MailChimp Email Marketing Blog » dynamic content

Table of Contents Merge Tag

Amanda — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 19:36:51 +0000

In the latest MailChimp upgrade we developed an easy way for you to add a table of contents to your newsletter.

The * | MC:TOC | * dynamic merge tag works by pulling anything from your email that is formatted as Title text, and displaying it as an ordered list complete with bullet points. Each item in your table of contents is then anchor linked to the corresponding blurb in your email.

To add a table of contents to your email, simply insert * | MC:TOC | * where you’d like the contents listing to appear. In the example screen shots you can see that I added some Title text (”In this edition of The MonkeyWrench”), and then added the merge tag below it.

You can also insert a Table of Contents in either the right or left column of a two-column template and the merge tag will work exactly the same way.

(I’ve used extra spaces between the elements of the merge tag so that it will render correctly for those who subscribe to the RSS-to-Email version of the blog.)

FNAME merge tag trick

Ben — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 21:43:42 +0000

We all know you can use MailChimp’s merge tags to start an email newsletter with:

Dear *|FNAME|*,

But what if one of your subscribers left their first name blank when they signed up?

Well, you could make the first & last name fields required on your signup form, but that doesn’t help if you’re importing a list where you never had that choice.

Luckily, you can use MailChimp’s advanced merge tags to dynamically replace missing FNAMEs with a generic greeting, like “Hello”. Just use this:

*|IF:FNAME|*Hi *|TITLE:FNAME|*,*|ELSE:|*Hello,*|END:IF|*

In plain English, this will look and see if a recipient has an “FNAME” in the database. If so, MailChimp will insert the first name, and capitalize the first letter of the name (for example, “Hi Bob,”). If it can’t find the first name, it just places a “Hello,” instead.

Special thank-you to MailChimp power user Yankee Publishing for the idea.

Dynamic Content in your emails

Dynamic content can be a really powerful tool for your email marketing, and our advanced merge tags make it easy. Here are more examples for using MailChimp’s advanced merge tags:

Autoresponder idea: customize your welcome message

Ben — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 17:06:44 +0000

I was browsing through some of MarketingSherpa’s 2008 Email Marketing Award winners, and came across this automated email campaign from Les Roches School of Hotel Mgt.

In a nutshell, they have a “request more info” form on their website (see below), where visitors could indicate which school they were interested in attending:

Then, when Les Roches sent their welcome email, it was customized with content that was specific to the recipient’s interests:

You can do that really easily in MailChimp.

Start by adding interest groups to your signup form. Then, customize your welcome email that gets sent whenever someone subscribes to your list. In the welcome email, use MailChimp’s dynamic content merge tags to swap out content based on interest. Here’s how to do all that:

Personalizing Your Welcome Emails in MailChimp

And here’s a merge tag tricks video, where we cover some of those advanced dynamic content merge tags (about 5:30 into the tutorial):

MailChimp Merge Tag Tricks

Ben — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 23:17:15 +0000

Here’s a video of some neat things you can do with MailChimp’s merge tags (formatting tricks, dynamic content based on interests, etc):

also see: Personalizing your welcome emails w/merge tags

NEW! Advanced Merge Tags

Amanda — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 14:55:13 +0000

Merge tags allow you to personalize your emails. One of the most basic and common uses of merge tags would be something like, “Hello, *|FNAME|*” inserted as a greeting for your email. The tag *|FNAME|* will insert the user’s first name, making for a customized email experience.

Advanced Merge Tags

In the latest MailChimp system update, we’ve added support for advanced merge tags. These enable you to to do some very cool things, including the ability to create dynamic content. In the Campaign Builder, when you click to edit any area of your content, you’ll see a link for the “advanced merge tag reference”. Clicking this will bring up an information window with all the details I’m about to share. We’ve divided this reference into categories to make it easier to use: Formatting, Dynamic Content, List Information, Sharing, and Campaign Information.

Let’s start with Formatting. This class allows you to modify the way the content inside you various merge tags is displayed. You can make the value displayed appear as all lower case characters using *|LOWER:YOUR_MERGE|* (where *|YOUR_MERGE|* might be something like FNAME for first name or LNAME for last name, etc). *|TITLE:YOUR_MERGE|* will change the value of *|YOUR_MERGE|* to title-case, which means that the first letter in each word is capitalized. This one is especially handy if you want to standardize the way names, for example, are displayed, regardless of whether someone signed up for your list using ALL CAPS or all lower-case characters. Check out the image below for some additional advanced formatting tags.

Next, let’s take a look at the new tags for Dynamic Content. In our opinion, this is one of the most exciting and powerful of our new advanced merge tags. Essentially, we’ve enabled you the capability to set up an *|ELSEIF:CONDITION|*, using the protocol of basic logic statements. Let me give you a scenario to make this a little more clear. Let’s say you run an online store for Major League Baseball fans. You might want to tailor your content to fans of certain teams based on the region they are from. For example:

|IF:STATE=FL|

Save 20% on all Marlins Window Stickers!

|ELSEIF:STATE=GA|

Save 15% on all Braves apparel!

|ELSEIF:STATE=MD|

Save 10% on all Orioles Window Stickers!

|ELSE:|

Save 15% on all MLB apparel this weekend only!

|END:IF|

In the coming weeks we will be going in to greater detail and giving you more examples, tricks and tips for using these advanced merge tags. There are a few more that I want to mention right now though. *|MC:SHARE|* will add all the social network icons that you see displayed at the bottom of this blog post. (Shameless plug: we know you are reading, now you’ve got to Digg us!) In addition, *|DATE|* will insert the current date, and *|RSS:RECENT|* will insert the titles of your five (by default) most recent blog posts. If you want to display a different number, all you have to do is use *|RSS:RECENTx|* where x = whatever number of posts you want to display. Happy merging!

Quick Update: Here’s a cheatsheet of all MailChimp Merge Tags