Stamps.com 2012 Annual Report Download - page 9

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.
2013 Business Strategy
PC Postage Business
Our 2013 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 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, online advertising and traditional media 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 and resulting in an attractive expected return on investment.
We plan to launch new features in our software including continued enhancements to our batch shipping capabilities such as batch printing
tools, design enhancements, international custom forms with hidden postage, and forms that can be use with thermal printers. We also plan
to broaden our support for USPS services such as Express Mail Flat Rate Padded Envelope, which offers cost effective overnight delivery,
Parcels Select service which offers the lowest USPS rates for ground delivery, and USPS Special Services that include Adult Signature
requirement and Hold for Pickup services on packages.
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Online advertising, including paid search, banner ads, permission
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based emails, and other online advertising methods;
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Partnerships including HP/Snapfish and others;
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Retail distribution of a boxed PhotoStamps product;
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Remarketing to our existing customers; and
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Traditional offline methods of consumer advertising.
•
Increase our Small Business Marketing Spending
. Based on recent analysis and trends, we continue to experience a strong return on our
investment in our small business PC Postage customers, who have a lifetime value of more than twice the cost of acquiring those customers.
Accordingly, we plan to increase our small business customer acquisition spend by an estimated 5% to 15% in 2013 versus 2012.
•
Optimize our Business Model and Improve our Customer Experience
. We plan to continue optimizing our registration process and post-
registration customer interactions to improve the initial experience a customer has with our service by shortening and streamlining the
registration process and facilitating easier purchasing of postage by customers during registration. We plan to expand our usage of demo
videos and online how to videos. We also plan to continue expanding our presence in social networking sites and continue expanding our
customer web portal and enhancing content on our website.
•
Enhance our Enterprise Solutions Sales and Marketing Efforts
. Customers continue to be attracted to our enterprise solution versus a
postage meter. We believe this customer preference is based on our dramatically lower cost of ownership and the greater visibility into
individual employee activity available from our sophisticated centralized front-
end reporting tool, with features typically not available with
a postage meter, such as real time data, improved web-based postage management tools, and enhanced web-
based financial and
administrative controls for central decision makers.
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