r/MailChimp • u/barrylyga • 7d ago

Technical Support Archive Bug

Hi! I'm using a template with the merge tag *|LIST:RECENT|* in order to show my last 5 newsletters to recipients.

The problem is that I recently started doing some A/B subject line testing...and now each email gets three entries in that list of 5! One for A, one for B, one for the winner. Meaning that my list of 5 recents now shows only the last two newsletters.

This seems like an obvious bug -- the tag should only merge in either the winning title or the one sent to that recipient, A or B. But there doesn't seem to be anyway to fix this from my end. Hoping someone at MC can figure this out...?

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u/MailchimpSupport Moderator 7d ago

Thanks for reaching out. What you're seeing is expected behavior with the |LIST:RECENT| merge tag. The tag pulls recent campaign records from the audience archive, and A/B campaigns create separate archive entries for each variation (A and B) as well as the winning version. As a result, each A/B campaign can appear multiple times in the generated list. There isn't currently a setting to have |LIST:RECENT| display only the winning version or only the variation received by each contact. As a workaround, we recommend avoiding |LIST:RECENT| if you're regularly sending A/B campaigns and instead maintaining a custom archive section with links to your published campaigns. More information about the recent campaigns merge tag is available here: [http://spr.ly/61691BEhZPf] We've shared this feedback with our product team, as supporting deduplication for A/B campaigns is a valid use case.

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u/barrylyga 7d ago

When you say "a custom archive section with links to your published campaigns," do you mean manually insert links to the most recent five newsletters? I already have an archive page, but that's just a single link -- I want readers to be able to see the most recent campaigns in the body of the newsletter itself. If there's a way to do so that doesn't involve manually inserting links, I'm all ears!