Hot Tubs Online: Olympic Hot Tub Company
Sells Hot Tubs Like Hot Cakes Using
Web-based Marketing
Puget Sound Computer User, January 1999
By Kimberly A. Haines
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 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 that year she used 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 suits? – 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 in 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. Manufacturer 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 sites, 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.
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