Web Awards 2000: General Excellence

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Since frequent site visits weren't really practical for customers in the United Arab Emirates, or even Arizona, Neckel and Helton hit upon what they considered to be the next best thing: pictures posted on the Web site that charted day-to-day construction. "We figured if customers could watch their boats being built, we could maybe improve customer satisfaction," says Neckel. The pictures would also pump up site traffic, which the company could take advantage of by adding new products and services. "What better way to get customers to visit every day than to show them something different about their boat every day?" says Neckel.

And then there were the unexpected benefits of the visual chronicling. "There's an interesting phenomenon in the houseboating world," says Helton. "Bigger is better. We've had customers who asked to have their boat extended by one foot just to best another customer's boat."

Helton tested the daily-pictures idea on a few tech-savvy customers. At first he thought it would be best to create a password-protected site for each customer. But when customers began asking to see other boats to get ideas for their own, Helton decided to give everyone access to all the photos and to protect customers' privacy by identifying each boat not by its owner's name but by a code number. "Some of our customers are country-western singers and movie stars, and they don't want their name out there," says Neckel.

The new site was launched in early 1999, and within 120 days it was receiving 35,000 hits a day -- up from the original site's 200 a week. By October, the most recent version of the site was getting 40,000 to 50,000 hits a day.

But the site has done more than simply increase the amount of customer contact. Neckel credits it with enabling Sumerset to put its business philosophy -- to restore time for customers -- into practice. "People used to make six or seven visits to the office after the initial design session," he says. "We've managed to stop the follow-up visits almost entirely." Helton adds that, in the long run, giving that time back to customers is often "even more important than cost savings."

Debra Wollaber says that the interactivity of the Web site helped seal the deal for her and her husband. She says that they were really excited when they finally got the online code for their boat (#2891). The couple began logging in regularly to monitor construction from their home, two and a half hours away from the plant. "It was a daily fix," she says. "One day I asked for pictures of a specific part of the boat, and Cecil posted them the next day."

To Neckel's surprise, the digital shots restored time for his company as well. For starters, because their output was visible for all to see, employees became more productivity conscious. "Nobody wants to have a picture be taken and not show progress," says Neckel. And because customers were constantly checking in, mistakes were more likely to be noticed early. "Four months ago we were building a boat that had the wrong entertainment center," says Helton. "The customer was able to stop us in time. Two weeks later, it would have been major dollars to fix."

Attracting customers
With the new site up and running, Helton set out to spread the word to the houseboating public. Neckel encouraged him to be very selective about placing banner ads on boating-related sites. "We're not trying to build numbers just to get numbers," says Neckel. "We want to get our core customer. Someone who visits a marine site might only be in the market for a runabout. But someone who's looking for information on taking a cruise -- that's someone who may be at our income level."

Helton also looked into placing ads and listing the company's products on some heavily trafficked general-interest sites. America Online proved to be a particularly useful ad buy, he says. "As a test, we ran $3,000 worth of banner ads for three months," he says. "AOL told us that normally a click-through rate of 0.5% is very successful, but we got 4.8%. And we sold two boats from that, which more than offset the cost."

He tapped into Amazon.com, too, one of the online companies Neckel admires most, by listing Sumerset boats for sale in Amazon's zShops, a network of independent vendors that sell through the Amazon site. Helton admits that the company hasn't yet sold a single boat through zShops, and that he didn't really expect it would. "There's something about the one-click process and a $200,000 boat that just doesn't go together," he says. But the zShop listings have generated interest. "It's a good traffic builder," he says. "We've probably had more than 5,000 visits from Amazon, which isn't a lot, but it's free. And we've had at least one sale from that."

Keeping customers for life
Fully aware that banner ads take advantage of only a tiny portion of the Internet's networking power, Neckel and Helton have put most of their marketing efforts into expanding Sumerset's houseboating community. "We try to follow what Harley-Davidson has done," says Neckel. "It has a production backlog and motorcycles that appreciate. So it maintains strong customer rapport to get that repeat business." Integral to the strategy are the Harley "road shows," events around the country to which the company invites Harley owners to show off what they have and trade up for what they want.

One of the first things Neckel did when he bought Sumerset was to establish regular houseboating regattas, which now number six a year, to help the company build a Harleyesque sense of community. Sumerset now uses the Web site to publicize, and accept registrations for, the regattas. Customers who can't attend can "watch" the goings-on over the Web, as Helton posts daily updates and digital snapshots. Neckel says that the seemingly passive form of marketing is actually very effective. "By bringing customers together as group, they produce their own testimonials," he says. Debra and Bruce Wollaber are a case in point: Bruce placed their order at Sumerset's Cumberland Regatta last May, after learning from others there about the boat-building process.

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