If your business or organization has its own Facebook Page, Direct Mail makes it easy to add a subscribe form that looks great, syncs automatically with Direct Mail, and doesn’t require your visitors to leave Facebook to sign up! Here’s how to add a subscribe form to your Facebook Page.

First, you’ll need to make sure your business or organization already has a Facebook Page. If you don’t already have one, click here to build one.

Once your Facebook Page is built and working, switch back to Direct Mail. Click on the Addresses tab at the top of the window and select the address group (from the list on the left) that you want your subscribe form to sync with. If you haven’t already, you’ll need to create a subscribe form for that group.

Once your subscribe form is created in Direct Mail, all that’s left is connecting it up to Facebook:

1. Select your address group (from the list on the left)
2. Click Subscribe Form: Edit Form
3. Click Add Form to Website and select Add to Facebook Page…

That’s it! Facebook will confirm that you want to add the subscribe form to your Facebook Page. In Facebook terms, the subscribe form is an “app” that you add to your page.

Once it’s added, visitors to your Facebook Page will see a “Newsletter Signup” app icon at the top of your Page (next to the Photos, Likes, and any other app you’ve installed on your Facebook Page).

If you want to see an example of what the finished product looks like, head on over to our Facebook Page and click the Newsletter Signup tab at the top of the page.

Questions? Don’t hesitate to get in touch with our support team. Thanks for reading!

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.

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.

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!