Making only the link destination editable in MailChimp

Question

Is there a way to only allow a user to edit a link's destination, and not the link itself, using MailChimp's template language? There doesn't seem to be anything about this specific situation in their documentation.

For example:

<a href="link.html" target="_blank">
    <img src="button.gif" alt="Button Name" />
</a>

So I want to allow the user to ONLY edit "link.html" to point somewhere else, as the link button never changes.

Unfortunately, to make matters more complicated, there's an unknown number of links in the template (thanks to the use of mc:repeatable), so the solution cannot be hard-coded to a specific link.

Is this possible?

Answer 1

I ran into exactly the same issue today. It seems the individual href attribute cannot currently be made dynamic using merge tags in Mailchimp.

The best workaround I've found is to create an editable field (span) within the repeatable section that contains the link and button image.

<tr mc:repeatable>  
    <td width="600px">                      
        <span mc:edit="offer_link">       
             <a href="http://www.mywebsite.com" target="_blank">
                <img src="http://www.mywebsite.com/images/button.png" width="100" height="30" alt="view offer button">
            </a>
        </span>
    </td>
</tr>

When the sender creates the email from the template, they can click the '<>' icon in the editor to edit the html for the link. They'll need some very basic HTML knowledge but it'll do the trick.