American Spa: E-Beat article
A spa's web site is often the first point of contact with a potential customer. How comfortable are you with its ability to make a favorable first impression?

By Jim Verrilli

Your exquisite spa services are thoroughly researched, and delivered with compassionate care. Your décor and equipment project the ideal blend of upscale ambience and comfort. The reception team are warm and articulate. Even the spa menu — from the descriptive writing and inventive graphic design to the paper selection and printing — is designed to help the spa achieve its ideal market position.

As a spa owner, you spend considerable dollars and effort to conscientiously develop and perfect your brand image. So it’s important to ask: In the "rush" to get your business online, did you apply the same level of care and consistency to the development of your web site as to your other marketing and client relations channels? Or have you, like so many others, "dropped the ball" on your brand?

Through the Internet, spas have the ability to generate business from without the local market as well as within. Think about it: Newly relocated residents, who traditionally hit the Yellow Pages, now head directly to the Internet to search for and familiarize themselves with the flavor of local services. Vacationers and business travelers routinely use the Internet to "scout ahead" for places to unwind after a long day of work or play. Imagine: An internet surfer hundreds of miles away may utilize a search engine to locate a spa, and purchase a gift certificate for a relative who may live only a few miles from the business. No need to imagine…it already happens every day.

These potential clients, though they may have experienced services at many spas, are new to your business. Their first impression — your web site — must be a good one; if not, they may simply "surf" somewhere else. After all, the competition is only a mouse-click away. It’s a fact: In today's market, your web site often provides the client’s first clues of what your business stands for. Consider how you feel when perusing another company’s site: If it does not communicate a clear, professional, well-organized message — and the design is not easily navigable — what do you expect of their products and services?

If you suspect your spa’s web site may be undermining your brand and market position, it probably is. In the rush to get online, too many well-intentioned business owners misapply the responsibility of web site planning and development, or underestimate their importance.

A web site is a tool you can use to regularly communicate with an audience of potential customers, sharing your market position, brand ideals, promotions, and new product and service additions. So it makes perfect sense to delegate the responsibility of the design or redesign effort to your most skillful communicator.

If your spa employs a manager or, even better, a marketing director or other person whose job revolves around client acquisition and retention, assign the responsibility of web site planning to her. Make certain she possesses the experience and business acumen to successfully conceptualize an effective approach and determine an appropriate vendor to execute her vision. Like any communication project, developing a successful web presence requires talents pooled from multiple disciplines, including marketing strategy, copywriting and graphic design. Your best selection for a vendor will be an agency with a proven track record in each of these areas — revealed through the web sites and results they have created for previous clients. Invest the time to properly flesh out this "cyber-extension" of your brand. If you do it right, you will reap substantial rewards.

Web sites need not be highly complex, or consist of numerous pages. Properly constructed, even a single page is capable of achieving a strategic relevancy ranking on a popular search engine or directory such as Yahoo!®, AltaVista® or Lycos®. So whether your spa plans a small web site or a large, interactive one, an Internet presence is still one of the most cost-effective promotion channels available. Your return on investment, once your web site is properly developed, is an inexhaustible, 24/7, customer acquisition tool — for less than $25 per month. Not a bad investment to extend the reach of your brand to the WORLD.