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Hot water and computers don’t mix
well, unless you’re Olympic Hot Tub Company. Co-owner
Alice Cunningham conservatively estimates that sales
have doubled since the company launched its Web site.
She first started one in mid-1996 and begun selling products
from it in 1997.
From January to October, 1998, the
company sold 60 hot tubs – just under 7 percent of its business – from
its Web page. Before, Cunningham assumed that people
had to try a hot tub before buying it. But some cyber
customers don’t see their tub until it arrives
at their home. And when they do come into the store,
they’re ready to buy. "They don’t come
to search or browse," she says.
Olympic Hot Tub has been its manufacturer’s
largest dealer for nine years running. It is also a
Web-marketing
leader in its industry. It created its site even before
its manufacturer, Hot S Spring Spas, did.
Cunningham says Web shopping saves customers significant
time compared to driving from store to store researching
products. Before the Internet, she had customers who
had driven from Olympia to Everett comparing tubs and
charting their characteristics.
"You can really tell the people who aren’t
Net people. They’re still doing all the leg work," she
says.
Olympic Hot Tub rode technology’s leading edge
by change. "We almost weren’t in the forefront
because we didn’t know anything about it," Cunningham
says of the Web.
Eva Chiu, president of InfoAdvantage,
met Cunningham through a mutual friend and floated
the idea of creating
a Web site for the spa retailer. InfoAdvantage is a Bellevue-based
Internet consulting and Web development company. "The
Internet was still very much a new area at that time," she
says.
Then, Internet users closely mirrored
hot tub buyers – upscale
consumers with high incomes. Cunningham receives a special-project
marketing budget from the manufacturer, that year she
used it to establish the Web site. "It turned out
to be the biggest bargain on the planet," she says.
She spent a few months writing copy,
and Chiu put it into a Web format and added graphics.
The Web also was
a good fit for the company’s low-key, education-based
sales technique.
Customers commonly do considerable
research before hot tub shopping. That tendency combined
with the area’s
high percentage of computer user makes Web-based marketing
a logical match. Before they ever come into a showroom,
customers can research models, compare features and measure
the space in their home.
"We really built the site with the idea of bringing
people to the stores," Chiu says. They never expected
people to buy spas straight off the Web page.
Chiu manages the award-winning site, which has quite
a splash in the industry. Aqua, a magazine for spa and
pool professionals, cited it as an example of the direction
spa marketing should go.
Cunningham considered other Web consultants,
buy they spoke in such techno-terms that she didn’t want
to use them. She has a word of caution for site developers
when they talk to business owners, "Get rid of the
jargon and make it easy for non-techies to understand."
Web wit
"
Nude or Not Nude?" was the question. The conclusion
of the winning reply from DEA and MLA in Gig Harbor is, "… So,
to your query, our answer clever – Do we wear suites? – No,
no never!"
Cunningham has hundreds of postcard replies to two surveys
asking customers whether they hot tub in bathing suits
or in the buff. The top verses are posted on the site.
Most reported skinny dipping 1982 but suiting up in 1994.
The site’s sense of fun and
user friendliness are key elements of its success.
It downloads quickly,
and key elements stay in familiar positions. Banners
advertise store specials.
In building the site, Chiu focused
on consumers’ reasons
for buying hot tubs. Buyers have different approaches
and different questions they want answered. "It’s
a really good vehicle to sell one on one," Chiu
says of the Web site.
She also makes it easy to update.
She includes the latest information once or twice a
month and makes major changes
once or twice a year. "The more frequently the site
is updated the better the [marketing] outcomes are," she
says.
Updating keeps the site foremost
in the business owner’s
mind as a marketing tool. Web search engines also tend
to choose recently updated sites to include.
For a Web site to succeed, a company
has to promote it regularly. "Businesses have to incorporate the
Web to support other media they advertise in" Chiu
says.
She sends Olympic’s website to all the search
engines and to lists of business sites in computer publications.
The Web address goes out on the company’s newsletter
and appears in all its print ads. She sends the Web site
on a CD to demonstrate at trade shows and advertises
it on other sites hot tub customers might visit.
Cunningham says the whole process of creating the Web
page and integrating it into the business went smoothly.
Now Cunningham keeps up with Web
trends and reads how-to articles. She plans to track
the site’s impact
more closely. Manufacturers Hot Spring now has a site
with a dealer locator, and she assumes some customers
find her stores that way. She wants her salespeople to
ask customer if they used the site and how they found
it.
More than 40 percent of Olympic Hot
Tub’s business
comes from referrals from existing customers. That rate
is holding up among cyber shoppers as well. Buyers can
pull up a picture of the hot tub they bought on the Web
to show friends at work.
Cunningham has bought banners advertising
her site on the Seattle Times’ real estate site
and local news pages, and the manufacturer has bought
banners on some
search engines. She also plans to create new links to
related sits, such as local real estate firms.
Tubs and technology
The company makes extensive use of technology besides
the Web site. It tracks customer files, sales and service
records and all payables and receivables on PCs and
a proprietary computer system. Its service center and
stores use WinFrame, a Citrix modification of Windows
NT 3.51 that allows graphically intensive programs
to run over phone lines or other narrow bandwidths.
Deliveries and service operate out
of the company’s
Tukwila service center. The Seattle store connects to
the warehouse there through a T1 frame relay link. Osborn
keeps records in both locations, but the service center
handles most of the invoicing and receivables tracking.
He is working on linking the Fife and Everett stores
to the service center as well.
The company uses a proprietary accounting
system, running its own hardware, OS and applications,
from Solutions
Plus in San Marcos, CA. Osborn says the software is text-based
and a good database engine makes it fast. "It’s
very, very user friendly," he says.
It runs payroll on Snap-2-It, also from Solutions Plus,
and is currently converting its other applications to
Snap. Osborn says Snap can run on almost any OS.
Osborn prefers UNIX to Windows NT
because of stability and expandability. "I think that UNIX and NetWare
combined is a more stable system" he says. "It’s
expandable more cheaply than NT." Osborn also would
like to use Linux, but worries that support would be
problematic.
The WinFrame system the company now uses is based on
Windows NT 3.51, which Citrix licenses from Microsoft.
Users of a WinFrame server pay on a per session basis,
rather than a per seat basis., which is the pricing structure
Microsoft is now using with NT 4.0.
For Osborn to switch to NT 4.0 with
Microsoft’s
Terminal Saver, he would need an NT Workstation license
for each device accessing the server. That requirement
would include clients such as Wyse WinTerms, which have
no disk drives. Because of the costs involved, Osborn
plans to stick with WinFrame for now.
The company uses Access for a marketing database that
contains more than 8,000 records. The service center
uses it to track sales histories and service information.
Cunningham likes it because it tracks Web referrals and
provides useful reports.
Steeped in success
Cunningham is confident Seattle’s love of hot tubs
will continue to grow. After long commutes, locals are
relaxing at home instead of venturing back out. "People
are making their homes more of a refuge," she says.
Cunningham would like to see sales grow 10 percent to
15 percent a year.
"If we do more than that, our infrastructure really
suffers," she says, and she doesn’t want customer
service affected. One feature she plans to add is selling
tub supplies on the Web site so customers can order online
and receive the supplies by mail.
Kimberly A. Haines is a freelance writer based in Seattle.
Reprinted with permission from Puget Sound Computer User.
Published 1999.
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