Web Awards 2000: Marketing

 

Third place (tie)

Plumbing the Depths

Company: Plumbing Express
Web address: www.plumbing911.com
Why it won: Its educational offerings help consumers, building trust in the company -- and sales -- in the process.
Company revenues: $15 million
Site-launch cost: $3,000
Judge's view: "Valuable online coupons entice customers to use the service. Self-service information areas help to build a sense of community and offer a comprehensive solution." --Don Peppers

Polybutylene piping announces its presence in a variety of unwelcome ways. First, there's an ominous bang. Then the water pressure drops down to nil and water begins pouring out of the pipes, ruining floors, ceilings, walls, and belongings. Home builders began installing the faulty piping in U.S. homes in the late 1970s. It was recognized as being fatally flawed in the late 1980s and was finally pulled from the market in 1995. Today an estimated 6 million to 10 million U.S. homeowners are affected by the dreaded stuff.

That's where Plumbing911.com comes in. Operated by Plumbing Express, an Alexandria, Va., company that specializes in polybutylene remediation, the site aims to tell visitors everything they need to know about the problem.

The education-oriented site has helped company CEO John Ellis, 35, expand his business exponentially. Plumbing Express began to focus on polybutylene remediation in the mid 1990s, but the business didn't take off until the site launched, in November 1998. Although Ellis and his partner, Peter Page, had advertised in all the usual channels, they found they were not getting their message across. Says Ellis, "It's not the kind of issue you can market in the conventional sense. You can't put 27 pages of information in a 30-second TV spot." That peculiarity of their product led them to create the Web site.

Ellis says his initial investment of $3,000 has paid for itself many times over in all the new business the site has brought in. Site traffic has grown at a rate of nearly 5% a month, and an increasing amount of the company's business is directly attributable to the Web. --L.G.P.

Conversation with Don Peppers

Judge: Marketing

Don Peppers, who coauthored The One to One Manager and other books with Martha Rogers, has spent most of his career honing the duo's now-famous message, which focuses on building long-term relationships with customers, suppliers, and employees. Peppers's choices for first and second place in the marketing category, real estate agent Elizabeth Gray-Carr and pasta company Flying Noodle, serve as fine examples of marketers that are winning their customers' loyalty. But there's always room for improvement. Here are his comments:

On what Elizabeth Gray-Carr should do next: "If there's one kind of business where relationship building and relationship selling make a lot of sense, it's realty," he says. Today, he notes, most real estate agents consider their relationships short-term. Peppers suggests that they can make those relationships more long-term by using their sites to provide customers with more and different services. "If I go to www.callelizabeth.com, eventually I should be able to get help on a moving company, on newspaper subscriptions, on turning on the utilities, on finding the nearest house sitters and baby-sitters, and so forth," he says.

On building long-term bonds: "Flying Noodle tries to entice you to take their newsletter. Why do they do that? So they will have an ongoing relationship with you. They're trying to create a degree of stickiness there so that when you come to the site, you stay there, and they have a 60% repeat-customer rate. That's pretty damn good." --Elaine Appleton Grant


Annual Web Awards 2000

General Excellence
Marketing
Customer Service
ROI
Innovation
Community
Judges

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