One email, adapted to membership status

Question

I frequently send emails to a large mailing list. In this mailing list there a roughly two categories of contacts: 1) members 2) non members

Ideally all would receive the same email, but I'd like to include a block/message ("the block") in the email for non members that encourages them to either renew their membership or sign up for membership.

I currently use mailchimp to design my emails. If I were to create "the block" in mailchimp, I'd have to create a second version of the mail that doesn't include "the block" and split my mailing list in two parts so that everyone receives what I want them to receive. To me this sounds like a sub optimal solution and one that is prone to go wrong at some point.

Would it be possible to optimise this using CiviCRM? I know that Civi currently copies my organisations address details at the end of each email. Would it be possible to create a block such as described above that Civi automatically inserts in emails to non-members, but leaves out in emails to members without having to send multiple emails?

If so, is it possible to make such a block look nice? (Currently the address details that Civi inserts look really bare). My website is a drupal website.

Thanks in advance for your help. I'm also open to any other suggestions you might have!

Elise

Answer 1

We have a setup like this. It's possible if you're comfortable with the smarty template language. If you enable the smarty email setting, you can put limited code into your email template that, say, does an API call to see if someone is a member. Then display the appropriate 'block' depending on the result. This works, but is vulnerable to users breaking it if they edit the template. I'm certainly interested to see what other suggestions people have.