We just sent out the October 2013 issue of Direct Mail Monthly. This month’s newsletter contains:
Read now (and don’t forget to subscribe if you’d like these updates pushed to your inbox in the future).
Trying to compete for your subscriber’s eyeballs in an increasingly crowded inbox can be tough. One tactic that you may not have considered before is using special characters (called “Emoji”) in the subject lines of your emails. Read on to learn what you should know about using Emoji in email.
Similar to emoticons or webdings, Emoji are mini-illustrations that can be inserted alongside text. In fact, as far as your computer is concerned, they’re just another character of text. The use of Emoji started in Japan as a way to express one’s self in text messages and then grew in popularity worldwide when Emoji capabilities were added to the iPhone (and later OS X 10.7).
Adding Emoji characters to your subject lines can be a fresh way to stand out from the crowd. Here’s how to do it in Direct Mail:
Before you get carried away adding Emoji to your email, please consider the following tips:
There are a variety of holiday-themed Emoji icons (snowflakes, stars, etc.) that you may want to try out over the next few months. Have fun and be creative!
Have you upgraded yet? iOS 7’s much anticipated launch day finally arrived yesterday and we were proud to be ready on day one! We’ve worked hard over the past few months to bring Stamps up-to-date with the new design principles of iOS 7. Stamps is now cleaner, easier on the eyes, and most importantly, gradient-free. Along with a fresh look, we made some tweaks under the hood that we think you’ll appreciate.
Just like Direct Mail on OS X, Stamps now updates email campaign reports in real time, which means the data on your phone will always be current (even without manually refreshing). After your email campaign goes out, you can open up Stamps and watch how your recipients are reacting. This feature leverages the latest push notification technology in iOS 7 in order to save battery life while still enabling you to track the thousands of interactions your recipients make with your email. Stamps even updates in the background! Be sure to allow push notifications when prompted by iOS.
This is a lesser-known feature of Stamps that we’d like to highlight. It’s no surprise that the percentage of emails being read on mobile devices continues to increase. With this in mind, it is crucial to test your email designs in a mobile environment. To save you the headache of sending yourself an email to test every change you make, we’ve added a feature to Stamps that allows you to see and interact with mobile versions of your email with a simple push of a button. Learn more
When working in a team, it’s not unusual to have to wait by your computer for the go-ahead to send out an email campaign. Timing is key. With Direct Mail, you can set your mailing to be delivered in the distant future, and in Stamps, a button will appear at the bottom of your report called “Deliver Now”. This enables you to send out that mailing even if you’re not by your computer when the go-ahead finally comes.
Collecting contact information at trade shows or other events can be a pain: handwritten forms are sloppy, entering business card data is tedious, and transcribing info into a spreadsheet is error-prone. We have a better solution. Build a subscribe form in Direct Mail and it automatically syncs to Stamps on your iPad, where you can display it to your visitors. They can enter their own info, and Kiosk Mode prevents anyone from exiting the app or tampering with the rest of your iPad. Learn more
We’ve built Stamps to be a strong complement to Direct Mail and we think you’ll find it extremely useful. Best of all, it’s free on the App Store!
Calling all our friends in the ATL! We are happy to be sponsoring the MacTech BootCamp series of training seminars for Mac consultant professionals. September 18th you can find us (and other great sponsors) at the Loudermilk Conference Center in Atlanta.
BootCamp is a day-long intensive seminar that dives deep on a variety of technologies and skills essential to any consultant supporting large (or small) Mac and iOS deployments. Learn the best way to provision mobile devices, manage networking and storage, implement robust backup strategies, and manage client relationships. All this, plus a great lunch and casual networking (the human kind) opportunities.
Interested? Register now and save $200 with our special e3 Software discount. See you there!
Today’s update to Direct Mail brings a variety of bug fixes and enhancements, but one of the most noticeable changes will likely be the improvements to the Reports user interface.
Since most of our customers (and most Mac users, in general) are accessing Direct Mail from their laptops, we optimized the Reports tab to make the most of limited screen real estate. As shown in the animation above, you’re able to see much more of your report in version 3.5.3 as compared to previous versions of Direct Mail.
We’ve also added a Report menu to the menu bar for easier access to features you may not have realized existed before.
As always, you can learn more about the rest of the changes in Direct Mail 3.5.3 by reading the release notes. Follow us on Twitter or Facebook for more updates in the future!
