5% to 10%
in 2014 versus 2013.