MailChimp is brilliant for email newsletters but…

MailChimp is undoubtedly my favourite Newsletter software. Im sure the folks at MailChimp would rather we saw them as an “integrated marketing platform”, but it certainly does a top job with email newsletters.

It just works. You can insert signup forms into your website, to save your admin team from having to transcribe printouts and emails – Nice. The system produces meaningful stats for the email campaigns you send out.

How to print your MailChimp Newsletter

All good right up to the point that you want a nicely printed version of your newsletter to hang on the Office or Club notice board.

Doing a ‘clean-skin’ print isn’t built-in.

I battled trying to find a solution to printing MailChimp emails for ages, then in a rare moment of brilliance I realised how to do this easily.

This technique removes the header and footers and other pesky content designed for an email that you don’t want in your printed version.

Here’s my quick and dirty solution to turning that nasty looking MailChimp email into a print-worthy document:

1. Find your campaign URL

This is the link to the MaliChimp email campaign. I find mine in the Campaign Details tab. It starts with https://mailchi.mp/...

2. Display it in a browser

Click on your Campaign URL, or paste it into your browser to display your email as HTML. This will also display along with those pesky Subscribe, Past issues Translate and RRS buttons at the top. At the page bottom the MailChimp footer is also displayed

3. Display the page code

Don’t fear! We don’t need to understand the code; the browser will help us find the elements we need to remove.

I use Chrome, so if you are using another browser else you’ll need to translate these instructions to suit your browser.

Right-mouse click on the Subscribe button, then click Inspect

We’re now looking at the code that generates that button.

4. Remove the unwanted page elements

In my world, a Chrome panel opens with the page HTML code for the subscribe button highlighted in a grey background – see below

Click the 3 dot menu on the left-hand side, then select Delete Element

Hazar! The Subscribe button disappears from your browser display!

Repeat the process for the other unnecessary header and footer elements until you have a clean HTML page

5. ‘Print’ to convert your cleaned page into a PDF

Now we have a cleaned page we just need to convert it into a PDF document.
Then click Ctrl P (windows) or Cmd P (for Mac)  to force the Print dialog to display
In the Print dialog Destination, select Save as PDF

The browser will transform and then save your de-cluttered web page as a PDF. All the ugly elements you don’t want to print are gone!

Now you can then print that PDF to your printer for a clean version of your MailChimp email.

Save the PDF so you can email it later as a cleaned version of your newsletter.

Voila – The Quick and Dirty way to create a clean printable PDF of your MailChimp newsletter