I am often asked by clients if they can send an attachment with a Mailchimp campaign. For example, a client asked this morning “can you tell us if we can attach a PDF to the EDM schedule that we are currently sending out through Mailchimp? We are trying and cannot do it”.
My response to the client was “no you can’t include an attachment on a campaign. What you can do however is host the PDF in Mailchimp and add a link to the PDF in the campaign”. Essentially what you need to do is store your file somewhere that is accessible via a URL and then as a link to your campaign to the file (you could always use a button in your campaign which links to the file).
Besides hosting your files with Mailchimp you can always save your file or files to Dropbox, Google Drive or similar and then add a link to the file in your Mailchimp campaign.
Here is a list of file types that you may store in the Mailchimp file manager. Keep in mind that the maximum filesize for each file is 10 MB.
| File Type | Extensions |
|---|---|
| Text files | .txt, .csv, .log, .css, .ics |
| Image files | .jpg, .jpe, .jpeg, .gif, .png, .bmp, .psd, .tif, .tiff, .svg, .indd, .ai, .eps |
| Document files | .doc, .docx, .rtf, .odt, .ott, .pdf, .pub, .pages, .mobi, .epub |
| Audio files | .mp3, .m4a, .m4v, .wma, .ogg, .flac, .wav, .aif, .aifc, .aiff, |
| Video files | .mp4, .mov, .avi, .mkv, .mpeg, .mpg, .wmv |
| Spreadsheet files | .xls, .xlsx, .ods, .numbers |
| Presentation files | .odp, .ppt, .pptx, .pps, .key |
| Archive files | .zip, .tar, .gz, .7z, .vcf |
2018 – can you now?
No. Mailchimp doesn’t allow sending files as attachments with email messages. Services such as Gmail are becoming more strict than ever about not showing messages that are larger than 102kb meaning that email messages with attachments have a smaller chance of being opened and read.
I can link my campaign to a pdf but the pdf loses it’s page display settings. How can I get my linked pdf to hold the page display settings?
@Mary, all that Mailchimp does is upload the PDF file and store it. When the reader of your campaign clicks the PDF link in your campaign they are downloading the PDF from Mailchimp. It is therefore very unlikely that the PDF display issues are related to Mailchimp. What software are you using to initially save the PDF?
I no longer want the link to be active. How do I delete it from MailChimp storage? I deleted the campaign but the link in the sent email is still active.
Kris, merely delete the file from the Mailchimp content manager.
Hi Gary,
From what I understand, deleting the file from the Mailchimp content manager doesn’t remove the content from the “cloud”.
i.e. Recipients of a campaign can still click the link and access a Mailchimp link to a PDF sent in a previous campaign even though that PDF file was deleted in the Mailchimp content manager.
Please correct me if I’m wrong.
Cheers,
Chris
Hi Chris, you are correct.