Merge Tags Overview
You can personalize or customize your MailChimp campaigns through the use of merge tags. Merge tags are either system tags MailChimp provides or they are tags that are automatically created when you add fields to your list.
Your List's Merge Tags
The fields that you set up in your list (Email Address, Name, Address, etc) will not only become the fields in your list and signup form, but will also have a corresponding Merge Tag. For instance, if you added a First Name field in your list *|FNAME|*, then using the merge tag *|FNAME|* in your content will bring up your recipient's first name.
Also, you can add fields that are specific to your recipients. To demonstrate, I've added a Rating field and Points field to my list. This will show individual subscribers their personal ratings and point count.
You can preview the merge tag display with our popup preview option to make sure that they display correctly.
Note
Different lists might have different merge tags. It all depends on how you set up each list's sign up form or set of list fields. Make sure you're using the corresponding merge tag for your current list. Otherwise, your merge tags may not display correctly.
Create default merge values, like Dear Customer, to fill a registration value that you might be missing.
Locating Your Merge Tags
You can access your merge tags in both your list settings and directly on your campaigns. See Examples
Other Available Merge Tags
There's a full list of merge tags on our merge tag cheatsheet that can be used in campaigns. This includes, links to social merge tags, merge tags that can be used in signup forms, etc.
How Merge Tags Look on Your Campaign
The content pulled in by your merge tags will be displayed in whatever style the merge tag text is. So if you typed in your merge tag and selected the text to be bold, the content we display will also be bold.
Note
We recommend that when you are creating your content, copy the Merge Tags from the example in an article then paste the tag into your campaign as plain text, to make sure that no stray code gets added in the background. Once the merge tag text is written, you can style it like any other text.
Testing Merge Tags
Test your merge tags before your campaign goes out with our popup preview. Popup preview is available on both the HTML and plain text versions of your campaign.
See Example
For signup forms, you can view the eepurl for your signup form to see any merge tags you've placed on your signup form.
If you've added merge tags in any of the other parts of the signup process, to run a test of the *|MERGE|* tags in the signup forms you'll have to actually have to sign yourself or a test email address up to your list. See Example