Let’s say you send an email newsletter to your list, and after a few days pass, you attend an event where you picked up a handful of new subscribers. Shucks, they just missed your most recent awesome newsletter! They’ll have to wait until next month’s newsletter before they hear from you.

Not anymore…

In MailChimp v4.1 (which will be launching over the next few days), we made it so that you can simply add the *| LIST:RECENT |* merge tag to your signup forms and welcome emails, so that all new subscribers get links to your recent newsletters.

First, go to your list tab:

Next, click on the “forms” link for the list you want to modify:

That’ll take you to your list’s form builder (every list that you setup in MailChimp gets its own free signup form, thank you pages, etc that you can customize any way you want). This is where you can edit each and every step of your list’s double opt-in signup process.

I’d recommend putting the “RECENT” merge tag on your thank you page, and in your welcome emails.

Just select them in the pulldown (see above) and then modify the content for each:

You might say something like, “check out some of our most recent newsletters:” and then follow that with the merge tag.

Tip: You can hack the tag a little by inserting a number, and that’ll change how many links MailChimp inserts.

For example, *| LIST:RECENT10 |* will show your most recent 10 newsletters.

Hit the save & exit button when you’re done:

Be sure to go and signup for your own list in order to test how it all works.

Note: Don’t copy-paste the merge tags from this article. I’ve placed spaces in them so that they won’t actually activate whenever this blog post gets emailed to my blog subscribers.

Bookmark and use our merge tag cheatsheet instead.