How to stop GMAIL from clipping your email marketing design. Have you noticed that when you send emails to Gmail recipients that may contain images and HTML styling that it gets cut in half?
When looking at emails like this, you’ll see a little message at the bottom that says
[message clipped] - view entire message
This is Google deciding that your message is too large, so it truncates it down to half, giving the viewer the option to navigate to a new tab to view the full version.
As email marketers, this can be quite a nuisance as it means that our viewers may only see half of your email.
The problem is that Gmail set a very low threshold for clipping your email - this clipping kicks in for an email size of 102kb. So if your email has a couple of images inside it, without realising you could be triggering your email to be clipped.
How to avoid clipping
The first step is to keep large file sizes such as images down to an absolute minimum. When you have settled on your choice of images, the next step is to make sure that the file sizes are as small as they can be.
Firstly. Make sure that the pixel sizes aren’t bigger than they need to be, for example, an image spanning the entire width of your email shouldn’t be any larger than 600 pixels wide.
You can then use an image-optimising website such as tinypng.com to resave your files using compression. These two steps are vital in making sure that your images pass the test.
Step two is to keep the content of your email down to a minimum, and make sure that your email isn’t super long. So perhaps instead of putting lots of text on your emailer - just have a small amount and link to the remainder of the article for viewers to visit your website to read. This has the added benefit that mobile viewers are put off by huge walls of text.
The next step is to make sure that your email doesn’t have any unnecessary HTML styling, if you have cut and pasted your text from a word document, it's quite common to accidentally paste over a lot of unrequired HTML code.
You can check this by looking at the HTML and removing anything like SPAN tags, that doesn’t seem to be doing anything.
The final step is to make sure that you don’t have lots of white space, if you delete any space that you don’t need, that will then strip out and line break HTML which could be added to the file size.
It’s worth trying to make sure that your email doesn't get clipped by Gmail, as this does have repercussions for people wishing to unsubscribe. If Gmail truncates your email, then the unsubscribe link won’t then be visible without viewers clicking to view the full version.