From day one, protecting our customer’s data has been a top design consideration. Nowadays, many people access their Direct Mail project data from multiple devices (including mobile devices using our iOS app, Stamps), so it’s important we provide our customers more information about their account activity.
The Account Activity section of the Direct Mail Account control panel
New: Account Activity
In Direct Mail 3.5, we added a new “Account Activity” section to the Direct Mail Account control panel (choose Direct Mail > Direct Mail Account from the menu bar). Account Activity shows you information about who (or what application) is accessing your account as well as an approximate geographic location.
If you see activity that is unfamiliar (like someone logged into your account on Stamps), you can instantly sign them out by clicking the “X” icon on the right-hand side of the window. That device will be unable to sign back in without first manually entering your email address and password.
We feel that these changes, as well as other behind the scenes improvements, will help continue to keep your passwords and other data safe from unauthorized access. If you ever have any questions about your account, please see our Security FAQ or contact support.
For a long time, we’ve offered our built-in templates in a variety of color schemes. But for a long time, we’ve felt that we could make those color schemes even better—which is why we’re excited to tell you about another new feature in Direct Mail 3.5: 100% customizable color schemes.
Selecting a Color Scheme
Most of our templates come in a variety of color schemes. You can identify templates with alternative color schemes by looking for the four-color icon in our template chooser.
The “3 Column” template comes in several color schemes.
Once you’ve chosen a template, you can select a color scheme from the popup menu at the bottom of the window.
Customizing a Color Scheme
Want to tweak the background to better match your logo? Want to use a different highlight color to really make your message pop? No problem. In templates that support customization, you’ll see one or more color wells show up next to the color scheme popup menu.
Each color well controls a different color (e.g. background color, link color, accent color, etc.) To change the color, simply click on the color well and pick from the palette that appears.
Templates With Brains
We wanted to make it easy to brand a newsletter with your colors while not getting bogged down tweaking every accent or text color to match. Our solution was to give our templates some smarts in picking complementary colors. You’ll notice that text, shadow, and accent colors will automatically be set to tints and shades that best complement the background and highlights colors you select. Direct Mail makes you look like a design pro!
Upgrading Direct Mail 3.4 and Older
If you’re upgrading to Direct Mail 3.5 from an older version, you’ll need to create a new message from the template chooser in order to enjoy these new features (and refreshed designs). Don’t worry, your existing messages will continue to display, edit, and send as before.
We think our new customizable color schemes will help you create even better looking newsletters. Try picking colors that complement your logo or brand—and, of course, try and avoid colors that might be a distraction. As always, we’d love to hear what you like (or don’t like) about these great new features. Feel free to sound off in the comments or send us an email.
P.S. For those power users out there, we’ve added a convenient hex color picker to the color panel. Look for it under the “#” icon.
In Direct Mail 3.5, we’ve made the Smart Groups feature even smarter. If you’re not familiar with Smart Groups, they work just like Smart Playlists in iTunes, Smart Albums in iPhoto, and Smart Folders in the Finder. Smart Groups give you an easy way to segment and filter your mailing lists according to a variety of criteria. Take a look at this help article to learn how to create a Smart Group.
So, what’s new? We’ve added the ability for Smart Groups to include addresses from more than one source group (in the past, it was either one source group or every source group). Now you can better customize your Smart Groups to include addresses from a variety of groups that meet your criteria.
In the above example, we are creating a Smart Group that pulls in addresses from two groups (“Direct Mail Monthly” and “From DM3 Announce”) and then filters those down to just the subscribers located in California. Other criteria that you can filter on include names, custom fields, open/click rates, subscribe dates, and more.
We hope you find these new improvements handy in creating targeted, meaningful campaigns for your subscribers! We welcome your feedback in the comments below or via email!
The just-released Direct Mail 3.5 update includes some changes to how Daylite syncing works. If you don’t use Daylite in conjunction with Direct Mail, then this blog post will probably not interest you. If you do, however, then you might be interested in what has changed.
Direct Mail now synchronizes unsubscribe information back to Daylite. Previously, if a contact was marked as “unsubscribed” in Direct Mail, that information would not appear anywhere in Daylite. Starting in version 3.5, when a contact is marked as “unsubscribed” in Direct Mail, the corresponding contact in Daylite will be moved to a group called “Unsubscribes” the next time you sync. The “Unsubscribes” group in Daylite is created for you automatically and will appear as a sub-group of the Daylite group you sync with.
Here’s an example. Let’s say you have synced Direct Mail to the “Mailing List” group in Daylite. Here’s what your group looks like in Daylite:
…and here’s what it looks like in Direct Mail:
Now let’s say that Victor Chan unsubscribes from our list:
The next time sync Direct Mail with Daylite, Victor Chan will be moved out of the “Mailing List” group and into the “Unsubscribes” group. Victor Chan will also disappear from your list in Direct Mail (as Victor is no longer in the “Mailing List” group that Direct Mail syncs with):
A Note on Performance
If you have a large number of unsubscribes that have not been synced over to Daylite yet, you may find that the syncing process takes a long time to complete. We are working with Marketcircle to improve sync performance in future versions of Daylite.
Conclusion
We hope you find this improvement to Daylite syncing useful in your day-to-day workflow. Please let us know if you have any questions—and please let your friends know about how easy it is to use Daylite with Direct Mail!
Using mail-merge tags is an easy way to personalize your message for each recipient. You can personalize your emails with information like the recipient’s name, company name, or up to 15 other fields of your choosing. However, long-time and first-time users of Direct Mail may not be aware of some of the more powerful mail-merge features that were added in Direct Mail 3. In this blog post, we’ll talk about two ways to make your emails more dynamic and more personal.
Fallback Values
Let’s start with a simple example. Here’s a mail-merge tag being used in the greeting of a message:
The “[first name]” mail-merge tag being used in a greeting.
But what if your mailing list doesn’t contain a first name for every recipient? That would mean that some people would see “Hello” and then just blank space where the name was supposed to go. We can use fallback values to remedy this situation. Try this instead:
Use the “fallback” feature of a mail-merge tag to provide default values when merging.
Now regardless of whether or not you have first name data for all the recipients in your list, the results will look great. Your recipients will either see “Hello Jonathan” (if that’s what you had listed as their first name in your mailing list) or “Hello Friend” (if you didn’t have their first name in your mailing list).
This technique works with all the mail-merge tags available in Direct Mail. We recommend using the Preview window to see ahead of time what your final, merged message will look like for each recipient in your list.
Conditionals
Conditionals take mail-merge tags one step further. They allow you to use if-else logic to create messages whose content changes depending on the recipient. For example, let’s imagine that I am sending out a reminder for an upcoming event where lunch will be served. I have already collected meal preferences for everyone on my mailing list and stored them in my mailing list under the column Custom 1. Here’s how I could use conditionals to include a special paragraph in my email for only those folks that prefer vegetarian meals:
We use conditional mail-merge tags to include a paragraph only for our vegetarian subscribers.
Now only the recipients that have the word “Vegetarian” in the Custom 1 column in your mailing list will see the paragraph about the vegetarian meals. If you need even more advanced logic, you can use if/else-if logic as well as other equality operators (=, !=, >=, <=, >, and <). Please see our support article for more information.
Conditional mail-merge tags are available under the “Conditionals” section of the mail-merge tag menu. As with fallback values, we recommend using the Preview window to see what the results of your mail-merge will look like for each recipient in your list.
Conclusion
We hope the above examples have been helpful in understanding how mail-merge tag fallback values and conditionals can improve your emails. We have found that email campaigns that are personalized to the recipient tend to have far better open and click rates. For more information, please see the following two support articles:
![The "[first name]" mail-merge tag being used in a greeting](https://directmailmac.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/mmt-simple.png)
