Mailchimp/Mandrill and Handlebars changing preview text

Question

I'm working with MailChimps Mandrill to send transnational emails with handlebars. The whole setup is done and the emails send absolutely fine - but when they arrive they still have the default Mailchimp template string for the preview text that look like:

|*MC_PREVIEW*|

Is anyone aware of a way to remove this from showing or change it? Currently I have to go into the code of the email in Mandrill and remove the block of code myself - wondering if there is a way to do that from Mailchimps end at all as it's a bit tedious every time an email template is updated and exported back to Mandrill to go in and remove it again.

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

I've had this issue, and what helped me was first changing the Mandrill default merge tags to Handlebars, then re-exporting the templates from Mailchimp back to Mandrill.

This converts all *|Mailchimp|* style merge tags in the code of the email into {{handlebars}}-style.

Important Edit:

If your Mailchimp templates are using handlebars to define the merge tags, these will get escaped like so:

\{{mergeTag}}

You will either have to manually delete these backslashes to get the tags to work again, OR reformat the merge tags in Mailchimp to be in the *|MAILCHIMP|* style before exporting.

If you choose the latter, when converting a camelCase merge tag to Mailchimp style, just put it in all caps.

E.g. {{mergeTag}} becomes *|MERGETAG|*