We’re happy to announce the release of the latest and greatest update to Direct Mail, version 5.9, available to all users today. This release includes a number of improvements, including full support for Apple’s latest line of Macs powered by the “M1” Apple Silicon chips. Direct Mail’s support for Apple Silicon means you can expect noticeably faster performance and longer battery life as you create, send, and track your email marketing campaigns.
How to Upgrade
This latest update is being made available to all customers, including Mac App Store customers, and will be automatically installed over the next few days, or the next time you open Direct Mail. You can also upgrade manually by choosing “Direct Mail > Check for Software Update” from the menu bar at the top of your screen.
Update: Congratulations to Joe Molloy, the grand prize winner of a brand new MacBook Air. Here’s what Joe had to say about Direct Mail:
I started using Direct Mail about four years ago when I was looking for Mac-focused software to help me to stay connected with my growing client base. I looked at Mailchimp at the same time, but didn’t get the feel for it that I get with Direct Mail. I like how easy it is to use, and how easy it is to design my newsletters. Being a one-man business, it is important to me to be able to deliver quality in everything that I create, Thank you Direct Mail, I’m very glad that I chose you!
You can learn more about Joe and his natural-healing practice at his website. Thank you, Joe, and thanks to all who participated.
We are working hard to help more people discover Direct Mail and we would love to have your help! Positive customer reviews and social media posts make a huge difference, so we’re offering a special opportunity to win shiny new Apple products—just by engaging with us online.
Grand Prize: Win a New M1 Mac
The grand prize winner will receive their choice of a brand new M1 MacBook Air or M1 iMac (in their preferred color). Five additional winners will receive a four pack of the brand new Apple AirTags. Winners will be announced in early August.
How to Enter the Contest
We’ve put together a number of ways you can enter the contest—and you can enter more than once. Each entry increases your odds of winning, and some entries are more valuable than others! Check it out:
1. Leave a Review
Leave a review of Direct Mail on the Capterra and/or G2 websites and earn 20 entries for each one. You’ll be doing us and your fellow Mac users a huge favor—and increasing your odds of winning a new Mac! If you already left a review in the past (and have an active Direct Mail account), don’t worry, you’re already automatically entered.
Just like your business, we benefit from increasing our social media presence! Follow us and share our posts (or compose your own). Each post earns you five entries in our giveaway contest, plus our eternal gratitude and appreciation!
Complete your entries by August 14th to be eligible to win. We’ll conduct the raffle drawing the third week of August and notify the winners via email.
Thank You and Good Luck!
Thanks for sharing your reviews of Direct Mail and spreading the word to your fellow Mac users! We couldn’t do it without you. If you have any questions about the contest, please see the official rules or reach out to our customer support team. Good luck!
Online video is ubiquitous these days. Social media, advertising, and entertainment platforms are all moving to focus on video. What about email?
One of the most common questions we have received lately is how to integrate video into marketing emails. In this blog post, we’ll share ideas on how you can using video to enhance your email marketing efforts, and show you how easy Direct Mail makes it to add videos to your emails.
Grow Your Lists, Increase Engagement
For email marketers, the name of the game is engagement: how can we increase the number of people who sign up for, read, and click through our emails? Given our ever-shrinking attention spans, video can be an effective way to increase engagement with your emails:
Video marketing company Wistia ran a number of tests and found that including video thumbnails in marketing emails yielded a 22% lift in clicks.
Video platform Vimeo has tools you can use to collect email addresses from the folks who watch your videos. Videos can be great lead magnets.
We’re not affiliated with Wistia, but they do have a number of other guides you may find helpful:
Direct Mail makes it super easy to add video content to your email, but first you need to make sure that your video has been uploaded to a video platform. YouTube and Vimeo are both popular choices and are integrated with Direct Mail. After you’ve uploaded your video, open Direct Mail, click the “Insert Content” button, choose “Video”, and click the spot in your email where you’d like place the video.
Next, paste in the URL to your video. Direct Mail will automatically grab a thumbnail of the video and insert it into your email. You can optionally choose the style of play button that Direct Mail overlays on top of the thumbnail.
When your recipients click on the thumbnail, their video will open in YouTube or Vimeo and automatically start playing.
Can I Play the Video Directly Inside the Email?
Unfortunately, no popular email app supports playing video from YouTube or Vimeo directly in the body of the email. If this ever changes, you can be sure that Direct Mail will support this feature! Until then, the video thumbnail + play button combination should be well understood by your recipients.
If including some motion in the email itself is critical to your design goals, you can consider creating an animated GIF of a few frames of your video. The GIF can then be inserted into your email with a link to watch the rest. Here are a couple resources to help you with that process:
Be careful with this approach, as even short animated GIFs can end up taking a super long time to download. Just watch that the size of your image file doesn’t exceed a few megabytes.
Conclusion
Video content has always been popular, and the story is no different in our online world. Using video to enhance your email marketing efforts can yield a larger subscriber list and increased engagement. Direct Mail’s built-in template editor makes it easy to spruce up your emails with video content, too.
Want more info on combining video with your email marketing? Have a question about something else? Please reach out to our support team today!
One of many awe-inspiring photos taken by Direct Mail user Christian Clauwers
Thank you to all our amazing users who replied to our customer spotlight request. It’s been great to learn more about so many exciting businesses, and hear how many of you have powered through the challenges of the past year. We look forward to sharing many more of these spotlights in the coming months!
Meet Christian Clauwers
We want to shine the spotlight this month on Christian Clauwers, an explorer and super-talented fine arts photographer from Belgium.
My name is Christian Clauwers. As an explorer / photographer, my work focuses on the interaction between man and nature (biodiversity, rising sea levels, etc.), with the oceans and polar regions as themes…This amazing software helps me to invite people to my exhibitions, to spread the word about my work, and to manage my international clientele.
We’re thrilled that Direct Mail is helping Christian share his talents and grow his business. You can see more of his work at https://www.clauwers.com.
It’s not too late to submit your organization to be included in our future social posts and newsletters! Just write us a few sentences about your business and how you are using Direct Mail to help achieve your goals. Please include a contact name, email, and phone number of who we can reach out to for more details. Email us today!
You’re doing big things for your business—let us bring some extra attention!
Are you using email marketing to grow your business and connect with your audience? We would love to share a profile of your organization and a success story (or two) in our upcoming newsletters and social media posts. To be included, click here to write us a few sentences about your business and how you are using Direct Mail to help achieve your goals.
Please include a contact name, email, and phone number of who we can reach out to for more details. We’re excited to spotlight your business and attract attention to the amazing organizations who use Direct Mail!
Have a question about email marketing?
What’s the best way to grow my email list?
How can I increase my campaign open rate?
How often should I send emails to my list?
We know there can be confusing or conflicting advice out there on the ever-evolving world of email marketing. So in upcoming newsletters and posts from us, we’ll be providing up-to-date answers on best practices, and responses to some of our most common questions.
If you’d like to have your question highlighted, please send us your question (and your business name and website). We look forward to hearing from you!
