Create Unique URLs for Subscribers

If you manage personalized content on your site or in your database, you may want to share a link with subscribers that's specific to their account with you. For example, you might share a personalized coupon with a single recipient. As long as you store unique identifier information for each subscriber in your database, you can do this with merge tags.

In this article, you'll learn how to create an audience field and merge tag for a subscriber's unique link ID, which can be added to any valid URL in your email campaign.

Before you start

Here are some things to know before you begin this process.

• Make sure you're familiar with how merge tags work in Mailchimp. To learn more, check out Getting Started with Merge Tags.
• When a subscriber forwards an email campaign, all unique URLs remain as-is. This could cause issues with your reports. To avoid these issues, check out Add the Forward to a Friend Link.

Create link ID in audience

First, you'll need to create a link ID field in your audience.

To create a link ID field, follow these steps.

1. Create a new text field in your audience and label the field and merge tag to something like "LINKID".
   
2. From your database, export email address and unique identifier data for each of your contacts into a CSV or tab delimited text file.
3. Import the file with the auto-update option turned on.
4. Map the imported information to the corresponding fields in your audience.

After the import is complete, you can send emails with unique URLs for your recipients.

Add link ID merge tag to your email

After you create a link ID field in your audience and import the unique data, you can add a unique URL link to your email campaign.

To add a unique URL to your email campaign, follow these steps.

1. Navigate to the Content section of the campaign builder and click Edit Design.
2. Add a link to your content. In the URL, include the merge tag for the unique identifier field from your audience.
   
3. Preview your campaign and view live merge info to make sure the unique identifier works correctly.
   

Conditional merge tags don't work with unique URLs. If a conditional merge tag is used in a URL, the URL will break when the campaign is sent to the audience.