Merge Tags can look scary to the uninitiated, but these little guys are the secret to any handsomely tailored nonprofit newsletter. They allow you to personalize emails to donors, volunteers, and fans of your organization. For instance, you might want to address donors by name or highlight different calls to action for different audiences. Merge tags make this flexibility possible.

You and I know that fundraising appeals are more successful the more personal they are. If you’d like to send out an appeal for your latest fundraising campaign, it might be helpful to address your donors by name.

All you have to do is stick the following merge tag where their name would normally appear:

(Make those vertical bars by typing shift and backslash at the same time.)

The merge tag — the part between *| and |* — will tell MailChimp to retrieve their first name and stick it right in your campaign, personalized for each email address. If you’re skeptical this will work (like I would be), just click “Popup Preview” within the campaign builder.

Then click the “view live merge info” button. You can toggle between subscribers to double and triple check.

Even if you don’t have everyone’s first name, you can use dynamic merge tags to fill in the gaps. These are like IF-THEN statements in geometry (don’t worry, I slept through that part too):

This portion of the campaign will now read, “Dear Ladies and Gentlemen,” if you don’t have the subscriber’s first name. You can put any text where “Ladies and Gentlemen” currently is: “Friend,” “Bozo,” “Mr. and Mrs. Moneybags,” etc.

Here’s what a functioning example looks like in the campaign editor:

Dynamic merge tags can get powerful quickly. Let’s suppose your organization does noble but complicated environmental advocacy work in Georgia. Your mission is to improve water and air quality and protect wilderness. The trouble is, Georgia has really diverse landforms — mountains, piedmont, coast, and everything in between.

The mountain people might not care so much about the piedmont, and the coastal people are plain sick of hearing about the mountains. Don’t even talk to me about the piedmont people. Merge tags make it easy to send tailored messages within the same campaign:

If you’re from Savannah on the coast, Helen in the mountains, or Atlanta on the piedmont, you’ll see what probably resonates with you the most. Everyone else sees a generic call to action.

Don’t be afraid to take advantage of dynamic merge tags in a much more robust way. We’ve put together a merge tag cheat sheet, a merge tag guide, and a primer on conditional (or dynamic) merge tags if you’d like to learn more.

You can also start at the beginning with MailChimp for Nonprofits, our introductory guide for your organization.

All you need to do is add the following merge tag in the body of your text at the location where you want the button to show up:

*|GOOGLE:PLUSONE|*

By default, the merge tag will link to the campaign archive version of your email and use your subject line as the title. You have some additional options for customizing how it works though.

*|GOOGLE:PLUSONE[$url=http://yourwebsiteurlhere.com]|*

The optional variable $url=http://yourwebsiteurlhere.com specifies the URL shared. If not specified, links to your campaign archive.

*|GOOGLE:PLUSONE[$title=title of my post]|*

The optional variable $title=title of my post specifies the title of the page being shared. If not specified, uses the subject line of your campaign.

And to enable +1 sharing for individual items in your RSS-to-email campaigns, just use:

*|RSSITEM:PLUSONE|*

To personalize an image, Visage generates a custom graphic for each name (or other field) on the MailChimp list that you select—now each reader’s image will have his or her own name magically embedded in the actual image. Neat!

To use Visage, just sign up (you’ll need your MailChimp API key), and you’ll be able to get started right away. Currently there are 12 different templates available, ranging from an authentic shake-cam effect road sign to a band flyer posted on a light pole. Here are some examples of what you can make:

Visage is currently free of charge, and it allows you to generate 1000 custom images per campaign.

Check out Visage

Just add

*|TUMBLR:SHARE|*

to the body text of your campaign, and you’ll see the little Tumblr icon appear.

Then, when a subscriber clicks on the icon in your email, they’ll be taken to a web archive version of the campaign. Clicking the icon again brings up the share dialog.

Then just as you would share any other content (like a link or image) from the Tumblr bookmarklet or web interface, you’ll have the option of editing the name (the default is your campaign’s subject line) and link description.

There are a few options to further customize the URL or title that you’re sharing.

*|TUMBLR:SHARE[$url=http://yourwebsiteurlhere.com]|*

The optional variable $url=http://yourwebsiteurlhere.com specifies the URL shared. If not specified, links to your campaign archive.

*|TUMBLR:SHARE[$title=title of my post]|*

The optional variable $title=title of my post specifies the title of the page being shared. If not specified, uses the subject line of your campaign.

And to enable Tumblr sharing for individual items in your RSS feed, just use the following:

*|RSSITEM:TUMBLR|*

Related Posts

• Add A Newsletter Button To Your Tumblr Blog
• Chimpsterous Publishes a Subscribe Form to Your Posterous Site

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.

FACEBOOK:LIKE:URL - Imagine you’re sending an email about your ski shop’s end of summer sale. You can now manually code a like button for each individual item that you’re advertising and allow people to Like those overalls or ski goggles specifically.

This will also work if you want to allow someone to Like (become a Fan of) your business page. URL here should be the link (including http://) to the item/article/page being Liked.

If you want to use this same logic for the individual articles in an RSS campaign, you can do that too. Just use RSSITEM:LIKE instead. More on that below.

TWITTER:TWEET – In early August Twitter created a Tweet Button to make sharing content around the web one-click simple. We’ve added the button to the top of all our blog posts, and now you can add it to your emails with this simple merge tag. Think of TWITTER:TWEET as a Tweet This button for your entire email campaign.

As an aside, it’s important to note that Twitter will turn your campaign-archive.com link into one that’s shortened with t.co when share via this button.

GOOGLE:BUZZ – Similar to Facebook’s Like and Twitter’s Tweet Button, we wanted to give people the option of sharing links via Google Buzz. Adding the GOOGLE:BUZZ merge tag will allow your readers to easily share your campaign archive link via Buzz.

RSS Campaigns

RSSITEM:LIKE – This merge tag allows you to create a Facebook Like button for each item in your RSS campaign, and the Like will link specifically to an individual item or article.

RSSITEM:BUZZ – Create a Google Buzz share button for each item in your RSS campaign that will allow the individual article to be shared directly to Google Buzz.

RSSITEM:TWITTER – Create a Tweet button for each individual item in your RSS campaign that will allow the individual article to be easily shared via Twitter.

Twitter

|TWITTER:TWEET:[$url=http://blog.mailchimp.com,$text=i heart mailchimp]| - Use this syntax to set the both the URL you want your tweet to link to, as well as the text of the tweet, as you want it to appear on Twitter.

This will only work at the campaign level, so not for individual items.

Facebook

FACEBOOK:COMMENTS – allows you to add Facebook comments to your email. Read all about it here.

FACEBOOK:PROFILEURL – will return a URL to your Profile on Facebook so that you can build a link to it. For example:

< a href=”*| FACEBOOK:PROFILEURL |*”>my profile< /a> (extra spaces added here so it’ll appear properly in the RSS-to-email version of our blog updates)

FACEBOOK:PROFILEURL:pagename – will return a URL to your Fan Page on Facebook so that you can build a link to it. You can either use the pagename (in bold)– in our case, http://facebook.com/mailchimp– or you can use the ID# if you haven’t set a custom URL for your page. Still confused? Here’s some additional information from our Knowledge Base.

Google Buzz

|GOOGLE:BUZZ:[$url=http://blog.mailchimp.com,$text=i heart mailchimp]| - Use this syntax to set the both the URL you want your post to link to, as well as the text of the post, as you want it to appear on Google Buzz.

Again, this will only work at the full campaign level, so it’s not available for individual items within your email.

Video

Since it doesn’t work to put video inside of your HTML emails, we’ve created video merge tags. They’ll automagically generate a screenshot of your video that links over to the location where the video is hosted online.

With the max_width attribute, you can now set how wide you want the screenshot to be and we’ll scale things appropriately. (Remember, you want to keep your email templates under 600px wide because of email client limitations and preview panes.) So for example, if you want to link to a bunch of videos in the right hand column of your email, you’d use YOUTUBE:xxxx:120. That’ll make sure the video screenshots are only 120px wide and won’t break your template. Video merge tags are currently available for YouTube, Vimeo, Blip.tv and Vzaar.

YOUTUBE:id:max_width

VIMEO:id:max_width

BLIPTV:id:max_width

VZAAR:id:max_width

The video ID consists of letters and numbers, dependent on the service provider. It is present in the URL of the site, found at the top of the browser window. Occasionally, the video ID will be presented within a long URL. If this is the case, the video ID ends before a question mark, as seen in the YouTube and Blip.tv examples. To use the merge tags, simply copy the video ID into the tag.

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.

But the fact of the matter is the safest thing you can do is generate a screenshot of your YouTube video player, insert that image into your email, then link it to your actual video landing page.

It’s a miserable process that we just made easier with our YouTube (and Blip.tv and Vimeo) merge tag…

If you want to include a video in your MailChimp campaign, and it’s hosted on YouTube, Blip.tv or Vimeo, just get the video ID, and stick it in our new video merge tag like this:

MailChimp will go to the video, grab its keyframe (a still image from your video), then overlay some video control elements to make it look playable:

Whenever users click, it’ll take them to the hosted version of your video.

No need to screenshot anything, upload to MailChimp, etc. Just use the merge tag, and you’re done.

One-click Social Share

We’ve made it super simple to connect MailChimp with Twitter, allowing you to automatically tweet a link to your campaign as soon as you hit the send button. Just go to your Account settings, and click on Integrations. Under Twitter, just click the big authorize connection button and oAuth will take it from there. This is a safer and better way of integrating with Twitter because it means you no longer have to enter your Twitter username and password directly into MailChimp.

It’s also a snap to share your email using Facebook, Myspace, Stumbleupon, Digg or Delicious using our social share feature. In your Campaigns list, just click on the “social share” link underneath the email you’d like to share with your network.

You’ll be taken to an intermediate screen (which will open in a new tab or a new window, depending on how you have your web browser configured) where you’ll need to enter your username and password for the service, and then voila! Easy peasy.

Twitter Template

Are you a social media power user who wants to be able to include your Twitter identity as part of your email campaign branding? If so, the Twitter template is perfect for you.

When you go to create your email campaign, you’ll want to select the “new email” tab when it’s time to select your template. Then scroll down to the bottom of the page and you’ll see the Twitter template.

On the next screen (the campaign builder), you’ll see that MailChimp visits your twitter page, and automatically pulls in your colors and background image:

When you look closely, you’ll see that we’ve included a new Twitter merge tag in the right hand column. Where it says “TWITTER:FULLPROFILE” we’ll insert your twitter avatar, follower count, and recent tweets.

Then when you click on “pop up preview,” we’ll show you how the merge tag looks when it pulls in your data:

Tracking Twitter Tweets & Re-tweets

As you probably already know, every time you finish a MailChimp campaign and send it off, you can post a link to the campaign archive on Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks. In order to make this work on Twitter, we had to create our own URL shortener (EepURL).

Ever since then, people have been asking us for some magical way to track how many people tweeted and re-tweeted their email campaigns. So we did that, and you can now access those stats through the Reports tab in your MailChimp Dashboard.

1. How many people tweeted about the campaign
2. How many people re-tweeted
3. Who the tweeters are
4. Timeline of tweetage from original tweet

Social Site Merge Tags

We’ve made it super easy to insert social sharing links into your emails with just a simple merge tag.

So instead of having to go grab icons and links individually for sites like Twitter, Digg and LinkedIn, you can just add *|MC:SHARE |* wherever you’d like your social links to appear.

If you only want to include certain social sites, there’s also a way to do that using MailChimp’s merge tags.

Here’s how…

*|SHARE:SITE_NAME1,SITE_NAME2| *

So for example, to just include Facebook, Twitter, Myspace and Digg, you would insert the code:

*|SHARE:facebook,twitter,myspace,digg| *

Resulting in the following:

Eventbrite Integration

We’re excited to announce that MailChimp has partnered with Eventbrite, and our services are seamlessly integrated. Build events in Eventbrite, then design & deliver awesome invitations in MailChimp. Ben wrote an excellent tutorial that covers all the nitty gritty details about the integration, so I won’t go into all that here.

Essentially though, you can create and sell tickets using Eventbrite. Then design a great looking invitation using MailChimp, track ticket sales and stats, and even create follow up emails using Mailchimp’s powerful segmentation tools!

We think this video shows how excited we are about this, and why you should be too! (warning: there’s smooching involved):

Video Merge Tag

If you want to include a link to a video on Vimeo, YouTube or Blip.tv, we’ve got a new merge tag to help save you time. It’ll automatically generate a screenshot of the embedded video player, which will link to the location of the video online.

Just use:

*|YOUTUBE:xxxx| *
*|VIMEO:xxxx| *
*|BLIPTV:xxxx| *

Where “xxxx” is the unique video identifier at the end of each link.

J—aiyznGQ in:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J—aiyznGQ

2753436 in:

http://blip.tv/file/2753436

6223439 in:

The resulting email will look like this:

MailChimp Is a Social Monkey

Some additional posts you might find interesting:

• Using Twitter to Rate Email Campaign Effectiveness
• Adding a Newsletter to Your Facebook Fan Page
• Trends in Email: Sharing Via Facebook and Twitter
• Using Posterous To Drive Facebook Fan Engagement
• Using Facebook Fan Pages in Conjunction With Email
• App Sketchbook Uses Email For Feedback and Doubles Twitter Followers
• Using Twitterkeys and Special Characters For Email Marketing

Follow these best practices and you are sure to create awesome emails that your clients will love:

• Your email layout should be no wider than 600 pixels for best viewing in various email clients
• Avoid using the following CSS in your templates:
  • Floats
  • Positioning
  • Background images (doesn’t work in Outlook and Gmail)
• Use this wonderful reference created by our friends at Campaign Monitor to see what CSS is supported in major email clients http://www.campaignmonitor.com/css/
• It’s a good idea to limit the number of editable spaces in the template to keep things simple
• Name all editable spaces consistently. The name you assign via mc:edit="somename" is used to create a field in the database to store the user’s content. If they switch templates after writing content, they could lose their copy if the editable space names aren’t consistent. Use the following conventions common content areas:
  • mc:edit="header – used to name the header
  • mc:edit="header_image" – used to name an editable header image
  • mc:edit="sidecolumn" – used to name an editable left or right side column
  • mc:edit="main" – used to name the main content space
  • mc:edit="footer" – used to name the footer
• Editable images should not be placed within an editable content container
• Set the @theme declaration in your CSS for the page background, header, footer and content space so templates can be quickly customized with the MailChimp color themes. See the template language docs for the correct names to be used.
• Be creative with the use of merge tags. Use the social merge tags to provide readers of your email new ways to connect with you and share your content. Use The table of contents merge tag (*|MC:TOC|*) to create an automatic list of links to the <h1> and <h2> headings in an email.
• Be sure to include the required CAN-SPAM info in the footer (*|UNSUB|* *|LIST:DESCRIPTION|* *|LIST:ADDRESS|*)
• Include target="_blank" in links to ensure they open a new browser window or tab when emails are viewed in browser based email clients
• Include a link for users to update their subscription preferences <a href="*|UPDATE_PROFILE|*" target="_blank">change subscription preferences</a>
• Include a link to let users view the email in a browser: <a href=”*|ARCHIVE|*” target=”_blank”>view this email in a browser.</a>
• Include a link to your website: <a href=”*|LIST:URL|*” target=”_blank”>visit our website</a>
• Feature the forward to a friend link somewhere prominent <a href=”*|FORWARD|*” target=”_blank”>forward to a friend</a>. Make a cool button treatment for it where possible to encourage sharing
• Once you’ve created a template, put test it in a campaign and try customizing it by changing color, adding content, etc to make sure it will work well for others who might be using it in different situations.