Google Sheets, New Autoresponders, and Faster Syncing Arrive in Direct Mail 4.2

We’ve been working hard the past few months on some key improvements to Direct Mail and are happy to now make them available to everyone in our Direct Mail 4.2 update. In this blog post, I’ll cover three of the enhancements. For more detail, feel free to consult the release notes. To upgrade right away, open up the Direct Mail app and choose Direct Mail > Check for Software Update from the menu bar at the top of your screen. Here’s some of what’s new:

Import from Google Sheets

Google Sheets is an increasingly popular app for working with spreadsheets online. Starting in Direct Mail 4.2, you can import your mailing lists directly from Google Sheets—without having to export to a CSV file first like the old days.

import-google-sheets-2

Direct Mail talks directly to Google to let you browse and import any Google Sheets document that you own (or that is shared with you). Your Google credentials are kept safe through the use of a secure access token.

New Autoresponder Trigger

Starting in Direct Mail 4.2, you can now trigger an autoresponder whenever a new address is added to your list via our API. If you use our API, either directly or via Zapier, this new trigger can enable convenient automation features. For example, if you have an online shopping cart that adds new customers to your mailing list at checkout (via the API), you can use this trigger to send them follow-up emails, promotional offers, etc.

Faster Syncing

If you use our cloud features to share your email campaign projects across multiple Macs, you’ll love the faster syncing performance in Direct Mail 4.2. Syncing is dramatically faster than before and uses less memory resources on your Mac. Even customers not using our cloud features will benefit from numerous performance enhancements we’ve added throughout the app.

Thank You

In addition to Google Sheets, autoresponders, and performance features, we’ve squashed plenty of bugs and added enhancements throughout. We hope you’ll upgrade right away. To do so, open up the Direct Mail app and choose Direct Mail > Check for Software Update from the menu bar at the top of your screen. We thank you for your continued feedback and feature suggestions and look forward to great things to come!

A Note for Mac App Store Customers: ~~Thanks for your patience as we wait for Apple to approve the 4.2 update.~~ The 4.2 update is now also available in the Mac App Store.

by Jonathan August 6, 2015 in Announcements

Regarding the OS X El Capitan Public Beta

Update: As of OS X 10.11 Public Beta 2, the compatibility issues described in this blog post have been resolved.

Today marks the beginning of Apple’s public beta for the next version of OS X: 10.11 “El Capitan”. In addition to the usual disclaimers that accompany beta-quality software, we want to point out to eager Direct Mail users that the current version of Direct Mail (4.1) is not compatible with the public beta of El Capitan (as of this writing). For our technically-inclined readers, beta 2 introduced a WebKit-related bug that is responsible for the crash. We have notified Apple of the issue (rdar://21690765) and hope they will have it resolved in an upcoming seed. In the unlikely case that the bug survives until the release of OS X 10.11, we have identified a workaround that will be ready in time.

Our recommendation is to not install the public beta of El Capitan on any Mac that you plan to use Direct Mail on—at least until we’ve confirmed that Apple has fixed the bug. As always, please contact our support team with any questions.

by Jonathan July 9, 2015 in Announcements

Search and Segment Like a Pro

You are probably already familiar with the “Search Addresses” box in the toolbar, but in this blog post I want to introduce you to a couple more powerful ways you can search for addresses in your mailing lists. There are lots of reasons you may find yourself wanting to do more than just a simple search, including:

Sending a special email campaign to just a particular segment of your mailing list (like the folks who engage the most with your emails)
Bulk operations, like unsubscribing, editing, or removing a list of email addresses

Both searching features can be found in the menu bar, under the Edit > Find menu: Find Addresses Matching List and Find Addresses Matching Rules.

Find Addresses Matching List

This feature works exactly as advertised. Just type or paste in a list of email addresses and click Find. Direct Mail will search for and display all the matching email addresses it finds in your address groups. There is flexibility in how your enter your list, too. Emails can be one-email-per-row, or comma-separated, or any other delimiter. They can include names (e.g. “Joe User” <joe@example.com>) or just plain email addresses (jane@example.com).

Find Addresses Matching Rules

This is where the real fun starts. This feature allows you to set a list of criteria (or “rules”) to search for. For example, you could search for contacts that match all of the following:

Subscribed in the past six months
Open rate greater than 30%
Most recent location is “California”

We’ve provided some sample rules that you can use to get started. To access the sample rules, click the “gear” menu in the bottom-left corner of the window.

Making Search Results Useful

Depending on the purpose of your search, there are several actions you can take with the results of your search. For example:

You can copy and paste the search results into a new address group. This could be a segment of your list that you send a targeted campaign to later.
You can bulk-edit the search results by selecting the addresses and choosing Addresses > Edit from the menu bar at the top of the screen.
You can bulk-unsubscribe the search results by selecting the addresses and choosing Addresses > Mark as Unsubscribed from the menu bar at the top of the screen.

We hope you “found” these search tips handy 😉. More searching tips are available in our support section, including finding duplicates, finding invalid email addresses, and help on finding your most engaged subscribers.

by Jonathan May 15, 2015 in Features

New API, New Integrations

Alongside the Direct Mail 4.1 update, we are happy to announce today the release of our brand new API. For those who are asking themselves right now “what in the world is an API?”, a good answer is: a way for computer programs to talk to each other. An even better answer is: a powerful new way to integrate Direct Mail with many of the websites and services you use every day. The new API allows apps and websites full access to your Direct Mail project (with your permission, of course), including messages, mailing lists, campaign reports, and more. If you are a developer, you can get started right away building custom integrations with Direct Mail. If you are not a developer, we have an exciting announcement for you, too…

Integrate With Over 400 Apps and Websites

Included in our new API is support for the popular service Zapier. With Zapier, you can connect the apps you use to easily move data between them. It makes integrating and automating your workflow a snap. For example, you can automatically:

Add Salesforce contacts to your Direct Mail mailing list
Use Wufoo entries to create Direct Mail subscribers
Add PayPal customers to your Direct Mail mailing list
Add SurveyMonkey respondents to your Direct Mail mailing list
Post sent email campaigns to your LinkedIn feed
…and much more

To get started with Zapier, you’ll need to visit their website to create an account. ~~Our integration with Zapier is still in beta, but if you want to get an early start, click this link to use our app with their service~~. Update: Our Zapier integration is now live and ready to go. We think you’ll love it!

Developer Details

You can find a complete API developer’s guide posted in the support section of our website. In short, though, the API is a web-based REST API that you can access from any programming language (or even just good old curl). We support several webhooks, as well. If you have been using our version 1 API, don’t worry, we will continue to support it going forward. It is, however, officially deprecated.

Direct Mail projects that have been moved to the cloud are fully accessible, including read and write support for messages, address groups, addresses, and reports. Changes made via the API are synced to the user’s Mac the next time they open Direct Mail.

We are excited to see kinds of integrations you build! Please don’t hesitate to reach out to us with any questions or requests for features or integrations you’d like to see. For a long time, Direct Mail has supported integrations with top-notch OS X apps. We’re happy now to open the door to integrating with an entire universe of great web-based applications, too.

by Jonathan May 14, 2015 in Announcements

4.0.5 Update Now Available

The latest update to Direct Mail is now available to all of our users, including App Store users. Normally we wouldn’t announce a “point release” with a blog post, but there are some really great performance and bug fixes included in this one that we’d love everyone to enjoy! If you haven’t already, here’s how to update:

Open Direct Mail
Choose Direct Mail > Check for Software Update from the menu bar at the top of the screen.

If you downloaded Direct Mail from the Mac App Store, just use the App Store app to grab the update. You can also just use the Download Now button in the top-right corner of this page.

As always, please contact our support team with any questions or concerns.

by Jonathan April 8, 2015 in Announcements

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