Stamps.com 2014 Annual Report Download - page 10

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.
2015 Business Strategy
Mailing and Shipping Business
Our 2015 mailing and shipping 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, qualifications 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.
In 2015, we plan to continue increasing, optimizing and refining our enterprise customer lead generation and sales and marketing efforts.
We plan to continue working on improving the efficiency of our sales team. We also plan to increase the number of enterprise customers as
well as increase the number of locations with existing customers.
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Table of Contents
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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.
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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 believe we will continue to experience a
strong return on our investment in our small business mailing and shipping 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 spend including that
of ShipStation and ShipWorks by an estimated 10% to 20% in 2015 versus 2014.
•
Enhance our Enterprise Solutions Sales and Marketing Efforts
. Our solutions continue to have a stronger customer value proposition
compared to postage meters and our 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.