Ever wondered why your email campaign's message is not fully displayed when it lands in your contact's inbox and why the "View entire message" link is displayed in the email? It's because Gmail has come up with the practice of clipping emails.
Why Gmail clips your emails
Every email consists of text, image, HTML that is used to style your content, URLs, tracking code, and more. All these are put together in code to form your email message. To determine your email's size, Gmail will measure every character of the code. If the size exceeds 102 KB, the email will be clipped, and the recipient will instead see the "View entire message" link.
You will face the following issues when your email gets clipped:
- The tracking code that calculates the open rate is also cut off, so marketers won't be able to measure the performance of their campaign.
- The unsubscribe link will not be displayed, and you have to click "View entire message" to see it along with the message. This means your clipped email will not comply with the CAN-SPAM act and your emails might face deliverability issues.
When your email will get clipped
Your emails will be clipped during the following scenarios:
Your email has a lot of content
If your email campaign has more content than necessary, your email's code size will increase. If the size is more than 102 KB, your email will be clipped. Marketers often end up in this situation when they try to address too many topics in a single email.
You copy and paste content from a different source or a website
When you copy some content from a website or a word processing program and paste it into your campaign, the hidden formatting code of the content will also be added to your campaign. This will increase the code size of your campaign, and, if it exceeds 102KB, your email will be clipped.
You send multiple test emails with the same subject line
Gmail will combine emails with the same subject line into a single thread. When you send multiple test emails with the same subject line, Gmail will combine your emails into one single email and the email message will become too big. This will force Gmail to clip your email.
How to avoid Gmail clipping
We know that it takes a lot of effort to design a captivating email. You can follow these techniques to prevent your emails from being clipped:
- When crafting your campaign, provide crisp and relevant information. If you want to provide additional information, you can direct the recipient to your website or relevant websites by using hyperlinks.
- Choose a minimalistic email design and try to avoid heavy graphic content. You can add simple images that support your message. This approach will help you reduce the code size of your email.
- Don't copy and paste content from other websites and word processing programs directly. You must paste as plain text to remove the formatting style used in the source website or word processing program. This will prevent unwanted code from getting added to your email.
- Don't send multiple test emails with the same subject line.
- Before sending your email campaign to your contacts, test it by sending it to your Gmail account to identify rendering issues.
When you design your email campaign, focus on offering content that is necessary and relevant to the recipient. Don't try to address multiple topics in a single email and don't burden the recipients with too much content. This not only prevents your emails from being clipped, it also keeps recipients engaged.