Merge tags in Mailchimp help to automatically populate various information into an email campaign. Merge tags may be used for inserting your blog post content into a campaign through to personalising an email with the recipients first name.
A question I get asked often in Mailchimp training is how to set a default value for a field that will be used by the merge tag should a value not exist in the field for the subscriber. As an example, say we want to start the email message with Hi *|FNAME|* (this will insert the value entered for the subscriber in the First Name field) but not all subscribers have provided their first name. Luckily it’s really easy to set a merge tag default value for fields to be used in a case just like this.
How to set a default merge tag value
Follow these instructions to set a default merge tag value for a field (in this example we set a default for the First Name field):
- From the Mailchimp dashboard click the list where you want to set the default value for a field.
- Click Signup forms.
- Click the Select button next to General forms.
- Click the First Name field.
- In the default merge tag value field, enter the text you want to appear for the merge tag (if there is no first name assigned to a subscriber).
That’s all there is to it. The text entered into the default merge tag value field will appear if the subscriber hasn’t supplied their first name.
Would this work if you wanted to default value to be blank (just a space).
having issue from a mailchimp campaign that autoposts to facebook. Using the FNAME merge field which appears on the facebook post. Is there any way to get it not to show?
Clay, did you ever get an answer to that? I’ve been scouring the Internet and can’t find this addressed anywhere. It seems like a critical problem with sharing a post with Facebook or Twitter, because the link goes to a page with a bunch of unmerged merge tags (so the actual text of the field name appears, like |FNAME|, instead of the data that is properly swapped when going out as e-mail).
Never mind. The instructions above are actually the solution to the problem I was having. It didn’t occur to me that the problem was a bad default value, because every member of my list has a valid First Name. however, in the web view, when linked from a generic source, like a Facebook post, it doesn’t have the visitors First Name and uses the default, which, if not set, will appear as <> or something equally ugly.
Just set the Default Merge Tag Value, as defined above, or Lists -> click the dropdown next the List that will be used for the particular campaign -> Settings -> List fields and *|MERGE|* tags -> set the default value for each Merge tag.