Intersections Inc's Customers Performance

We have a dual go-to-market strategy in the U.S. and Canada, through partner marketing and through direct-to-consumer marketing via search and display messaging. A substantial number of subscriptions in our products and services are canceled each year, as we believe is the case for similar products offered by our competitors in the identity theft monitoring industry. There is an investment cost to acquire a new subscriber and produce initial fulfillment materials, and therefore subscribers typically must be retained for a number of months in order to cover these costs. Our goal is to achieve a customer retention profile sufficient to achieve positive cash flow returns on these investment costs, above predetermined hurdle rates, across our entire subscription population.
In 2016 and 2017, we continued to expand our business relationships with new partners including retail, communication and other industrial partners, as well as partnering with employers to offer Identity Guard® as an employee benefit option. Building off our historically successful partner product distribution strategy, we have increased our internal business development capability in various channels more than 100% as we continue to pursue and contract with partners to bring our suite of differentiated and comprehensive products to their customers. We also made significant investments in our internal systems, member platforms and IT security compliance in order to build, enhance and prioritize security in our partner distribution channels and generate subscriber growth using an agile development process. We continue to develop, improve and expand upon all of these important initiatives.