How to put a live waitlist ticket in Mailchimp emails

What you’ll build

• A ticket of two images side by side: the subscriber’s spot in line, such as #784, and how many friends joined with their link, out of a goal such as 5.
• Optionally, a referral leaderboard image for updates and newsletters, with the reader’s own row highlighted when they’re in the top eight.

DynaMail draws both images each time an inbox loads them, from the numbers Lineup keeps. You paste the ticket into your emails once; nothing in the email changes after that.

What you need

• A free DynaMail account. Lineup is free, and its ticket images are ordinary DynaMail widgets you can restyle in the editor.
• A waitlist tool that sends webhooks: LaunchList on the Grow plan or higher, Waitlister on the Growth plan or higher, or anything that can post JSON to a URL, such as Tally, Zapier or your own backend.
• Your waitlist subscribers in a Mailchimp audience, with the same email addresses, and room for one more audience field.

Set it up, step by step

1. 1

   Create your waitlist ticket

   In the DynaMail dashboard, open Lineup and start a new waitlist ticket. Under Your ticket, enter your product’s name, how many spots a referral moves someone up (250 by default), the referral goal (5 by default) and the reward for reaching it, such as “Early access”. Lineup creates three widgets from this: the spot, the friends bar and the leaderboard.

   Subscribers’ names on the leaderboard stay off unless you turn them on.

2. 2

   Connect your waitlist tool

   Under Connect your waitlist tool, pick your tool and copy the webhook URL Lineup shows you. It’s private to this waitlist; if it leaks, you can rotate it in the waitlist’s settings.

   LaunchList (Grow plan or higher): click Plugins in the sidebar, then Create a webhook, and add the URL. LaunchList sends a new_user event for each signup and an email_verify event when someone confirms their address.

   Waitlister (Growth plan or higher): go to Integrations in the sidebar, click Manage on the Webhooks card, enter the URL, and select new sign-ups, referrals completed and subscriber unsubscribed.

   Anything else: have it post each signup as JSON to the URL, with the subscriber’s ID or email and the referral code or referrer they came with. Lineup’s field map tells it where those are in your payload.

   Then tell Lineup whether your tool confirms email addresses. If it does, a referral counts once the friend confirms; if not, it counts at signup. Click Send test signup to see a test referral land, and use Import existing signups (CSV) if people joined before you connected Lineup.

3. 3

   Add a LINEUPID field to your audience

   In Mailchimp, click Audience, open the three-dot menu and choose Audience fields and merge tags. Click Create a new field, name it “Lineup ID”, pick a text data type, enter LINEUPID as its merge tag, and save. Mailchimp merge tags are at most 10 characters, in capitals.

4. 4

   Fill the field with the CSV join

   Export the audience: click Audience, then Export audience and Export CSV. Mailchimp emails you when the export is ready; it can be a ZIP with one CSV per contact type, and the subscribed file is the one you need.

   In Lineup, under Put the ticket in your emails, open the Mailchimp tab and drop the CSV into the CSV join. Your browser sends Lineup only the email column, gets back each subscriber’s lineup_id, and saves a copy of your file with a lineup_id column added.

   Import that file back: click Audience, then Add contacts and Import contacts, and upload it. Check Update any existing contacts, and when you match columns, match lineup_id to the Lineup ID field. An import doesn’t change anyone’s marketing status.

   People who join after the export don’t have a lineup_id in Mailchimp yet, so run the join again before each send. Direct Mailchimp sync, which fills the field as people join, is coming.

5. 5

   Paste the ticket into a Code block

   In the new builder, click a Code block or drag one into your layout, and paste the ticket in the Code menu. In the legacy builder, drag in the Code block, paste, and click Save & Close. The Image block will not do: in the new builder it only uploads or browses the content studio.

   Ticket (Mailchimp)

   Copy

   <table role="presentation" width="600" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" border="0" style="border-collapse:collapse;">
     <tr>
       <td width="372" style="padding:0;"><img src="https://img.dynamail.io/widgets/YOUR-SPOT-WIDGET-ID/render.png?recipient=*|LINEUPID|*" width="372" height="236" alt="Your spot on the YOUR-PRODUCT waitlist" style="display:block;border:0;" /></td>
       <td width="228" style="padding:0;"><img src="https://img.dynamail.io/widgets/YOUR-FRIENDS-WIDGET-ID/render.png?recipient=*|LINEUPID|*&target=5" width="228" height="236" alt="Friends who joined with your link" style="display:block;border:0;" /></td>
     </tr>
   </table>

   Lineup’s setup page gives you this snippet with your three widget IDs and your goal filled in. Here, YOUR-SPOT-WIDGET-ID, YOUR-FRIENDS-WIDGET-ID and YOUR-LEADERBOARD-WIDGET-ID stand for them, and 5 is an example goal. *|LINEUPID|* is the field’s merge tag, so each subscriber’s lineup_id lands in both image URLs. A lineup_id is only lowercase letters and digits, so it needs no URL encoding. For a dark email, add &scheme=dark to both URLs.

   For an update or newsletter, the leaderboard goes in a second Code block:

   Leaderboard

   Copy

   <img src="https://img.dynamail.io/widgets/YOUR-LEADERBOARD-WIDGET-ID/render.png?recipient=*|LINEUPID|*" width="600" height="528" alt="YOUR-PRODUCT referral leaders" style="display:block;border:0;max-width:100%;height:auto;" />

6. 6

   Test with a real subscriber

   Mailchimp doesn’t fill contact merge tags in test emails, so a test send shows the ticket without a number. Open Preview, turn on Enable live merge tag info, and pick a subscriber from your import; the ticket should show their spot. Mailchimp also suggests sending a live email to a small test segment.

   In Lineup, Check the merge tag takes a value, such as a lineup_id from your subscriber list, and shows the images that reader will get. Paste an unfilled tag there too, to see the ticket a reader gets when the tag fails: it has no number.

What subscribers will see

Their spot and friends as of the moment their inbox loaded the images. Apple Mail can load images when the email arrives and Gmail keeps its own copy, so reopening an old email may still show an old spot. Each new email asks DynaMail for the ticket when it’s opened, and DynaMail draws the current spot and marks the image not to be cached. Some inboxes, such as Gmail’s image proxy and Apple Mail Privacy Protection, can keep showing a copy they fetched earlier, so the number can lag.

Limits and privacy

• Image URLs carry the random lineup_id, never an email address.
• The CSV join sends only the email column, in batches, and Lineup keeps nothing from it; the file with lineup_id is assembled in your browser.
• A subscriber whose Lineup ID field is empty sees the ticket without a number, never someone else’s.