If you've created a Mail Designer 365 Signup Form, you can use the WordPress plugin to insert it into your website. This is a great way to encourage website visitors to sign up to receive your email newsletters and only requires a few steps to get set up.

Install the plugin

To get started, download the plugin file and install it via the Plugins view of your WordPress site:

Connect to your Mail Designer 365 account

Once you've installed the plugin, you can connect it to your Mail Designer 365 account to access your existing signup forms.

Access the plugin settings via Settings > Mail Designer 365 Subscription Form Inserter:

To get connected, you will need to retrieve your API key and API secret from your my.maildesigner365 account. These can be found here. Once you've located them, paste them into the fields in the plugin settings:

Select your signup form

Now you've connected your Mail Designer 365 account to WordPress, you have access to any signup forms you've configured at my.maildesigner365.com.

Select the form you wish to insert from the dropdown menu,

then copy and paste the shortcode on to a web page of your choice:

Awesome - your form is now ready to use on your WordPress website!

New users who sign up via your form will be automatically added to your Mail Designer 365 contacts, ready to receive your email newsletters.

For sending out your Design to individual recipients, you can either use the Direct Mail Option inside the App, or the Direct Mail Option in the Campaigns Interface

To send out your Design using the Campaigns interface, save your Design to the Team. Then open up the Direct Mail Campaigns Interface

The latest version of your design will be uploaded to TeamCloud and Delivery Hub will open in your browser:

Template and Subject

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

Make sure the section Template an Subject has a green checkmark

Recipient and FROM

Next, open up the section: Recipient and FROM by clicking on the arrow on the left side

Select Individuals if you are sending to individual recipients

Enter the recipients email address(es) into the field Specify recipients 

Press Enter or click on Add Contact to confirm adding the contact to your email. The Email Address will appear in yellow once it is added successfully

Repeat for any additional recipients you are sending to.

Make sure your FROM address is correct. This is the address your email will be sent from.

Once you are finished, make sure there is a green Checkmark next to the section Recipient and FROM

By default, Mail Designer 365 will pre-fill this field with your last-configured address. If you have multiple addresses configured, choose one from the dropdown menu. If you want to add a new address, go to From: addresses in the sidebar menu.

Delivery Date

Open up the section: Delivery Date by clicking on the arrow on the left side

Here you can decide when to send your campaign. Choose to Now to send immediately or Scheduled to schedule it for a future date and time. Alternatively, choose Not decided yet to save it and come back to it later.

Make sure the Delivery Date section has a green checkmark next to it.

Content

Open up the section Content.

Here you can select Banner options if you are on a free Mail Designer Campaigns plan. The Banner will be removed by default with any paid Campaigns plan.

You also have the option to disable link tracking and can give your Campaign an internal name to easier recognition in the interface.

Make sure the Content Section has a green Checkmark.

Send

You will be able to send, as soon as you have green checkmarks next to all sections.

Press the green Send Button.

Your email will now be sent and Mail Designer Campaigns will redirect you to the Completed Campaigns section. Here you are able to see if your email was opened and any links were clicked.

Wanting to use Apple Contacts to send with 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.

To import your Apple Contacts from the address book into Delivery Hub takes a few small steps.

Here's how to do it:

1. Open up your Apple Contacts App
2. Select the contacts you would like to import
   • If you want to select all, press Cmd + A
   • To handselect specific contacts hold down Cmd while selecting contacts
   • To select a range of contacts hold down the Shift button
     
3. Next, open up Numbers to a blank document
4. Drag your selected Contacts into the Numbers Document
   
5. Make sure your column titles are listed as follows:
   • Last Name
   • First Name
   • Email
   • You can keep other Colums such as phone number in the document or remove them if you wish. If you keep them in the document they will also be imported into Mail Designer Campaigns as custom Attributes for the contact.
     
6. In the File Menu of Numbers select Export to > CSV...
   
7. Next: Log into your my.maildesigner365.com account
8. Navigate to the Delivery Hub Menu at the top
9. In the sidebar on the left choose "Import Contacts"
   
10. Choose "CSV" in the main Window
11. Drag your Exported CSV List to the CSV Import Portal
    Please note: If the list you are importing has over 200 contacts, you will need to upgrade to a Mail Designer 365 Campaigns plan that supports this number of contacts
    
12. Next you have the option to assign attributes to your new contacts. Attributes represent different characteristics (e.g. language, interest, country, etc.) and tell you more about the contacts you are adding. This step is important for setting up an audience later.
13. In the Attribute Dropdown click on "Create New"
    
14. Then in the New Attribute Window Choose a name for your Attribute. An example for this import could be
    • Attribute: Origin
    • Value: Apple Contacts
    • Press "Add" to confirm
      
15. You can add as many attributes and values as you like before importing your contacts. Once you are ready press "Import".
16. Sucess! Your contacts were imported!
    
17. Now you can proceed to assign additional attributes to your contacts as described in this guide, alternatively set up an audience List, or directly start sending your campaign.

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 →

A quick Introduction to attributes

Attributes in Mail Designer Campaigns are basically advanced tags on contacts, that allow you to filter your subscribers based on their profiles.

Attributes are completely flexible and you can assign an unlimited amount of attributes and values to a single contact.

Let's look at some examples for easier understanding.

Let's assume you have the following contacts in your subscriber list

As you can see from this list you already have a bunch of information on these contacts based on their interests. How amazing would it be to be able to use this information for targeting your subscribers in your Newsletters? Now let's look into how you would do this in Mail Designer Campaigns.

What are Attributes?

You are probably familiar with Tags. Attributes are basically an advanced version of tags and they work like this. Based on the above list let's say we want to be able to filter the user group by Language. So we would create an attribute called language and attribute values for English, German and French.

Next we could create an attribute for clothing type containing the following example values: T-Shirts, Sweaters, Accessories

You could then add an additional attribute for Gender or Interest groups, etc. You get the idea.

Attributes and values are 100% customisable in Mail Designer 365 Campaigns, so you have full flexibility and you can target your subscribers leveraging all information you have about your users.

Adding attributes to your contacts

Once you have imported contacts into your Mail Designer Campaigns you can assign attributes to them. Let's walk through it step by step.

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 Contacts
   
4. In the main window you will now see your existing contact list
5. Now there are two ways to filter existing contacts to assign attributes to them
   1. You can filter your list based on the parameters of your import. To do this, press the Filter by attributes button
      System attributes are for example:
      • created_at
      • import_origin (set to MailChimp for contacts imported from MailChimp)
      • import_info (set to MailChimp list name for contacts imported from MailChimp)
   2. You can manually add contacts from your list to your clipboard and assign attributes to several contacts at the same time.
      • Use the Clipboard button next to the email address to add the contact to your clipboard
      • To view the list of contacts on your Clipboard, select the blue Clipboard text at the top
        
6. Next you want to go to the bottom of your list and click on the dropdown menu next to Action
7. Choose Add Attributes from the Action Dropdown Menu and press the Button Add attributes to contacts
   
8. You will now see the Add attributes Window
9. Click on the attribute Dropdown Menu
10. If you already have attributes defined, you can select one from the dropdown. Otherwise select + Create New
11. Now please create a name for your attribute and the value this attribute should have for your selects contacts. Based on the above example we are choosing Language as the attribute and English as the value. You can use the "+" Button to add multiple values for the same attribute. Press "Add" when you are finished creating the attribute.
12. Add as many additional attributes as you like and once you are done press the yellow Add attributes button
13. Repeat this process for other attributes you would like to assign to your contacts.

Once you have assigned attributes to your contacts, let's look into creating audiences for your campaigns