Getting Started with Merge Tags
Use merge tags to insert dynamic content, like names or titles, in your emails. Learn about merge tags, where to access them, and how to create new ones.
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Mailchimp offers merge tags for all kinds of dynamic information. Paste a merge tag into your email to send personalized content to your subscribed contacts. The following list outlines all of the tags available to you.
To learn more about how to use merge tags in Mailchimp, take a look at our Getting Started with Merge Tags article.
Use these merge tags in any type of email.
Merge tag | What it does |
---|---|
*|ARCHIVE|* | Creates a View this email in your browser link to your email campaign page. |
*|BRAND:LOGO|* | Adds a default logo placeholder to your email. Use this merge tag in place of an image URL in a custom-coded template or Code content block. |
*|CAMPAIGN_UID|* | Displays the unique ID for your email. |
*|REWARDS|* | Adds the Referral badge to your email. |
*|REWARDS_TEXT|* | Adds a text-only version of the Rewards link. |
*|MC:TRANSLATE|* | Inserts links to translate your sent email into different languages. |
*|TRANSLATE:xx|* | Adds a list of links to translate the content in your email. Replace xx with the code for the language your email is written in, and we'll display other available languages. For example, use *|TRANSLATE:en|* for an English email, and we'll exclude English from a list of supported languages links. |
*|MC_LANGUAGE|* | Displays the language code for a particular contact. For example, if your contact's language is set to English, the merge tag output will display the code en. Use this merge tag to show conditional content based on contacts' language settings. |
*|MC_LANGUAGE_LABEL|* | Displays the plain-text language for a particular contact. All languages are written in English, so if your contact's language is set to German, we'll display "German" instead of Deutsch. |
*|DATE:X|* | Displays the current date in a given format. Replace X with the format of your choice. For example, *|DATE:d/m/y|* would replace d with the day, m with the month, and y with the year. View a full reference of date options on the PHP website. The merge tag will display as the date the email is sent to the contact. |
*|LIST:RECENTX|* | Displays a list of links to recent emails sent to the audience indicated. Replace X with the number of emails to show. If you leave X blank, it will show 5. |
*|MC:SUBJECT|* | Displays the email's subject line. |
*|MC:TOC|* | Creates a linked table of contents in your email. |
*|MC:TOC_TEXT|* | Creates a table of contents in your email as plain-text. |
*|MC_PREVIEW_TEXT|* | Use this merge tag to generate preview text in a custom-coded email. For more detailed steps on how to use this merge tag, check out Edit Your Email's Subject Line, Preview Text, From Name, or From Email Address. |
*|POLL:RATING:x|* *|END:POLL|* | Creates a poll to record contacts' ratings of 1-10. Learn how to add a poll to your email. |
*|SURVEY|* | Creates a one-question survey with a set number of responses that contacts can choose from. Learn how to link a survey to your email. |
*|PROMO_CODE:[$store_id=x, $rule_id=x, $code_id=x]|* | Use this tag to include a promo code in an email. Replace the “x” variables in your Promo Code merge tag to specify what promo code to display. The $store_id tag identifies your connected store, and is set by the API. It defaults to the earliest connected store. You can retrieve store IDs via our API. The $rule_id tag indicates the conditions that must be met in order for a promo code to apply, and is set by the API. For example, your rule can set a specific discount for a promo code. You can retrieve rule IDs via our API. The $code_id tag identifies your promo code, and is set by the API. You can retrieve code IDs via our API. |
To quickly add RSS content to Regular, Plain-Text, and A/B test email types, use Feedblock RSS merge tags.
Pull RSS content into RSS emails with merge tags. You'll use different tags for different tasks. Use preformatted RSS tags as a simple solution, or customize your feed using channel and item tags.
Use these merge tags to display contacts’ information in your emails or default signup forms and response emails. The following list contains the most common merge tags used for personalization. To learn more about using merge tags to personalize your emails, read our Getting Started with Merge Tags article.
Merge tag | What it does |
---|---|
*|FNAME|* | Inserts your contact’s first name, if it's available, in your audience. |
*|LNAME|* | Inserts your contact’s last name, if it's available, in your audience. |
*|EMAIL|* | Inserts your contact’s email address. |
*|PHONE|* | Inserts your contact’s phone number, if it’s available, in your audience. |
*|ADDRESS|* | Inserts your contact’s address, if it’s available, in your audience. |
These merge tags add details about your audience, contact information, current date, and more. They're commonly used in subject lines but can also be used in regular emails, forms, and response emails.
Merge tag | What it does |
---|---|
*|LIST:NAME|* | Inserts the name of your audience. |
*|LIST:COMPANY|* | Inserts the name of your company or organization that's listed in the Required email footer content for your audience. |
*|LIST:SUBSCRIBERS|* | Inserts the number of contacts in your audience in plain-text. |
*|USER:COMPANY|* | Inserts the company or organization name listed under Primary Account Contact info in your Mailchimp account. |
*|MC:DATE|* | Displays MM/DD/YYYY or DD/MM/YYYY based on your settings in your account Details. |
*|CURRENT_YEAR|* | Displays the current year. This is great if you include a copyright date in your email, because it will update automatically every year. |
These merge tags grab essential information about your audience from the Required email footer content in your Mailchimp account. While they're built for the footer of your Mailchimp emails, they can be used anywhere in your email.
Merge tag | What it does |
---|---|
*|UNSUB|* | Gives your contacts the opportunity to unsubscribe from your emails, which is required by law and our Terms of Use. If you add this merge tag, be sure to add it with the link tool to make it clickable. |
*|LIST:DESCRIPTION|* | Inserts your audience's permission reminder. |
*|EMAIL|* | Inserts your contact's email address. This is commonly used in the unsubscribe link, which shows contacts which email will be removed if they click the Unsubscribe link. |
*|HTML:LIST_ADDRESS_HTML|* | Inserts your mailing address and the "Add us to your address book" link that points to the vcard (.vcf) file with your address details. |
*|LIST:ADDRESS_VCARD|* | Inserts an "Add us to your address book" link to your email. |
*|LIST:ADDRESS_VCARD_HREF|* | Creates a link to your vcard (.vcf) file with your address details. |
*|LIST:NAME|* | Inserts the name of your audience. |
*|ABOUT_LIST|* | Creates a link to the About Your List page. |
*|LIST:UID|* | Inserts your audience's unique ID from your audience's hosted forms. |
*|LIST:URL|* | Inserts the website URL set in the Required Email Footer Content for this audience. |
*|LIST:ADDRESS|* | Inserts your company or organization postal mailing address or P.O. Box as plain text. |
*|LIST:ADDRESSLINE|* | Inserts your mailing address as plain text on a single line. |
*|LIST:PHONE|* | Inserts your company or organization telephone number. |
*|LIST:COMPANY|* | Inserts your company or organization name. |
*|LIST:EMAIL|* | Inserts your default "Reply-To" Email set in the Audience name and defaults for this audience. |
*|ABUSE_EMAIL|* | Inserts the email address located in the Required Email Footer Content for this audience. |
*|LIST:SUBSCRIBE|* | Inserts the URL for your audience's hosted signup form. |
*|UPDATE_PROFILE|* | Inserts a link to the contact's update profile page. |
*|FORWARD|* | Inserts the URL to your audience's Forward to a Friend form. |
These merge tags can be added to your audience's Confirmation thank you page and Final welcome email. They will not work on other pages or emails that are part of the signup process.
Merge tag | What it does |
---|---|
*|OPTIN_DATE|* | Displays the date your contact subscribed to your emails. Displays MM/DD/YYYY or DD/MM/YYYY based on the settings in your account Details. |
*|OPTIN_DATETIME|* | Displays the date and time your contact subscribed to your emails. Displays MM/DD/YYYY or DD/MM/YYYY based on the settings in your account Details. |
*|UNSUB|* | Gives your contacts the opportunity to unsubscribe from your emails, as required by law and our Terms of Use. If you customize your footer and add this merge tag, add it with the link tool because it needs to be clickable. |
*|UPDATE_PROFILE|* | Gives your contacts the opportunity to change their preferences. |
The following merge tags pull account information from the Administrator contact information in your Mailchimp account.
Merge tag | What it does |
---|---|
*|USER:COMPANY|* | Displays the company or organization name. |
*|USER:ADDRESS|* | Inserts the administrator address for the account on a single line. |
*|HTML:USER_ADDRESS_HTML|* | Inserts the administrator address for the account on multiple lines. |
*|USER:PHONE|* | Inserts the administrator telephone number for the account. |
*|USER:URL|* | Inserts the administrator's website URL. |
*|USER:UID|* | Displays the "u" parameter from your hosted Mailchimp audience forms. |
The following merge tags pull audience information from the Administrator contact information in your Mailchimp account.
Merge tag | What it does |
---|---|
*|LIST:NAME|* | Displays the name of your audience. |
*|LIST:COMPANY|* | Displays the name of your company or organization as set in the required email footer content for this audience. |
*|LIST:SUBSCRIBERS|* | Displays the number of contacts in your audience in text format. |
*|LIST:RECENT|* | Displays the 5 most recently sent emails for the audience you're sending to. This is great if you want to show examples of recent emails to people who are interested in subscribing. See an example. |
*|LIST:RECENTX|* | Displays clickable links to recent emails sent to your audience, where X is the number of emails to show. If a value for X isn't included, we'll pull in the 5 most recent emails by default. |
*|ARCHIVE_LINK_SHORT|* | Creates a shortened URL to your sent email. |
*|LIST:DESCRIPTION|* | Displays your audience's permission reminder. |
*|HTML:LIST_ADDRESS_HTML|* | Displays your audience's mailing address and the "Add us to your address book" link that points to the vcard (.vcf) file with your address details. |
*|LIST:ADDRESS_VCARD|* | Adds a standalone "Add us to your address book" link to your email. |
*|LIST:ADDRESS_VCARD_HREF|* | Creates a link in your email to point to your vcard (.vcf) file with your address details. |
*|ABOUT_LIST|* | Creates a link to the About Your List page. |
*|LIST_HOST|* | Displays the "http://yourcompany.us1.list-manage.com/" portion of your hosted form URLs. |
*|LIST:UID|* | Displays the unique ID for your audience. |
*|LIST:URL|* | Displays the website URL set under the required email footer content for this audience. |
*|LIST:ADDRESS|* | Inserts your audience's mailing address as plain text. |
*|LIST:PHONE|* | Inserts your company/organization telephone number as set under required email footer content. |
*|LIST:EMAIL|* | Inserts your default "Reply-To" Email under Audience Name and Defaults. |
*|ABUSE_EMAIL|* | Inserts the email address located under required email footer content. |
*|LIST:SUBSCRIBE|* | Adds the URL for your audience's hosted signup form. |
*|LIST:SUBSCRIBERS|*
You can use this to display a numeral within your text. For example, if you have 100 contacts and use this in your email:
*|LIST:SUBSCRIBERS|*
Happy customers are enjoying our newsletters
We'll display
"100 Happy customers are enjoying our newsletters."
There are a variety of merge tags you can use to connect Mailchimp with your social media accounts, including X (formerly Twitter), Tumblr, Instapaper and more.
Use these merge tags to include your X (formerly Twitter) feed in your email.
Merge tag | What it does |
---|---|
*|TWITTER:FULLPROFILE|* | Populates your email with your X (formerly Twitter) avatar, follower, tweet, and following counts; a follow link, and your latest tweets. |
*|TWITTER:PROFILE|* | Populates your email with your X (formerly Twitter) avatar, follower, tweet, and following counts; and a follow link. Doesn't include your latest tweets. |
*|TWITTER:PROFILEURL|* | Displays your direct X (formerly Twitter) profile URL. For example: http://www.twitter.com/mailchimp. |
*|TWITTER:TWEETS2|* | Lets you control the number of tweets to show in your email. Replace 2 with the number of tweets you'd like to display. If you don't include a number, we'll default to your five most recent tweets. Use this in combination with *|TWITTER:PROFILE|* to customize what you're sharing with your contacts. |
*|TWITTER:PROFILE:TWITTERUSERNAME|* | Inserts multiple X (formerly Twitter) profiles in your Mailchimp email. Replace TWITTERUSERNAME with the X (formerly Twitter) display name of any profile you want to show in your email. To work properly, the X (formerly Twitter) feed must be publicly available. |
*|TWITTER:TWEET|* | Adds a Tweet button to your email that allows contacts to share your email campaign page link. By default, the tweet includes your email's subject line, your X (formerly Twitter) handle, and a link to your email campaign page. |
*|TWITTER:TWEET [$text=my custom text here]|* | Includes your own custom text instead of the subject line of your newsletter in your Tweet. Also includes a link to your email campaign page. It's important to use the correct formatting for this tag: Use plain-text with no quotation marks, make sure [$text] is in lowercase, and keep the space between TWEET and [$text]. |
Embedded videos aren't supported in most email clients and are often removed. If you have videos you want to share, use our video merge tags for Blip.tv, YouTube, Vimeo, and Wistia.
For more information, check out our Add a Video to an Email article.
When you add conditional merge tags to an email, that content will display only to the contacts who meet the conditions you set. Conditional merge tags can be used in emails and in your audience's Final welcome email.
Use these merge tags when creating content via the Mailchimp API.
Merge tag | What it does |
---|---|
*|EMAIL_UID|* | Pulls in the "e" parameter from hosted form URLs, email tracking links, etc. |
*|UNIQID|* | Pulls in the $member->email->unique_id; (API function). If used in an email, this tag will pull in your contact's unique ID. It can also be used to create unique links for contacts. |
*|CAMPAIGN_UID|* | Displays the unique ID for your email. |
*|EVENT:PROPERTY|* | Pulls in the $member->email->events->property; (API function). If used in an event-triggered automated email, this tag will pull in the specific property value of an event. For example, let’s say you set up an automation triggered by the event meetup_registered, which has location properties for each city that hosts a meetup. If your content includes “Get ready, *|EVENT:location|* ", a contact who registered for a meetup in Atlanta will see “Get ready, Atlanta.” To learn more, check out our Track Outside Activity with Events article. |
The content encoding class of merge tags class allows you to modify how the content inside your merge tags is displayed.
Merge tag | What it does |
---|---|
*|HTML:YOUR_MERGETAG|* | Handles audience field contents as raw HTML and makes no changes. This is a great way to pull in URL parameter values from your audience and include them in your links. For example, if you have a merge tag, *|MYPARAMS|* , and a value includes something like ?id=1234&custom=awesome in your link, use http://www.yourwebsite.com/`*|HTML:MYPARAMS|*` to keep the value of your merge tag as-is: http://www.yourwebsite.com/?id=1234&custom=awesome. |
*|URL:YOUR_MERGETAG|* | Encodes the value of your merge tag for inclusion in a URL. For example, if you have an audience field with the merge tag, |QUERY|, and the value includes something like I love monkeys in your link, use http://www.yourwebsite.com/`*|URL:QUERY|*` to URL encode the value like: http://www.yourwebsite.com/I love monkeys. |
*|TITLE:YOUR_MERGETAG|* | Changes the value of your merge tag to title case (the first letter in each word is capitalized). |
*|LOWER:YOUR_MERGETAG|* | Changes the value of your merge tag to all lowercase. |
*|UPPER:YOUR_MERGETAG|* | Changes the value of your merge tag to all uppercase. |
Classic Automations are available to accounts that have previously created a classic automation. Use merge tags to display the total number of emails in the automation, display the next or previous subject lines in the automation, or even allow contacts to add or remove themselves from an automation.
Use these merge tags to automatically display the numbered position of the email within the automation, and more. They can be used in the subject line or body content for automation emails. They should not be used in regular email.
By default, the numbers will display as the digit (1, 2, 3, etc.). Add the following text before the end the merge tag to define how you want the number to display. As an example, you would type *|AUTOMATION:TOTALEMAILS(TEXT)|*. You don't need to replace the text in parentheses with a value.
(DIGIT) – displays a number (1, 2, 3, etc.)
(DIGITORDINAL) – displays a number as an ordinal (1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc.)
(TEXT) – displays the number as text (one, two, three, etc.)
(TEXTORDINAL) – displays the number as ordinal text (first, second, third, etc.)
Merge tag | What it does |
---|---|
*|AUTOMATION:TOTALEMAILS|* | Displays the total number of emails in the automation. |
*|AUTOMATION:CURRENTPOSITION|* | Displays the current position of the email within the automation. |
*|AUTOMATION:NEXTPOSITION|* | Displays the next position in the automation. |
*|AUTOMATION:PREVIOUSPOSITION|* | Displays the previous position in the automation. |
*|AUTOMATION:NEXTSUBJECT|* | Displays the subject line of the next email in the automation. |
*|AUTOMATION:PREVIOUSSUBJECT|* | Displays the subject line of the previous email in the automation. |
Use these merge tags to allow contacts to add or remove themselves from an automation. The Leave Automation merge tag can only be used in its associated automation.
Merge tag | What it does |
---|---|
*|AUTOMATION:WORKFLOWREMOVEURL|* | Adds a link to your automated email, so contacts can remove themselves from an automation. This doesn't remove contacts from the entire audience. |
*|AUTOMATION:WORKFLOWADDURL(campaign_id)|* | Adds a link to your email, so contacts can join an automation they're interested in. Be sure to replace the campaign id with the automation ID. |
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Use merge tags to insert dynamic content, like names or titles, in your emails. Learn about merge tags, where to access them, and how to create new ones.
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