All New Daylite Integration and Forward to a Friend Features!

Update: Direct Mail 3.4 is now available in the Mac App Store.

Just in time for the holidays, we’re happy to announce a brand new version of Direct Mail (3.4) that delivers two oft-requested features: Daylite 4 integration and a “forward to a friend” feature for sharing your emails. Read on for more information, and be sure to download the update today! Mac App Store customers will need to wait a bit longer, as Apple is still reviewing the update.

Daylite 4 Integration

We are big fans of Daylite and know that many of our customers rely on Daylite and Direct Mail to stay in touch with their clients and customers. Although Daylite 4 (launched earlier this year) did not initially support third-party integration, it has recently been updated to support integration with Direct Mail. We’ve worked hard to make integrating with Daylite even easier than before—you don’t even need a plug-in!

You will need Daylite 4.1 to support integration with Direct Mail.

Importing Contacts

Now importing contacts (people and companies) from Daylite is as easy as dragging and dropping. Try selecting your contacts in Daylite and then dragging them onto Direct Mail’s window:

Contact Syncing

Instead of importing your contacts from Daylite each time, you can also set up Direct Mail to automatically sync with one or more of your Daylite Groups. Now it’s easy to manage your mailing list from inside Daylite and use Direct Mail for creating, sending, and tracking your email campaigns. Direct Mail will keep up-to-date with name, email address, and other changes you make inside Daylite.

Please see this help article for more information on setting up syncing with Daylite.

Linking Email Campaigns

Daylite makes it easy for you to keep track of email correspondence with your clients. Now Direct Mail can automatically link sent email campaigns back to Daylite, as well. You can even jump from Daylite into your Direct Mail email campaign report with one click:

We think you’re going to love the integration between Direct Mail and Daylite. Please let us know what you think in the comments or via our support site.

Forward to a Friend

Direct Mail 3 has long made it easy for your recipients to share your email on Facebook and Twitter. Now we’re adding support for sharing via the original social network: email. Our templates in Direct Mail 3.4 now include “Forward to a Friend” links that your recipients can use to pass along your newsletter. If you use your own templates, you can add this functionality by including a link with the href set to “[forward to a friend url]”.

You’ll be able to see when people share your newsletter by looking at the Links section of your history report (just like for Facebook and Twitter).

What Else?

We’ve also added a brand-new web-based API to Direct Mail 3.4. This makes it possible to add, remove, or update your Direct Mail mailing lists from other web-based applications—even when your computer is turned off. Please see our API documentation for more information.

Another addition is a new bulk-edit feature. Now it’s easy to edit the contact information (like correcting the spelling of a company name, for example) for several addresses at once.

Enjoy!

We hope you like these new changes in Direct Mail—be sure to check out the recently updated Stamps for iPhone (and now iPad), too! We are already hard at work on some exciting new changes to be announced in the new year!

Read the release notes or get the update today!

by Jonathan in Announcements

Stamps Comes to iPad!

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.

by Jonathan in Announcements

Use Transparency to Make Your Logo Look Great!

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!

by Jonathan in Features

Read Our September Newsletter

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!

by Jonathan in Newsletters

Smart Email Marketing for the Holiday Season

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!

by Jonathan in In-Depth

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