How to use StoneNews

What StoneNews is

StoneNews sends a newsletter to your customers. The hard part of a newsletter has never been having something to say — it is turning six job photos and a few sentences into an email that looks like it came from a real business.

So that is the part StoneNews does. You drop the photos and the notes into a chat, and it hands back a laid-out email you can send. If you want to change something, you say so, or you edit it yourself.

Step by step

1. 1

   Open StoneNews

   Turn it on from Integrations, then open StoneNews from the sidebar. The page is a list of issues, past and in progress.
   New issue

   MarchDraft

   FebruarySent

   JanuarySent
2. 2

   Decide who gets it

   Your subscriber list lives in the app. Add people, or bring across the customers you already have in FieldStone. Every email carries a one-tap unsubscribe, and someone who uses it comes off the list immediately — you never have to handle that by hand.
   412 subscribersAdd

   Unsubscribe link on every email
3. 3

   Dump in what you have

   Start an issue and put your raw material into the chat: photos from a job you are proud of, a paragraph about a new hire, the fact that you are booked into July. Rough notes are fine. This is the whole of your side of the work.
   Here are 6 photos from the Oak St re-roof. We hired Marcus in February. Booked into July.

   Laid it out with the re-roof on top and Marcus underneath. Have a look.
4. 4

   Watch it come together

   The email is laid out beside the chat as you go — headline, photos, sections, your colours. Ask for changes in the same conversation: shorter, move the photos up, cut the last bit. For the small stuff it is quicker to edit the text directly, so you can do that too.
   The Ridgeline Report
5. 5

   Turn numbers into something worth looking at

   Give it figures — jobs finished, years in business, how many roofs went on last quarter — and you get a clean chart in your own colours rather than a sentence full of digits. Ask it to show a product or a service and you get an image for that too.
   Roofs completed

   Drawn in your colours, dropped into the email
6. 6

   Send it to yourself first

   A test send puts the real email in your own inbox. Open it on your phone, because that is where most of your customers will. This is the step that catches the photo that looked fine on a laptop and enormous on a handset.
   Test sent to you@ridgeline.com
7. 7

   Send it, or pick a day

   Send it now, or schedule it for Tuesday morning and forget about it — FieldStone posts it when the time comes. Either way you see how many it went to.
   Tue 17 Mar, 8:00 AM

   ScheduleSend now
8. 8

   Next month is easier

   A finished issue can be saved as a look and started from again, so your newsletter is recognisably yours every time instead of a different email each month. And if a few weeks go by without one, FieldStone gives you a nudge on a Friday.
   Start from

   February

   January

   It has been a few weeks — fancy writing March’s?