Another feature that’s launching in MailChimp v4.1 is something we’re calling the “archive tool bar.” Whenever someone visits your campaign’s archive in their browser, there’s an optional toolbar at the top of the screen:
Your subscribers can use the toolbar to:
- Share your campaign on Digg, Facebook, MySpace, Delicious, etc., (we’re using ShareThis)
- Subscribe to your list (useful if the email was forwarded to them)
- View past issues (we’ll point them to a list of your recent campaigns sent to that list)
- Translate the email to over 30 different languages (using Google Translate)
This is a free feature, and is optional.
To enable the toolbar for your campaign archives, click “List name & defaults” under your list’s settings:
then check this box:
You’ll notice that a lot of the functionality for the archive toolbar is aligned to the right. That’s because we’ll eventually be adding more (really, really cool) functionality to the left side of the toolbar down the road.
great feature! We get a handful of people accessing the campaign-archives on each of our campaigns so this will be very cool!!
also, when we share out the campaign via Twitter and Facebook it will hopefully result in additional people signing up since they’ll see the toobar at the top!
keep adding awesome features!! thanks!
Nice work!
We’d love to use the Share This feature but our emails all have dynamic content that doesn’t display properly if someone clicks through the link that is posted.
This is what appears if I click on my email that I’ve posted to Facebook:
Dear <<first Name>> (<>),
Why can’t MailChimp’s social share work with dynamic content? It should either display according to the user who shared the email or – if that’s not possible – it should at least show the “default / else” contents of an if conditional statement.
@Trent To resolve that issue, you can use some fancy conditional merge tags to serve a customized message if you have info about a subscriber, or show something more generic if you don’t. Here’s how you can do that:
*|IF:FNAME|*
Dear *|FNAME|*,
*|ELSE:|*
Dear Braves Fan,
*|END:IF|*
Or just skip the greeting all together if no name value is present:
*|IF:FNAME|*
Dear *|FNAME|*,
*|END:IF|*
If you are interested, here’s some more info on the topic: http://blog.mailchimp.com/tag/dynamic-content/
@Aarron, thanks for your response. I’ve tried over and over but conditional merge tags aren’t working for me when the email is shared. I went back and tried your suggestion exactly.
– I send myself an email with conditional and include the social share feature at the bottom of the email
– I receive the email and the dynamic content appears properly
– If I click the “Share in Facebook” link or some other social share link in the email, the link it includes leads back to my message. But the message doesn’t have the appropriate default content (“Dear Braves Fan” for example). Instead it appears as “Dear <>”.
Is this the intended functionality? Do others have the same results when trying to share their dynamic emails via the social share features?
I can’t find this setting anywhere.
It’s going live when v4.1 goes live. The upgrade process starts Sunday, and then it’ll take a few days to go through and upgrade all our users. Sometimes between Sunday and Thursday, you’ll see it under List –> Settings
As it turns out, using fancy merge tag conditionals won’t render as expected in a campaign archive. Sorry for misleading you, but I do have a solution to share.
In the form builder (lists > create forms), you can set a predefined value for your fields (Ex: for your first name field, you might set the predefined value to “customer”). Then your campaign archive will show this default value when it encounters the merge tag.
This screenshot explains it a bit better: http://eepurl.com/NRi
We also have a fancier solution in the works that will give you more control over what is shown in your campaign archive.
Hi Arron — Thanks again for your recommendation re: form default fields. Trent and I are working together on this. The campaign archive (and social-shared versions) are going to be more important to us soon, so I was wondering if there was an eta or rough timeline on when we might expect The Fancy Solution. Can you give us an idea of how it would work?
Would it help with conditional cases as well? For instance, would we be able to set a condition to display the “Click for web version / Click to unsubscribe” sections only in the actual emails, but remove it for archived versions and shared (eg facebook, twitter) versions?
Thanks again!
I can’t give you a timeline on when to expect a more sophisticated tool set for handling archive content display, but yes, it would have conditionals that would allow you to specify what gets shown/hidden in an archive page.
Thanks! Sounds good enough for me.
Keep up the good work.
Thanks guys! MailChimp keeps getting better and better. We will be archiving all of our campaigns on our new website once it launches so the new archive toolbar is both timely and helpful.
Is it possible to translate the text in the tool bar (share, translate, view past issues…)? It is only in english.
Thanks
please translate the tool bar in other languages
only in english
thanks for this feature. thanks for the rsvp to me on the question of how to set it up.
I am hoping the translate feature on the toolbar means that I no longer need that huge long string of languages that hangs on at the end of the campaign when i use the merge tag feature for tranlating.
This is suddenly showing on my archives despite the check box being unchecked, and I CANNOT have it there or everyone has access to segmented campaigns they should not be seeing. What happened and how soon will you fix it?
If the facebook comments option is checked, the archive toolbar will turn on. Try unchecking that.
Is there a way to turn that off through the API for newly created campaigns?
Don’t think you need to — you can simply uncheck the box under your list’s “default settings.” http://eepurl.com/hcYa
Ben,
As you previously stated, the toolbar appears no matter what, if Facebook comments are on.
I have successfully reproduced this undocumented unwanted behavior:
- “add a toolbar of utilities to the top of my campaign archives” is unchecked in “List Name & Defaults”;
- a new campaign is created through the API; “allow [Facebook] comments” is on by default;
- sending the campaign enables the toolbar regardless of “add a toolbar of utilities to the top of my campaign archives” being unchecked.
Right now, the only available workaround I can think of is to manually disable “allow comments” before *manually* sending the campaign, but that is gone once a campaign gets sent without disabling “allow comments” first.
Oh, I missed the context of your earlier question. Assumed it was meant for the toolbar in general, not FB comments. Apologies. And I’ll point this out to the devs for consideration.
I turned the toolbar on and noticed different behavior by browser:
In Firefox and Chrome, the toolbar stays pinned to the top of the screen, even when I scroll down the page. In IE, it stays at the top of the page and disappears when I scroll down.
Which is the intended behavior? Is there a way to change it?
Unfortunately, this is just a limitation of IE (that is any version below IE9). The problem is that IE doesn’t understand a CSS positioning property called position:fixed.
People on modern browsers will enjoy the toolbar attached to the top of the browser all the time, and people on older version of IE still get the same functionality, but without the convenience of fixed positioning.