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!
One of the winners that Amy announced for our Email Template Throwdown had an interesting dynamic content power trick that I wanted to showcase.
Scott, from IndieMark, won an authentic Wildcat wrestling belt for his “x-ray” template (and made this video to prove it):
If you open up his template design and look closely, you’ll see something intriguing bit of code…
MailChimp offers all kinds of merge tags that allow you to dynamically add information to your campaign, so you can include something like a subscriber’s name, your Twitter profile, or even build an entire campaign with content from other sources.
We put together a manual for using merge tags so you don’t have to scratch your head when you look at our cheat sheet. The cheat sheet is a great reference, but it’s helpful to see what the merge tags look like when you put them in your template and how they’ll look to your subscribers when they receive your email. That’s what this guide is for.
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.)