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 My Apps in the sidebar. The page is a list of your newsletters — drafts, scheduled and sent.
   Start from savedNew newsletter

   AprilDraft

   MarchScheduled

   FebruarySent

   JanuarySent
2. 2

   Decide who gets it

   Subscribers are picked from the contacts you already have in FieldStone — anyone with an email address. Open Subscribers from the ⋮ menu inside a newsletter, tick who should get it, and save. Every email carries a one-tap unsubscribe, and someone who uses it comes off the list for good — you never have to handle that by hand, and they cannot be ticked back on.
   Subscribers412 selected

   Unsubscribe link on every emailSave
3. 3

   Dump in what you have

   Start a newsletter 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. The + beside the message box uploads photos or pulls them from StoneBox. 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 on the Preview tab, one tap from Chat — headline, photos, sections. Ask for changes in the same conversation: shorter, move the photos up, cut the last bit. For the small stuff it is quicker to press Edit on the preview and change the words and photos by hand, so you can do that too.
   ChatPreviewEdit

   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 bar or line chart rather than a sentence full of digits. Ask it to show how something works on screen — a customer paying an invoice online, say — and you get a mock-up of that screen too.
   Roofs completed

   Drawn for you, dropped into the email
6. 6

   Send it to yourself first

   Test send, in the ⋮ menu, 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. Look at the subject line too — it sits at the top of the preview, and if you leave it empty the newsletter's title is used.
   Test sent to you@ridgeline.com
7. 7

   Send it, or pick a day

   Send is at the foot of the preview, next to how many subscribers it reaches. Or pick Schedule from the ⋮ menu, set it for Tuesday morning and forget about it — FieldStone sends it when the time comes. Once it has gone out it is kept as a record and can no longer be edited.
   Schedule send

   Tue 17 Mar, 8:00 AM

   Reaches 412 subscribersSend
8. 8

   Next month is easier

   Before you send one you like, pick Save look from the ⋮ menu. Next month, Start from saved opens a new draft with that layout and you swap in the new photos and words — so your newsletter is recognisably yours every time instead of a different email each month.
   Start from a saved look

   February

   January

   The new draft takes its layout