Putting audio in a newsletter: the listen link, and nothing else
No email client plays audio inside a message. What works is a link to a page that plays that one audio, and a listen counted with its 'letter' origin.
It is a request that comes up as soon as a newsroom has voiced its articles: "can we put the audio in our newsletter?" The honest answer starts with a technical no, then leads to a simple solution, as long as you understand why the no exists.
Why you do not "put" audio inside an email
An email is not a web page. Email clients (Gmail, Outlook, Apple Mail, and the webmails) disable almost anything that might run inside a message: no embedded audio player, no scripts, often not even HTML audio tags. That is a security rule, not an oversight, and it is not going to change. A publisher who drops a player into their letter gets, at best, an empty box, and at worst a message cut by the filter. What does cross every email client, on the other hand, is a link. So the right move is not to play the audio inside the email, but to put a link in it, pointing to a page that plays the audio.
The listen page for a single audio
For that, every audio has a page that plays only itself. Not the hub that strings together all of an account's audios, not an iframe to embed elsewhere: a standalone page, with the article title, the player, a link back to the full article, and the site's brand (or WeDispatch's, depending on the plan). It is exactly what you paste into a newsletter, whatever emailing tool you use, a Brevo, a Mailchimp, or a plain email sent by hand.
This page reads what already exists, rebuilding nothing: no synthesis, no cost. It follows the same access rules as the rest of the site. An audio that is not ready is not served, and the page says so without promising anything. It serves the current version of the audio, never an old one. And if the article sits behind a wall (subscribers only, say), the page plays the excerpt, as it would for an anonymous visitor, and says so clearly. The link is ready to paste, the recipient clicks, they listen: that is the whole journey. To wire all this onto an existing site, our page on audio on WordPress lays out the integration routes.
The listen is counted, with its origin
A listen that comes from a newsletter is only useful if you can tell it apart from the others. You can. When an audio is played from that listen page, the listen is counted with the "letter" origin in the account's Listens screen. Alongside it, the other origins: the player embedded in the site's article pages, the daily morning playlist, the account's public audio page. Each names a surface WeDispatch serves itself, and the origin is written by the server as it builds the page, never guessed at playback.
Two points are worth stating plainly, because they touch on trust. First, counting is anonymous by design: no IP address written, no cookie, no listener identifier. We know a listen came from the letter, never who made it or from which inbox. That is a verifiable argument, not a marketing promise: "no personal data about your readers" is a fact when nothing personal is written. Second, the podcast feed is not among the counted origins, and that is deliberate: its episodes go out as direct files to the listening app, which never passes through our counters. Showing it at zero would be false, so we do not show it.
What it changes for a newsletter
A newsletter lives on opens and clicks. A listen link adds a reason to click, for the reader who has no time to read the letter at their desk but would listen to it on the way. And because the listen is counted with its origin, the publisher sees, in their Listens screen, what their letter actually brought in as audio, separated from the rest. It is not a vanity figure: it is what lets you decide whether the listen link deserves a better spot in the next edition. The link costs one line of HTML in the letter's template; the rest, the page that plays the audio and the counter that files the listen in the right place, already exists.
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