You’ve probably noticed the “view this in your browser” link we include in our templates to take your subscribers to the online archive of your newsletters.
It’s pretty handy in case people can’t view the correct version of the email in their email clients, but have you ever wished you could hide that link when people actually go to the archive page? Or, have you been hoping for a way to change the text to some other content instead?
Well, with our dynamic merge tag: *| IF:ARCHIVE |*, you can!
Here’s how.
Let’s say that you want the “view this in your browser” link to appear in all emails, but when people click to view in their browser, you want to replace that link with some other promotion that’s going on at your website.
In the source code, you could edit the header bar to something like this:
*| IF:ARCHIVE_PAGE |*
If you like these special deals, check out our “On Sale” page at Bananaco.com!
*| ELSE: |*
< a href=”*| ARCHIVE |*”>Email looking funky? view this in your browser</a >
*| END:IF |*
Your email would look like this:
And people viewing your campaign archive page would see this:
If you just want to hide the archive link instead of replacing it with other text, you can use this bit of code:
*| IFNOT:ARCHIVE_PAGE |* < a href=”*| ARCHIVE |*” >view this in your browser</a >*| END:IF |*
The “view this in your browser” link will disappear on the archive version of your campaign.
Nerd Alert:
Did you know you can publish newsletters to MailChimp straight from your website’s CMS? Ok, maybe you did. You seem pretty “with it.” How about this: You can create email specific stylesheets that hide or display content in emails. Pretty (nerdy) cool!
You might also want to check out:
Embedding Signup Forms on Your Email Archives
Archive Toolbar For Campaigns – If you aren’t already including this in your campaign archives, you definitely should be. It allows people to share your campaigns on social networks, translate them, and sign up to your list right from the archive page.
Hi! This looks like a great feature, however I am a bit confused. My understanding is that I can add this code in order to get rid of the the option to “view past issues” when the archive link is clicked and the email is opened in a browser. If that is correct, then I need some clarification and help with implementing it correctly. When I set it up, everything worked as described here, except for the fact that the link to past issues was still showing up in the archive toolbar. Thank you in advance!
The archive link that’s in your newsletter is for when your email is broken, or just not rendering correctly. The link allows people to view *that* newsletter in their browser. Once they’re viewing your newsletter in their browser, it’s kind of silly (to some people) to still have a link to “view in browser.” Hence the tip. But the link that remains in your archive toolbar is meant to allow subscribers to view old issues. A lot of people want to see what content they might’ve missed from past issues.
I would like to DISABLE people’s ability to see past issues… some campaigns are sent to only segments of people. how do I do that??
Yes!! I have also asked for this feature. I would like to be able to create and manage folders with campaigns that are “ok for sharing with everyone on this list” “ok for sharing with certain people” – a segmented archive system to match the segmented list system :)
I will join you in asking for it if you tell me where to ask. I got a support email this morning in response to my “Help” email yesterday, and basically they say this cannot be done….
What is the correct format for the If Else tags? Are the spaces supposed to be there? Where can I find more documentation about available tags?
The spaces are *not* supposed to be there. We put them in to break the merge tags from rendering whenever our blog posts are sent with our RSS-to-email feature. Full merge tag documentation is at: http://blog.mailchimp.com/merge/
OK, I’m not a programmer. SO how would I use this to remove the FNAME from an archive page?
Hi Rich,
You can use this same premise to remove an FNAME from a displayed archive page. In you campaign, you’d want to include something like this (with spaces removed):
*| IF:ARCHIVE_PAGE |*
Hey everybody, thanks for checking out our campaign!
*| ELSE: |*
Hey, *| FNAME |*, thanks for checking out our campaign!
*| END:IF |*
So the part right under the IF:ARCHIVE_PAGE tag would be what shows up on the archived version of your campaign and the ELSE would be what your subscribers receive in their inboxes.
Hi I am using *| IF:FNAME |* to add user name to mailer. It works and replaces “Hi Bob” with “Hi there”.
The trouble comes in when viewing in archive. I get <> in the browser.. I have tried to add an *| IF:ARCHIVE |* tag but not sure I have it in the right place. too many IF’s ELS’s and END’s :)