Stamps is a great way to view your email tracking reports from your iPhone, iPod touch, and now iPad! We’re happy to announce that version 1.2 of Stamps is available now from the App Store and features several great enhancements.
Detailed History Reports
We’ve enhanced the history reports to show you detailed activity information for each recipient. See which email addresses opened, clicked, bounced, unsubscribed, or filed a spam complaint. You can even see what each individual recipient clicked on in your message.
Just like Direct Mail on your Mac, you can view a report of the top email clients and get a fully-interactive map of where your recipients were when they opened your email.
Full-Screen Subscribe Forms
If you use your iPad in store or at trade shows to collect subscribers for your mailing list, then you will love the new full-screen mode for Stamps subscribe forms. Just use two fingers to zoom in to your subscribe form (just like you would to zoom into a page in Safari) and it will automatically go full-screen.
Get the Update!
If you already have Stamps on your device, open the App Store to update. If you haven’t tried out Stamps yet, visit https://directmailmac.com/stamps on your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad to try it out. It’s completely free! You can learn more about it here.
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!
Our September newsletter is fresh off the presses and on its way to our subscribers. Read this month’s issue for a primer on holiday email marketing, tips on how to share your email campaigns on Facebook, and an update on our iOS app, Stamps.
If you’re not a subscriber, join our list at the bottom of this page!
With the back-to-school rush behind us, the email marketer’s attention now turns to the fast-approaching holiday season. We consulted Responsys’ yearly Retail Email Guide to the Holiday Season for some great suggestions on how to maximize your email marketing efforts as we head into prime retailing months. In this blog post, we’ll share some of the highlights that apply to businesses both large and small.
Start Early
Consumers start their holiday shopping early. According to the National Retail Federation, 40% of consumers begin gift shopping before Halloween (October 31), another 40% begin in November, and the remaining 20% in December. As a result, many of the top retailers start their email campaigns early to capitalize on these shoppers.
Black Friday is often recognized as the “official” start of the holiday shopping season, but data from Responsys shows that increasing numbers of retailers are kicking off the season on Thanksgiving Day itself:
This move to Thanksgiving Day is driven, in part, by the rise of mobile email.
Focus on Mobile
Ubiquitous mobile devices (smartphones, iPads, etc.) mean that more people are checking their email more often. The holiday season affords mobile device users plenty of opportunities to kill time checking email. For example:
Airport-related or other delays while traveling on the day before Thanksgiving (the busiest travel day of the year)
Watching a football game on Thanksgiving with the remote control in one hand and phone in the other
Standing in line at the register on Black Friday
Since odds are your email will be read on a mobile device, take the time to make sure it looks good on the small screen. Email templates that come with Direct Mail are designed to look great no matter what device they are read on, but take advantage of our Design Test and Send to iPhone features to make sure your content (and subject lines) work great on mobile.
Pre-Holiday Messaging
Getting an early start to holiday marketing does not mean barraging your customers with calls to buy right away. Since we’re still on the leading edge of the holiday season, use this time to send email campaigns that will set you up for success during peak buying time. Here are some ideas:
Offer loyalty or other incentive programs that will increase the chance of repeat sales later. Consider something as simple as offering discounts to fans of your Facebook page.
Request reviews of your products. Large numbers of positive reviews for your product will drive later sales.
Survey customers in order to gather valuable data for targeted campaigns later on.
Encourage opt-ins for other marketing channels like Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest. Messaging the same customers over multiple channels can help drive sales.
Announce a website relaunch or a new feature.
Use the above mentioned ideas during this preseason time to set up a successful buying season down the road.
Conclusion
Responsys’ 2012 Retail Email Guide to the Holiday Season is full of great information and suggestions for email marketers. Smart retailers are learning to match consumers move to shopping earlier in the year with early email campaigns. The exponential growth of iPhone, Android, and other mobile devices is signaling to email marketers the importance of making sure their designs look great on a small screen. Lastly, appropriate messaging during the holiday preseason can pay off big during the final two months of the year. Take advantage of this knowledge, these tips, and Direct Mail to make the most of your email marketing this holiday season!
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!
