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The StoneHenge blog

Opinions, insights and occasional rants on IT consulting

If it has real meat, it's not spam

By: Mike Fletcher on Friday, July 30, 2010, under email, marketing

I was talking to a prospective client yesterday when he remarked about our monthly email newsletter.

"It's really good," he said. "I read it each month. I look forward to it."

When was the last time you heard a client say he looks forward to getting an email from you? I get 100 company newsletters a month, and 99 of them are spam. But there's one I look forward to each month, too, and that's because it has some real meat in it. And if it has real meat - knowledge you can sink your teeth into - then it's not spam.

Our inbound marketing plan

The reason this came up is that this week Constant Contact, our email vendor, honored StoneHenge Partners with its annual All-Star Award for 2009. Since we began our newsletter in January 2009, we've sent out almost 6,000 emails. The results:

More than 700 people have subscribed, and our unsubscribe rate is less than half the industry average.
32% of our subscribers open our emails each time, double the industry average.
27% click through from the email to our website, almost triple the industry average.

Said Constant Contact's CEO, Gail Goodman: "Our customers work hard to build strong relationships with their customers through email marketing, and some, such as StoneHenge Partners, truly excel in this effort."

When we opened this communication channel, one of our fears was that we would alienate our customers. You get enough spam elsewhere as it is; you don't need more from us. So we chose to focus on this tool not as a way to drive sales or increase revenue (inward-facing motivation) but as a way to build relationships with our clients by providing them real value (outward-facing motivation). It's a key part of our inbound marketing plan: a comprehensive, multi-channel approach to engage clients through email, through this blog, through hosting seminars and of course through face-to-face dialogue.

Among the topics we've covered in our 20 newsletters:

Function Point Analysis - what is it, how does it work, and how has it benefitted us.
Nimble development - how it combines the best of Agile and Waterfall to produce efficent code and happy coders.
Website design - when does a site need a redesign, and what you should look for.
Business requirements - How to describe what you want in a way that both stakeholders and developers understand.
Case studies - Stories of how we helped a variety of clients in a variety of industries, with details on what made the difference.

In the future

We're going to continue serving up beef, not spam. In fact, since at our core we're a technology company, future topics for this blog and for the newsletter are going to be be even more technological in nature. Among the topics in our pipeline: