Saltworks Builds Business with E-Zine and Search
Of all the topics featured in e-mail newsletters, few are as narrow as the one covered by Mark Zoske. Zoske and his staff put out an entire e-zine devoted to a well-known chemical compound: salt.
And there’s a logic to it. Zoske is the founder of Saltworks, a $3.5 million-a-year online business that sells salt and related products.
It all started back in 2001 when Zoske ran HO Sports, a company that sold skiing and other equipment. He decided it was time to break out and see if he could earn money at what had been a personal passion.
So he set up Saltworks (www.seasalts.com), which now pulls in roughly $300,000 per month. It has 15,000 active customers, including retailers, gourmet cooks and people looking to use salt for bathing and therapeutic applications.
At first, Saltworks pursued search engine marketing, using an outside firm for support, but soon found that strategy cost too much and didn’t bring in enough business, said Zoske. Next, the firm tried to do its own search engine optimization.
Last year, Saltworks hired Portent Interactive, which helped it cut its pay-per-click advertising costs by 50% and improve its search engine rankings. But that wasn’t all.
Saltworks also started an e-mail newsletter at the end of 2005. It now has 25,000 subscribers, and pulls open rates between 30% and 40% and according to Naomi Novotny, vice president of the Redmond, WA-based firm.
An average issue of the monthly e-zine contains new product announcements—for bath and sea salts, for example—and gourmet recipes. Occasionally, the firm does separate editions for customers who use salt for food and those who use it in the bath.
Saltworks does not take ads for the newsletter. “We want it to be for our customers and not seen as a moneymaking venture,” Novotny explains. But the e-zine does have an impact.
Every time it comes out, Saltworks get a spike in business, sometimes as much as $10,000, according to Novotny.
Meanwhile, the firm has boosted its overall sales by 230% over the past year and cut marketing costs by $10,000 per month, largely through smarter use of search.
Saltworks jumped from unranked to number four for the phrase ‘bath salts’, and to the top three for ‘dead sea salt,’ says Ian Lurie, president of Portent. For the phrase “gourmet salts,” Saltworks went from number five to number one and for the phrase “wholesale bath salt,” the company went from unranked to number four.
Portent achieved this by finding words and phrases that potential customers most frequently use to search for gourmet and bath salt products.
What’s next?
For the moment, Zoske says he wants to continue doing what he’s doing, although he guesses the firm could grow to five times its current size.
“People keep asking me when are you going to get into pepper and other spices,’ he quips.
