Wow. Hammock has been featured as a case study by the email marketing powerhouse Emma. (I know they’re a powerhouse because I hear their underwriting message on NPR wherever I travel.)

But first, I’ll confess. I’ve been a fan of the email marketing firm Emma since before they were an email marketing company. Indeed, the two founders of Emma are members of the Hammock Inc. and SmallBusiness.com alumni club. (Note to self: start a Hammock Inc. and SmallBusiness.com Alumni Club.)

Hammock was one of Emma’s first clients and is one of the longest continuous users of their products, which still gets wows when someone from Hammock talks on the phone with one of their famed (for friendliness and helpfulness) customer service people who notice how low our customer number is.

That said, I never thought that Hammock would be one of their case studies for email marketing. Perhaps, a client of ours, but not us.

The case study, appearing on their marketing blog, is a look at what we set out to do with our email “un-newsletter” called Idea Email. And fortunately, it has been received the way we hoped it would be. (Emma’s stats enable us to know that.)

We’ve learned a lot from creating and sharing the Idea Email and, I’m happy to say, the folks at Emma have made some observations about it in their case study that mirror our findings. We’re honored they’ve chosen to use Idea Email as a teaching opportunity — and especially that it’s a learning opportunity that doesn’t start out with, “don’t do this.”