Drugstore.com Earnings call
Drugstore.com Earnings Call | InternetStockBlog.com
You can learn a lot about online trends by reading earnings transcripts of online retailers. Checkout this shift towards search identified here:
In addition to looking at each order, and each partnership, we have been carefully scrutinizing our marketing expenses. In 2005, we tested a number of marketing vehicles to accelerate our growth and gain valuable insight into which program drive customer behavior. As part of our 2006 budgeting process, we did a very careful analysis of each and every marketing program examining the effectiveness, return, and relative performance of each. Our goal was to identify programs that provide the greatest growth at the lowest cost, to identify which programs help us drive to profitability, and which will be deferred until we have the cash to self-fund.
Our analysis confirmed that search both free and paid is a cornerstone of our new customer acquisition and continues to show very high ROI. In addition, the changes we’re making to our site and shopping experience has driven significant changes to customer conversion and our personalization effort both on the site and in e-mail shows very strong returns.
By comparison, catalog, direct mail, and in-box inserts have proven to be more expensive.