Confused about if-then-else with Mailmerge Addon

I’m wanting to include one of two sentences in my email depending on the content of a “Status” field, which will be either N or R.
The syntax I tried was {{Status |N|Thank you very much for joining our Society. |Thank you for renewing your membership of our Society}}
However, all the resulting emails contained the second text…
Could anyone tell me what I am doing wrong please?