Update Profile [link] not appearing in email to subscriber

Hi @martin2bwow,

As you’ve explained it, you’ve done nothing wrong. Without changing any settings, the email is supposed to look something like this: https://imgur.com/a/B4IsNmc

Do you know if your email host has a tendency to filter emails? Do they perhaps strip out certain links? Do you send other emails from your website? Do any of the other links in that email work?

Let me know.

Thank you,
Kevin.

Hi and many thanks for your very prompt reply.

Well, my email platform (Thunderbird) is fully equipped and normally displays everything in html etc. I just checked website notifications sent by email to me. I don’t get much: WordPress updates show html links; new blogs are fully featured. Contact form doesn’t have rich text / html capacity, and when my website sends them to me my email doesn’t convert urls to links, so it appears as plain text.

Can’t see any indication my email software or website are stripping anything out. Should mention my colleague tested the ‘update profile’ option too and received the same plain text email using a different set-uo. Also, in the yikes email, ‘this email was sent from <url>’ comes through as plain text, not a link. Not sure if that was as intended. However, at the bottom of the yikes ‘update profile’ email, your EasyForms & Yikes urls appear as html links.

Cheers

Martin

• This reply was modified 6 years, 4 months ago by martin2bwow.

Hi Martin,

That’s very strange: the URLs that we’re dynamically replacing are being deleted(?) but the URLs that are hardcoded into the emails are working… I’ve never seen this before!

I would suggest messing around with it a bit. The first thing you can do is try to change some link text (i.e. the text between the [link] tags). See if anything changes. You can also try putting your own URLs in the email just to see what happens.

Another thing you can do is to copy the source of the email and paste it here (right click the email and choose “Inspect Element”). This can get a bit messy so let me know if you have any more questions about it.

If you’re familiar with PHP we have a filter that lets you customize the email body via code.

That would look something like this:

add_filter( 'yikes-mailchimp-update-email-content', 'customize_update_profile_email', 10, 2 );

function customize_update_profile_email( $email_body, $update_url ) {
	return 'this is my own email body! And the profile update url is: ' . $update_url . 'Update Profile</a>';
}

Cheers,
Kevin.

Many thanks Kevin.

Here’s what I’ve got so far. Tried toggling the ‘view message body as’ setting in Thunderbird between html and plain text. In plain text, the Update Profile link reappears, but is displayed as <https://caterfly.co.uk/&gt; – our home page url, brackets included, and no Mailchimp link.

Looking at the email source code below – and scrolling to the bottom, this matches the above – no Mailchimp link inserted, for some reason just using the website home page url. I wonder how your plugin pulls in the update profile link from Mailchimp and wonder whether there is a problem there?

Return-path: <[email protected]>
Envelope-to: [email protected]
Delivery-date: Wed, 18 Jul 2018 18:08:54 +0100
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	for <[email protected]>; Wed, 18 Jul 2018 18:08:52 +0100 (BST)
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X-Barracuda-Envelope-From: [email protected]
X-Barracuda-Effective-Source-IP: cloud12.unlimitedwebhosting.co.uk[149.255.60.160]
X-Barracuda-Apparent-Source-IP: 149.255.60.160
Received: by cloud12.unlimitedwebhosting.co.uk (Postfix, from userid 11712)
	id 40AA8BB707B; Wed, 18 Jul 2018 18:08:51 +0100 (BST)
To: [email protected]
Subject: MailChimp Profile Update
X-PHP-Script: caterfly.co.uk/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php for 82.12.134.220
X-ASG-Orig-Subj: MailChimp Profile Update
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Date: Wed, 18 Jul 2018 17:08:51 +0000
From: =?UTF-8?Q?Martin_=26_Fran=C3=A7ois_at_Caterfly?=
	<[email protected]>
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
X-Mailer: PHPMailer 5.2.22 (https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer)
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	---- ---------------------- --------------------------------------------------
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<p>Greetings,</p>
<p>A request has been made to update your MailChimp account profile information. To do so, including subscribing to our new lists for The Change Platform and for occasional news, please use the following link: <a href="https://caterfly.co.uk/"></a>
<p>If you did not request this update, please disregard this email.</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>This email was sent from: https://caterfly.co.uk
<p>Thanks and warm regards</p>
<p>Martin & Fran?§ois</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p style="font-size: 13px; margin-top: 5em;"><em>This email was generated by the <a href="https://www.www.ads-software.com/plugins/yikes-inc-easy-mailchimp-extender/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Easy Forms for MailChimp</a> plugin, created by <a href="https://www.yikesinc.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">YIKES Inc.</a></em></p>

Thoughts? Cheers, Martin

[moderator note: please use the CODE button instead of BLOCKQUOTE]

• This reply was modified 6 years, 4 months ago by Steven Stern (sterndata).
• This reply was modified 6 years, 4 months ago by Steven Stern (sterndata).

Hi Kevin & co

Was just reminding myself how Mailchimp update profile links work. Of course, each link is unique to each subscriber / list. What I hadn’t appreciated is “For this reason, the *|UPDATE_PROFILE|* merge tag only works after a campaign is sent to your list.”

https://mailchimp.com/help/add-an-update-profile-link/

I’m working with a new list, no campaign yet so maybe that’s what’s causing the missing link / default homepage url. I’ll in the next day or 2 to try switching to another dummy list & dummy campaign to test that theory, see if the missing link turns up.

Would that explain the behaviour you’re seeing?

Cheers Martin

• This reply was modified 6 years, 4 months ago by martin2bwow.

Hi Martin,

Sorry I didn’t get back to you last week I must’ve missed your last reply.

I’m not sure the update profile URL requires a campaign as I’ve made test lists without sending any campaigns and am able to update my profile. However, I’ve read the MailChimp article and they definitely state that a campaign is needed if you want to use the update profile merge tag.

The way we generate the update profile link is to fetch the list’s subscribe URL, change the subscription endpoint from /subscribe to /profile, and then add the subscriber’s unique ID as a query arg with the key e.

This will look something like this: https://freddiesjokes.usX.list-manage.com/profile?u=8d3a3db4d97663a9074efcc16&id=xxxx&e=xxxx.

The only way I can see this failing is if our API calls are failing (i.e. we cannot access the list data or the data point subscribe_url_long is empty). If our API calls are successful, there will always be a URL in the href field.

Have you turned on debugging for our plugin? (https://yikesplugins.com/support/knowledge-base/debug-settings/) This will let you know if the API calls are failing. Can you try turning on debugging and running another update profile email test?

Let me know the results.

Thank you,
Kevin.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 4 months ago by yikesitskevin.

Many thanks. I’ll check again over next couple of days.

Hi Kevin

I’m picking this back up again. I tried a few things without success.

Debugger is ON, yet no errors have been recorded.

Whatever I do to play around with the custom ‘update profile’ message, yields the same results. [url] works fine. All of [Link] Any text [/link] comes up empty. When I view my email in ‘plain text’ instead of ‘original html’ I see that all of – [link] Any Text [/link] – is replaced by the homepage url, and when I view the email’s ‘message source’ I can see the [link] bits replaced by <a href=”our homepage url”…

I did send out a dummy test campaign to a segement of this list (me) in Mailchimp, so according to what we’d read from Mailchimp earlier (see further above), the profile links should be established and available to your API.

What next?

Just to add: I didn’t try the PHP filter suggestion above. PHP isn’t really my thing, and it seemed a step too far. However I would happily follow instructions if you still felt it might help. Would I, for example, paste the code above into one of the plugin’s PHP files ie at WordPress/plugins/Yikes… ? I have access to the site’s control panel so that’s no barrier.

Just noticed this topic has been marked ‘resolved’ – it isn’t. Cheers.

Hey Martin,

Sorry – not sure why it’s marked as resolved. Probably because it’s an older ticket.

Can you copy and paste what your message looks like from the Form Builder’s custom messages section?

Also, we replace [url] with the site’s homepage URL… I don’t know but I’m wondering if that has something to do with it…

Many thanks Kevin

Here’s the code version of the Update Profile form:

Greetings,

A request has been made to update your MailChimp account profile information (the software that helps us manage our mailing lists). To do so, including subscribing to our new lists for The Change Platform and for occasional news, please use the following link: [link] Click here to update Mailchimp profile [/link] < if this link doesn't display please <a href="https://caterfly.co.uk/contact/">contact</a> us.

If you did not request this update, please disregard this email.

&nbsp;

This email was sent from:[url]

Thanks and warm regards

Martin & Fran?ois

&nbsp;
<p style="font-size: 13px; margin-top: 5em;"><em>This email was generated by the <a href="https://www.www.ads-software.com/plugins/yikes-inc-easy-mailchimp-extender/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Easy Forms for MailChimp</a> plugin, created by <a href="https://www.yikesinc.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">YIKES Inc.</a></em></p>

When it appears in my email:
Greetings,

A request has been made to update your MailChimp account profile information (the software that helps us manage our mailing lists). To do so, including subscribing to our new lists for The Change Platform and for occasional news, please use the following link: < if this link doesn’t display please contact us.

If you did not request this update, please disregard this email.

This email was sent from: https://caterfly.co.uk

Thanks and warm regards

Martin & Fran?ois

This email was generated by the Easy Forms for MailChimp plugin, created by YIKES Inc.

Cheers

Martin

• This reply was modified 6 years, 2 months ago by martin2bwow.
• This reply was modified 6 years, 2 months ago by martin2bwow.
• This reply was modified 6 years, 2 months ago by martin2bwow.

In case the message just posted didn’t get past the moderator, I was struggling to replicate the outputs when posting here – form code posted and email as received in html.

Cheers

Hi @yikesitskevin, wondered if you’d had an more thoughts on this?

Cheers

Hi @martin2bwow,

Kevin is away on vacation right now, but he will be back next week.

Thank you,
-Tracy