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.

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…

First, this is where you’ll find all the winners’ templates:

Go to the “pre-designed” category, and click on “Artists & Designers.” You’ll find all kinds of email templates submitted by well-known designers there. Scroll down a little, and you’ll see Scott’s:

Select the template, and then you’ll notice a section with some merge tag code that looks something like this:

That’s using one of our dynamic content merge tags, * |INTERESTED| *

If you’ve never heard of them, here’s an article about our dynamic content tags, and here’s a full, more updated merge tag cheatsheet you can bookmark.

Anyway, Scott coded this merge tag so that you could place dynamic content in there, if you have content for a particular interest group. What’s cool is the way that he strategically positioned the merge tag in his code, in order to make his rounded corners work.

Here’s what I mean.

Let’s say I have an email newsletter list called “Tech News” and my signup form lets people check their news interests:

So I have some people on my list who are interested in Robots (who doesn’t?).

Now let’s say I’m working on my next newsletter, and there just so happens to be some cool robot video I want to show only to people interested in robots. I can tweak that dynamic content slot like this:

Then, in the slot between those INTERESTED tags, I place my robot content with the video link.

To check what that would look like, click pop-up preview, then the “view live merge info” button.

This will let you preview the email for each recipient on your list by clicking little “next” and “prev” buttons.

For those who like robots, the email will look like this:

For those who don’t like robots (assuming such people exist), that dynamic content will disappear, and those spiffy rounded corners elegantly collapse:

If you code templates for clients with our HTML email template language, this is a nice little piece of design trickery to try out.

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.

We omitted RSS-to-Email merge tags and dynamic content (IF statements) from this guide because we think they’re unique enough to merit their own guides. Those guides will be done soon, and I’ll post them to the blog when they’re ready.

Here’s what’s inside the guide:

• Merge Tags for Formatting Custom List Information
• Merge Tags for Campaign Information
• Merge Tags for List Information
• Merge Tags for Social Sharing
• Merge Tags for Video Sharing
• Merge Tags for Email Translation

Download the guide here.

More free guides:
Your First Email Marketing Project
Email Marketing Field Guide (General Tips and Best Practices)
How To Create An Email Marketing Plan

Check out all the downloadable guides in our Resources section.

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.)

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:

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:

• Video: Merge tag tricks
• Personalize your welcome emails with dynamic content
• A/B Test your design and content in MailChimp

also see: Personalizing your welcome emails w/merge tags

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