Mail Designer 365's Direct Mail feature allows you to send your stunning email creations directly to customers via the Mail Designer 365 app.

To get started, click on Direct Mail in the Mail Designer 365 toolbar:

The latest version of your design will be saved, here you can choose a name and your Team for your design.

Afterwards the Direct Mail Window will open:

Subject

First check your email's subject. This is the email subject message that will be displayed in the recipient's inbox

To: Field

In the To: field you can enter your recipient addresses. Either copy paste them from a list, manually type them into the field. Contacts can be separated by: Comma ","; Semicolon ";"; "Enter" or "Tab".

Each recipient will receive a separate email. Recipients will not see each other.

BCC option

For each Direkt Mail you send, you have the option to BCC yourself. You can use this to keep track of emails send out. Just select the checkmark next to "BCC me". You will receive one email for each recipient delivered to your own inbox.

From: Address 

This is the address your email will be sent from. If you have already set up a From Address in your Team, it will show up here.

• If the field says "No From: address defined"  ,
• open up the dropdown and select "Manage From: Addresses":
• This will take you to the web interface, where you can configure the From: Addresses for your team.

Once your From: Address is set up, select it in the dropdown menu.

Please note: You need to confirm your email address in order to be able to send your Direct Mail

Attachments

You can add attachments to your Direct Mail by dragging them into the indicated box

There is a limit of three attachments per Direct Mail and the size is limited to 20MB total.

Banner

By default your Direct Mail will include a Banner for Mail Designer.

You have the option to select between a light and a dark banner, depending on your design. You also have the option to remove the banner. #

Tip: Including a Banner in your Direct Mail will allow you to save Stamps!

Stamps

The stamps bar will show you how many stamps you will need for your Direct Mail and how many stamps you have available.

Send your Direct Mail

To send your Direct Mail, press the Send Button and your Mail will be sent.

Pets Delight is a growing pet store chain based in Germany. They offer products for dogs, cats, rabbits, rodents, and aquatic life, and have a number of physical stores in Germany, as well as an online store that ships orders throughout Germany and internationally to Austria, Switzerland, and France.

The team at Pets Delight use Mail Designer 365 to send regular email campaigns to their customers in which they promote new products, sales, and special offers.

Creating audiences

In Mail Designer 365 Delivery Hub, attributes can be used to create audiences. This allows users such as Pets Delight to send email campaigns to a select group of contacts, based on certain characteristics.

At present, they are using the following attributes in to characterize email contacts:

• Pet Type (i.e. Dog, Cat, Rabbit, Rodent, Aquatic)

• Location (i.e. Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France)

• Language (i.e. English, German, French)

Audiences can be created under Delivery Hub > Audiences. Within this view, a wide range of operators are available to filter contacts based on their assigned attributes.

Use operators to create custom audience queries for segmentation

In this case study, we take you through the different operator options for designing custom audiences so that you can feel confident using them when creating your own audiences.

Operator options

• Must have all of / Does not have all of
• Equals exactly / Does not exactly equal
• Has any of / Has none of
• Contains (text) / Does not contain (text)
• (Attribute) is set / (Attribute) is not set
• In the last (time period) / Not in the last (time period)

Here are some examples of how Pets Delight use the audience tools in Delivery Hub to create specialized audiences for their campaigns…

August 8th is International Cat Day. To celebrate, Pets Delight are planning a week-long promotion across all cat products.

Audience setup:

To let all of the relevant customers know, they first need to create an audience consisting of contacts who own a cat. Because some contacts have more than one pet type, they first use the operator “must have all of” with the attribute “Pet Type = Cat” to include all customers who have been marked as cat owners.

These customers must own a cat but may also own other pets:

To increase footfall in their stores, Pets Delight are planning a Germany-wide, in-store promotion with 20% off all product lines for one day only. They want to send out an email campaign to all their customers in Germany to inform them about the promotion.

Audience setup:

The audience will consist only of customers who are living in Germany and are able to shop in-store. To filter out these contacts, the operator “equals exactly” is used together with the attribute “Location = Germany”.

This excludes any customers living outside of Germany:

Pets Delight have recently improved their small animals range and added new product lines for rabbits, guinea pigs, hamsters, rats, and mice. The team wants to send out a campaign to let all customers with a small animal know about the new products.

Audience setup:

The campaign can be sent to customers with a rabbit, a rodent, or both.

Here, the operator “has any of” is used with the attribute “Pet Type = Rabbit, Rodent” to select all of the customers with a rabbit and/or a rodent as a pet:

Let’s assume a percentage of the contacts collected by Pets Delight do not have an associated pet type. In order to improve the email experience for these customers and send them more relevant content, Pets Delight plan to send out a quick email survey to gather information on which pets the customers own.

Audience setup:

To quickly identify the customers with no pet data, they use the operator “is not set” with the Attribute “Pet Type”.

This generates a list of all the contacts who haven’t shared their pet type and are therefore suited to receive the campaign:

Using the analysis tools in Mail Designer 365 Delivery Hub, the Pets Delight team identified a steady decline in email engagement over the last few months. To address this issue, they decided to send a re-engagement email campaign to contacts who had not opened their emails in the last three months.

Audience setup:

Delivery Hub offers a range of system attributes which are automatically assigned to users based on particular events such as open rates, bounces, etc.

To create an audience of churned users (i.e. users no longer engaging with their emails), they used the system attribute “last_opened_at” together with the operator “not in the last…” and set the time period to 3 Months.

This filters out all of the subscribers who have not opened one of their emails in the last 3 months:

Pets Delight send out a recurring welcome campaign to new contacts when they first subscribe to their newsletter. This campaign contains a welcome offer and is typically sent out once a week to all new customers who have signed up that week.

Audience setup:

Thanks to Delivery Hub’s system attributes, the team can easily identify new users. The system attribute “created_at” is used with the operator “in the last…” with the time period set to 1 Week.

This filters out all the new subscribers from that week:

Pets Delight also use Delivery Hub to send internal emails created in Mail Designer 365. This includes important staff announcements, a company newsletter, and special internal rewards campaigns.

Audience setup:

Because all staff members share the same email domain (@pets-delight.de), the team can use the system attribute “email_address” together with the operator “contains text” and enter the domain to filter out all contacts with this email domain – i.e. all staff members:

Initially, Pets Delight were only sending emails in German. However, after expanding their business to also offer international delivery, email campaigns also needed to be localized for customers who do not speak German.

Pets Delight now regularly send email content in English and French to communicate with their international customers.

Let’s take the International Cat Day campaign as an example. This campaign was sent out in both German and English language.

Audience setup:

We will start with the filter from Example 1 to identify all contacts who own a cat:

For the German language campaign, the operator “equals exactly” is used with the attribute “Language = German” to identify all the German speaking cat owners:

Everyone else should receive the English language email campaign.

In this case, the operator “does not exactly equal” is used with the attribute “Language = German”. This means anyone who does not speak German will receive the English language newsletter:

Try it out

As you can see, the audience operators in Mail Designer 365 Delivery Hub are easy to use and offer a wide range of filtering options so you can implement a successful segmentation strategy in your email campaigns.

Ready to send your next campaign? Here's how to send an email via Delivery Hub →

Making the switch from Mailchimp to Mail Designer 365 Campaigns? Mail Designer 365 combines flawless HTML email design with easy to use sending tools and tailor-made audiences based on smart and adaptive attributes.

Delivery Hub makes it super straightforward for you to import your existing contacts directly from Mailchimp so you can get started right away. All you need is your Mailchimp API key!

Here's how to do it:

1. Log into your my.maildesigner365.com account
2. Navigate to the Delivery Hub Menu at the top
3. In the sidebar on the left choose "Import Contacts"
   
4. Choose "MailChimp" in the main Window
5. Enter your MailChimp API Key and press the button Connect to MailChimp
   (This is the same key that you enter in Mail Designer to export your Designs to Mailchimp)
   Where can I find the MailChimp API key?
6. Please note: If your Mailchimp List has over 200 contacts, you will need to upgrade to a Mail Designer 365 Campaigns plan that supports this number of contacts
7. If you have multiple Mailchimp lists, select the list you would like to import and press Import.
   Removing the checkmark in the yellow box will remove the deselected list from the import process. Only lists with yellow checkmarks will be imported
   Mail Designer Campaigns will save the name of the list with the contact, so you can access this later.
8. After the Import has been processed, it will appear in the list "The last 10 imports:"
   
9. Next you want to assign attributes to your newly imported list.
10. In order to find your freshly imported list of contacts, go to the Contacts section in the left navigation and set the following filters:
    1. import_origin = MailChimp
    2. import_info = Your List name

Now you can proceed to assign additional attributes to your contacts as described in this guide.