Many of the templates that come with Direct Mail include a placeholder for your company logo. Like this:
Since your logo is one of the first things your recipients will see, it’s important that it looks great. Oftentimes our team sees newsletters with logos that don’t mesh well with the background color of the newsletter, like this:
See that big white box surrounding the “art” logo? I think you’ll agree that it would look better if we got rid of the white background and had the logo blend in with the background. Here’s an easy technique you can use to make your logo blend in with the background:
Step One: Open your original logo artwork file in the Preview application
Step Two: Choose Edit > Show Edit Toolbar from the menu bar, then choose “Instant Alpha” from the Selection Tools menu
Step Four: Click and drag the colors you want to make transparent (in this case, the white background).
Step Five: Press the delete key to remove the selected color
Step Six: Choose File > Export from the menu bar. Choose “PNG” as the file format and make sure the “Alpha” option is checked.
Now when you choose your newly exported PNG for the logo, you’ll see the background color of the newsletter come through:
Use this same technique on your own logo to make a great first impression on your readers! Feel free to ask any questions in the comments and we’ll answer them right away!
The latest and greatest update to Stamps has been out a few weeks now, so we wanted to take a moment and highlight some of the great new features you can find inside. In case you don’t already know, Stamps is our companion app for iPhone that brings you your campaign reports on the go. Here’s what’s new:
Subscribe Forms on the Go
Now you can access all of your subscribe forms right from inside Stamps. They’ve been optimized to look and work great on the small screen, too:
Now it’s a cinch to sign up people for your mailing list no matter where you are!
Mobile Previews
This summer we added a great new feature to Direct Mail we call Design Tests. Design Tests show you full-size screenshots of what your email looks like in all of the top email clients (including mobile email clients). Since mobile email usage is set to surpass desktop email usage by the end of the year, we wanted to make designing for mobile even easier. Now you can instantly send previews of your message straight from Direct Mail to your iPhone. Here’s how it works:
Just click the “Preview on iPhone” button in the Preview window and you’re message will instantly appear on your iPhone.
Delivery Notifications
If you schedule a delivery to send at a later date, it’s nice to know when your emails have actually been sent. Now you can (optionally) receive a notification on your phone when your delivery completes:
Improved Layout
We’ve reworked the layout of the history report screen in Stamps to show you more information and a larger thumbnail of your email. Tap on the thumbnail to expand the image, or tap on the arrow to view the web version of your message.
We hope you like these improvements to Stamps. Please let us know what you think in the comments (or on our support page), and stay tuned for more enhancements in the coming weeks!
Those of you who have upgraded to the latest version of OS X (released yesterday) may have noticed that your copy of Direct Mail just gained a new feature overnight, totally for free! Now you can share your email campaigns to Facebook without ever leaving Direct Mail!
Share your email campaigns to Facebook by clicking the Share Message button in the toolbar
To enable this feature, make sure you’re running the latest version of Direct Mail, and OS X 10.8.2 or newer. You’ll need to sign in to your Facebook account by choosing > System Preferences > Mail, Contacts, & Calendars, and then following the on-screen instructions.
To share, head back to the Direct Mail app and click the Share Message button in the toolbar (make sure you’ve selected the sent email campaign you want to share). You can add a brief message, select the friends you want to share it with, then click Post. That’s it!
Add a comment and click Post to share your campaign
We love this easy integration with Facebook. Try sharing your next email campaign on Facebook to broaden the reach of your newsletter, promotion, or announcement. As always, let us know what you think in the comments!
Great-looking email designs help your business project a professional, polished image and can win you the confidence of your subscribers. With its intuitive editor and great selection of templates, Direct Mail can help you get up and running with a great looking email in no time. In this blog post, we want to share a few tips to help you get your designs looking just the way you want.
Adding, Moving, and Deleting Sections
Many of our templates come with sections that you can duplicate, move, or remove. Use this flexibility to lengthen or shorten the newsletter to fit your content—instead of forcing your content to fit the newsletter. You can identify these flexible sections by hovering your mouse over various sections of the template and looking for the following toolbar to appear:
Here’s what each of those icons mean, from left-to-right:
Delete. Deletes the section
Duplicate. Makes a copy of the section
Move Up. Moves the section up one slot
Move Down. Moves the section down one slot
In the following example, I’ve taken the “Sidebar (Right)” template and duplicated the Headline One section to make a Headline Two section:
Use the “Duplicate” button to expand your template.
Nowadays, nearly all email clients default to not loading images contained in the message body. The recipient can choose to load them if they want, but most do not. That being the case, it’s important to make sure your email looks good (and is understandable) even when the images aren’t loaded. One great way to do that is to make sure that you provide text descriptions for any image you add. For example, here’s a newsletter with an image of a car at the race track:
To add a text description, just click it and fill out the field labeled “Description”:
That’s it! Now when your message is sent, the recipients will see a helpful text description instead of a big, blank box:
As a bonus, text descriptions are a huge help to sight-impaired readers, as most computers and smartphones can read those descriptions aloud.
Composite Images
As you already know, it’s easy to add images to your email. Just drag and drop them into the message body (or copy and paste). Some templates, however, provide special placeholders called composite images. Composite images automatically apply great looking effects like drop shadows, borders, and overlays to any photo or image you drop on them. You can identify composite images by hovering your mouse over them and watching as the image darkens, like this image from the Air Mail template:
To add your own image, just drop a photo into the placeholder position, like this photo of a company outing:
Looks good, but we can’t see anyone’s face! Click the image to pop up an editing panel. Drag the Size slider to the right to zoom in the photo. Drag the image itself to get the faces centered just right (the cursor will turn to a hand icon to let you know you can pan the image). Much better:
Use the zoom and pan controls to get your photos looking just right!
Composite images are an easy way to add a professional touch to your messages. Use the zoom and pan controls to get your photos looking just right!
Conclusion
A great-looking email design will help boost your open and click numbers, as well as project a professional image to your readers. Try using Direct Mail’s streamlined templates, flexible sections, and image tools to get your emails looking just the way you want, and stay tuned to our blog for more great tips. Thanks for reading!
Update: Direct Mail 3.4 now seamlessly integrates with Daylite 4.1! Please see this blog post for more information.
We continue to work with Marketcircle on integrating Direct Mail with Daylite 4. In the meantime, however, we wanted to share a way that Daylite 4 users can import their contacts into Direct Mail. This is not our final solution for integrating with Daylite 4, but it hopefully will help smooth the transition.
How to Import Contacts from Daylite 4 to Direct Mail
Open Daylite and select the contacts you’d like to import to Direct Mail, like this:
Choose File > Export > Export People as vCards, like this:
Save the vCard in a place you can remember (like on the Desktop). Next, switch to Direct Mail and drag the vCard you just saved into the Addresses table, like this:
Direct Mail will ask you if you want to import the contacts. Click Import and Direct Mail will import your contacts:
That’s it!
What’s Next
Again, we anticipate this just being a temporary solution. Daylite 4 does not yet support third-party integrations, but as soon as they do, we will be ready with a great solution. Stay tuned!
