Add the audio of your articles to a Mailchimp newsletter
Mailchimp will not play an audio player inside an email, and no mail client does. What works is a button to a page that plays the audio, with the play counted under its origin, the newsletter.
As soon as a newsroom has added audio to its articles, the request comes in: can we put the audio in our Mailchimp campaign? The answer begins with a technical no, which is not specific to Mailchimp, and then opens onto a simple method that fits in a single block of the editor. Understanding the no saves you an hour of fighting it.
Why a player will not play in Mailchimp
An email is not a web page. Mail clients (Gmail, Outlook, Apple Mail and the webmails) disable almost anything that could run inside a message: no embedded player, no script, often not even the HTML audio tag. It is a security rule, not an oversight on Mailchimp's part, and it will not change. A custom code block holding a player gives the recipient, at best, an empty area, and at worst a message cut short by the filter. What does cross every mail client, on the other hand, is a link. So the right move is not to make the audio play inside the campaign, but to place a link to a page that does play it.
The block that works: a button to the listening page
Every audio has a page that plays only that audio. Not the hub that strings together all the account's audios, not an iframe to embed: a standalone page, with the article title, the player, a link to the full article, and the site's branding (or WeDispatch's, depending on the plan). That is exactly what Mailchimp knows how to relay. In the campaign editor, drop in a Button block (or a Text block with a link), label it plainly ("Listen to the article"), and paste the listening page address into the link field. Nothing else to configure: no code block, no extra domain to authenticate beyond what Mailchimp already asks for your sends.
One layout tip, specific to email: put the button high in the campaign, near the article title, where a hurried reader decides whether to open or to listen. A listen link buried under three paragraphs will not be seen.
Matching the right audio to the right campaign
The listening page reads what already exists, without rebuilding anything: no synthesis, no cost. For each article featured in the letter, you take the address of its listening page and paste it into the matching button. The page follows the same access rules as the rest of the site: an audio that is not ready is not served and says so, the page always serves the current version of the audio (never an old one), and if the article sits behind a subscriber lock, it plays the excerpt and states it clearly, as it would for an anonymous visitor. To wire the production of these audios onto an existing site, the three routes (plugin, feed, API) are set out on our audio on WordPress page, and they apply whatever tool publishes your articles.
The play is counted, under its origin
A play that comes from a campaign is only useful if you can tell it from the others. You can. When an audio is played from this listening page, the play is filed under the newsletter origin in the account's Plays screen, next to the other origins (the player on article pages, the daily edition, the public audio page). The origin is written by the server when it builds the page, never guessed at playback.
Two points bear on trust, and both are verifiable. Counting is anonymous by design: no IP address stored, no cookie, no listener identifier. We know a play came from the letter, never who made it or from which inbox. "No personal data about your readers" is not a promise, it is a fact when nothing personal is written. And the podcast feed is not among the counted origins: 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 it is not shown. What you read in the listening analytics is therefore what your campaign actually brought in as audio, kept separate from the rest.
What it changes for a campaign
A newsletter lives on opens and clicks. A listen button 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 commute. And because the play is counted under its origin, you can see, edition after edition, whether the listen link deserves a better spot in the next campaign. The general mechanism of a link inside a letter, and its limits, are described in the article on audio in a newsletter. The link costs one block in your Mailchimp template; the rest, the page that plays the audio and the counter that files the play in the right place, already exists.
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